Counterintelligence Chief Kim Chang-ryong
The next day, just as Major General Martin had expected, the Korean Army's Counterintelligence Corps drew up before the 7th Infantry Division's base.
Kim Chang-ryong came on with heavy, deliberate steps, straight toward the tanks posted at the division's main gate.
This was the Kim Chang-ryong they called Syngman Rhee's right hand—Syngman Rhee's adopted son. He had come all the way to the gate of the post to demand a meeting with the division commander, and Major General Martin did not so much as pretend to hear him.
What does that damned Yankee bastard know, shielding Reds...?
Kim Chang-ryong ground his teeth.
The year before, he had fabricated the East Coast Rebellion and succeeded only in disgracing himself. The story he had invented was staggering: when Syngman Rhee visited I Corps at Sokcho, Kim's own direct superior, Kim Jong-pyeong, would shoot the president, seize Busan—the temporary capital—and raise Cho Bong-am to the presidency. At the court-martial the fabrication came to light and the case was quietly buried. Even so, Kim Jong-pyeong was sentenced to three years. That was the measure of Kim Chang-ryong's power. Force an indictment, and the man on the other end still took a mortal wound.
Into the midst of that humiliation came the report out of Yeoncheon, in Gyeonggi Province—more than enough to lift his prestige back off the ground. Three hundred communists from the North had driven trucks down to Seoul to assassinate President Syngman Rhee. Spin a report like that the right way, and he could manufacture one truly extraordinary case. He would score points with the president and put a shine on the Corps' very reason for existing.
But the Americans gave him nothing. So Kim Chang-ryong resorted to a ruse.
"The ringleaders of that Red village were Lee Ki-jo and Jang Ma-ryang, weren't they?"
He put the question to his aide.
"Yes, Chief."
"Then offer to see only those two, out in front of the base. Tell them we will not set one foot inside the American compound."
"Understood."
He had another order for his staff officer.
"Go to General Kim Hong-il and ask him to spare us a little of his time."
"General Kim Hong-il has retired, Chief."
"I know that. The old man's sitting idle at home—he'll be bored, won't he? Tell him to come to Dongducheon and have a look at the face of some fellow who claims he served in the Nationalist Army."
The staff officer did not dare talk back. Kim Chang-ryong meant to make use of the fact that General Kim Hong-il had fought the Japanese as a general of the Nationalist Chinese Army in China. Yet even a former Nationalist general could hardly know every Korean who had been active over there. And that, precisely, was Kim Chang-ryong's method. He stuck together whatever could be stuck together, manufactured suspicion, and left people unable to tell what was true.
He was already counting on the moment. The instant General Kim Hong-il looked at Jang Ma-ryang and said he had never seen that face, Kim Chang-ryong would brand the pair of them communist spies. Think it through and the claim fell apart—but once he bore down, even a judge could do nothing. He had a good feeling the plan would take.
Word came back from the American side. To his surprise, they agreed.
"They've taken the bait!"
Kim Chang-ryong crowed. Already he was picturing the report he would lay before the president: a Red village sprung up along the 38th parallel, wiped out by his hand. The thrill of it ran through him. This would be the case that paid back the humiliation of the East Coast Rebellion, exposed for the fabrication it was.
A man named Lee Ki-jo, disguised as a businessman, would assassinate the American division commander. A man named Jang Ma-ryang had laid plans to assassinate Syngman Rhee. And Army Chief of Staff Paik Sun-yup would answer them and plot a coup. That was the scenario he had written.
Every time Paik Sun-yup crossed his mind, rage boiled up in him.
Those Manchurian Military Academy men are the whole problem... the bastards...
He loathed the way they whooped one another on and shoved one another up the ladder. Unlike him—a product of the Kwantung Army's military police training school—they had connections. They pulled and they pushed, and so the academy men kept climbing even when they committed no small share of wrongs. It was Paik Sun-yup who had promoted Park Chung-hee to brigadier general the year before and set him on the same rung as Kim Chang-ryong himself.
And who was Park Chung-hee? In 1948, when Kim Chang-ryong was still a major, he had arrested Park on suspicion of espionage. The interrogation established that Park Chung-hee and his elder brother, Park Sang-hee, were cadres of the Workers' Party of South Korea, and Park's confession had made it possible to round up and purge fifteen hundred members of the party organization. Fifteen hundred—fully three percent of the army's strength at the time. A man like that should never have been allowed to put on a uniform again. He ought to have counted himself lucky merely to have kept his life. Yet Park Chung-hee had passed through the Korean War and survived as if by some devil's luck.
That damned Park Chung-hee. If it weren't for this Paik Sun-yup, I could have killed him off long ago...
Kim Chang-ryong cursed the man who had spared him. At the time, Paik Sun-yup had been chief of the Intelligence Bureau at Army Headquarters. He saved his fellow graduate of the Manchurian Military Academy, planted him in Army Intelligence as a civilian employee, and even paid Park's wages out of his own official funds.
I'll kill every last one of these sons of bitches.
Somewhere along the way Park Chung-hee had become his rival, and Kim Chang-ryong itched to be rid of him. It was Kim who had blocked him the year before, when Park talked of going to study in the United States—because a man who went to America and came back would only rise higher. This time, he vowed, he would drag in the country bumpkins from Yeoncheon, tie them to Paik Sun-yup and Park Chung-hee, and send the lot of them to their graves for certain.
A few hours later the retired General Kim Hong-il arrived in Dongducheon in a Corps jeep. Kim Chang-ryong felt a faint kinship with him: a man who, like himself, had lacked connections, failed to advance, and gone into retirement. He greeted the general with scrupulous courtesy.
"Welcome, General. Thank you for coming to help us."
"General Kim. You've been working hard. There's a former Nationalist Army man inside the American base?"
"Yes, General. Please have a look, and tell us whether he truly served."
"See here, General Kim. How am I supposed to know every Korean who was in the Nationalist Army?"
"Even so—exchange a few words with him, and surely you'll be able to tell."
"Well. I could get a rough sense of it."
Kim Hong-il was curious about this man said to be hiding inside an American base, a former officer of the Nationalist Army. Why had they taken refuge with the Americans at all, and why were the Americans hiding them? That question was what had put him in a Counterintelligence Corps jeep all the way to Dongducheon.
"I'll show you the way."
Kim Chang-ryong escorted General Kim Hong-il up to the American tanks. The soldiers reported by radio that the Korean representatives were at the main gate. When the two tanks blocking the road drew aside, Lee Ki-jo and Jang Ma-ryang came into view.
The moment General Kim Hong-il saw them, he thrust a hand forward and began to stammer.
"Th-that... that man..."
The man his hand indicated was Jang Ma-ryang. Ma-ryang, seeing the general, dropped to the ground and made a full bow. Kim Hong-il ran to him, and Ma-ryang rose from the bow and came striding heavily to meet him.
General Kim Hong-il caught Ma-ryang in a fierce embrace as he said it.
"And you, General—have you kept well?"
The general could find no answer. He set his mouth in a hard line, patted Ma-ryang's back, and swallowed his tears. Only when the feeling had ebbed a little did he speak.
"Captain Jang. That you lived—that you did not die—I am truly grateful..."
"It was all thanks to you, General."
"I thought you'd died at Changsha... you..."
General Kim Hong-il could hold the tears no longer. Jang Ma-ryang gathered the old general tight against him, and then Ma-ryang, too, broke at last and began to sob. For a long while the two of them clung together and wept.
Lee Ki-jo watched with the look of a man whose guess had been confirmed. Kim Chang-ryong only stared, blank and hollow.
"Come inside the base, General. Let me offer you a drink."
"No. This is no time for me to take a drink from you. The Counterintelligence Corps has you under suspicion. Whether I go into Gyeongmudae or I go to the Army Chief of Staff, I will wash that false charge off you clean."
Ki-jo did not let the opening pass. He stepped up to General Kim Hong-il and bowed.
"General, it is an honor. I am Lee Ki-jo, of Yeoncheon."
The general studied him with a puzzled face.
"Were you with the Nationalist Army as well?"
"No, General. I am Ma-ryang's elder brother-in-law."
"Is that so? A pleasure! So you're an elder brother to Ma-ryang. Ma-ryang's brother is my brother too."
Lee Ki-jo and Kim Hong-il shook hands.
"Please help us, General."
Ki-jo bent at the waist before the old soldier.
"Of course. I will help you and Ma-ryang both. An injustice has to be set right."
General Kim Hong-il had been looking at Ki-jo with open pleasure when his eyes went to Division Commander Will Martin, coming toward them. Martin knew the general. In the early days of the Korean War it was Kim Hong-il who had fought a dogged delaying action against the North Korean army's irresistible advance and bought the time that mattered. Without him there would have been no last line on the Nakdong, and no landing at Incheon. Unlike younger generals such as Paik Sun-yup, he had been uncooperative with the Americans and at times a man to be avoided—but even they acknowledged what this master of the delaying action had done.
"Welcome to the 7th Division, General Kim Hong-il. Allow me to escort you, and I'll see you through an inspection of the post."
"My brothers' trouble is pressing just now..."
"You needn't worry, General. Newspaper reporters will be visiting the base tomorrow. Give them an interview then, and that will be enough."
"Is that so? Very well. Then I shall trust the division commander and set my mind at ease. Let us go in."
Division Commander Martin, General Kim Hong-il, Ki-jo, and Ma-ryang climbed into the division commander's jeep. Ki-jo saw the general's hand closed tight around Ma-ryang's where the younger man sat beside him. He looked like a father who had found a son he believed dead on the battlefield.
True enough—Ma-ryang was no ordinary man. He always seemed like someone who had walked past life and death as casually as a meal...
Ki-jo thought back over their somewhat rough first meeting, and over everything they had come through since.
Kim Chang-ryong, watching from a distance, stood before the American gate like a dog that had chased a chicken and come back with nothing. He followed the jeep with his eyes until it vanished into the compound, spat on the ground, and spoke.
"Goddamn it. I cooked the porridge, and the dog ate it!"
He understood that the thing had gone wrong. He gathered the Corps and turned back for Seoul, and in the jeep he made himself a vow.
One way or another, I'll stand that bastard Paik Sun-yup before a court-martial...
The scheme had collapsed, but Paik Sun-yup, at least, he meant to destroy without fail. They were the same age, and one of them was Chief of Staff while the other, a brigadier general, could do nothing but play chief of the Counterintelligence Corps. What had divided them was not ability. It was the school-tie pull of the Manchurian Military Academy, and the knowledge of it made him sick. He might bask in President Syngman Rhee's full trust, but before rank he could not help coming up short.
Catch Paik Sun-yup, and Park Chung-hee would come along as a bonus. Strike the head of that Manchurian academy clique, and a man like Park would drop like a kite with its string cut. He had always despised Park Chung-hee—the man he himself had once thrown in a cell.
First, tying in Paik Sun-yup is what matters. Take him down, and Park Chung-hee comes with him. Two birds with one stone.
In the car rolling back toward Seoul, Kim Chang-ryong clenched both fists until the knuckles stood white.