Hunting the Wild Boar (1)
On January 14, 1963, Ki-jo placed an article in the Hankook Ilbo under the headline "The Odds on the New KCIA Director."
It was a piece he had written himself, and he had set his own name at the foot of it.
The moment the January 7 morning edition hit the streets, a call came through to the Hankook Ilbo, early. It was Chang Kyung-soon, one of the names on the list.
"President Lee of the Hankook Ilbo — what is this, a club swung at me in the dead of night? You're saying I'm a candidate for the new directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency?"
Chang was a soldier who had taken part in the May 16 coup. He had served as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, then stood for the National Assembly from Gimje in North Jeolla and won.
"I wrote from the talk going around in the street. If it has put you in an awkward position, I apologize."
"Talk in the street? Who is saying I'm a fit man for director of the Central Intelligence Agency?"
"That I can't tell you. But I put you on the list because people say you are loyal to Chairman Park, and that the Chairman thinks well of you."
"Is that my reputation?"
Once loyalty was offered as the grounds, Chang's manner eased a little.
"Even so — I've only just pinned on an assemblyman's badge, and out of nowhere I'm to be KCIA director? What does that make the voters who elected me?"
"I'm sorry. It's only a handicapping piece. Please don't take it too much to heart."
"Next time you mean to put me in the paper, at least call and ask me first."
"I apologize. Next time, I certainly will."
Ki-jo apologized again and again, and soothed him.
After Chang, a call came from Kim Yong-soon, another name he had raised.
"Forgive the intrusion, but why on earth did you run an article like that?"
Kim Yong-soon protested as well. He too was a former soldier who had joined the May 16 coup. He had chaired the Education and Social Affairs Committee of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, then stood in the sixth general election for the Samcheonpo–Sacheon–Hadong district in South Gyeongsang, and won. Ki-jo offered him the same apology he had given Chang Kyung-soon.
Last of the three, Kim Hyung-wook came to the Hankook Ilbo in person.
He flung open the door of the president's office with his face dark with anger, skipped anything like a greeting, and lit straight in.
"Hey! You! Why did you put my name in that article?"
Ki-jo thought it was exactly like him. He answered without giving an inch before the wild boar's charge.
"I included you because I'd heard Councilor Kim Hyung-wook was a leading prospect for the next director. Please, sit down."
When Ki-jo refused to be cowed, Kim Hyung-wook sat — and, casual as anything, let one hand come to rest on the pistol at his hip. Ki-jo knew perfectly well the man meant to frighten him. He only smiled, and asked.
"Have I offended you badly?"
"You didn't put my name in there on purpose, just to humiliate me?"
Kim Hyung-wook barked it again. The way he said it, there was no chance in the world he would ever rise to director of the KCIA.
"How could that be? I put you in because I'd heard the men of the Military Academy's Class 8 place their trust in you. Please don't misunderstand."
Ki-jo brewed a cup of hot tea and set it in front of him. Seeing that Ki-jo had not shrunk by so much as a hair, Kim Hyung-wook quietly took his hand off the pistol.
"Who said a thing like that?"
"I gathered it from talk in the street, so it's difficult to name any one person."
"Did it come out of the Blue House?"
He asked it with a flicker of hope on his face.
"That's difficult to say. Have some tea first."
Ki-jo drank a cup with him. The charge had gone out of Kim Hyung-wook, and when he spoke again his voice had softened.
"I hear President Lee is close with our Class 8. Especially tight with Jong-pil and Jeong-geun, they say. This didn't come from Jong-pil, did it?"
Ki-jo neither confirmed it nor denied it. Kim Hyung-wook looked frustrated — and yet, of his own accord, he seemed to settle on Kim Jong-pil as the man who must have recommended him.
"You keep in touch with Director Kim? With Kim Jong-pil?"
"I've only heard that he'll be coming back to Korea before long."
"Mm. Right. It was Jong-pil."
He said it as if he were closing a case.
"Sorry for barging in like this. I had it wrong. Somebody's been trying to shake me and make a joke of me while I sit still, and my nerves were a little raw."
Ki-jo knew him for a man who lived inside a persecution complex. Of all the figures in the revolutionary camp classed as Kim Jong-pil's people, Kim Hyung-wook was marked the hardest of the hard-liners, and so he would have gone on believing that Kim Jae-chun — chief of the anti–Kim Jong-pil faction — was forever looking for a way to do him harm. Ki-jo knew that cast of suspicion had clung to the man right up to the day he died.
"Next time. If Jong-pil asks you to run a piece like this, you tell him to say a word to me, too. I've got to know something, if I'm going to be ready."
"If it ever comes to that, I certainly will."
Ki-jo saw him off on good terms — the same man who had blown in as if he meant to turn the president's office upside down. Then he waited for the real one.
The reactions of the three names on his list were not the response he had been after.
Around ten in the morning, the call he had been waiting for came through to the Hankook Ilbo. It was the Blue House.
"President Lee, the Chairman asks you to step over to the Blue House for a little while."
Ki-jo took his coat and went in.
Chairman Park was in his office, smoking, waiting for him. He ground the cigarette out in the ashtray and greeted Ki-jo as he came. A copy of the Hankook Ilbo lay open in front of him.
"Come in. Sit down."
Ki-jo could tell at once that the Chairman was not in any particularly foul temper. He took the chair, and Park asked.
"I read the piece that ran this morning. How did you come to write it?"
The Chairman, too, seemed curious about an article from Ki-jo's own hand.
"Among the men who joined the revolution, I picked out those whose loyalty to you runs highest, and I put them on the list."
"Is that so?"
Park studied him, curiosity plain in his eyes. And well he might. Chang Kyung-soon was the very man the Chairman had been quietly thinking of raising to the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kim Yong-soon, because history had shifted, would never become the second director — but in the original history he was the man Park had chosen, after long deliberation, to follow Kim Jong-pil. And Kim Hyung-wook, the last name on the list, had been taken on Jong-pil's forceful recommendation. All three had been men to Park's liking.
"Remarkable."
Park looked at him and grinned, as if pleased that the names he had been turning over in his own mind had been set down, one after another, as candidates.
"I'd like to hear what you think."
"What kind of opinion, sir?"
"There must have been things you couldn't put in the paper. Assess the three of them for me."
Ki-jo sidestepped the request.
"I'm a private citizen. I hold no place in the government. How could I sit in judgment on men being weighed for so heavy a charge?"
Park only pressed harder.
"Look here, I'm only asking you to talk. Tell me what you've heard on the outside."
"I'd rather not, Mr. Chairman. If that is the only reason you sent for me, I'll take my leave."
Ki-jo made to rise, and a flash of anger crossed Park's face.
"Eh? So this is how you are? Didn't you tell me you would be someone I could talk with?"
"Even so, the subject is too sensitive. It's difficult for me to say anything."
"It's all right. Go on. That's why I kept Hu-rak out of the room on purpose. Speak freely."
Ki-jo asked first whether he might smoke. Park lit the cigarette for him with the ease of an old acquaintance, then sat with one leg crossed over the other, watching. Expectation lay in his eyes.
Ki-jo understood him well enough. Park had been dissatisfied with Kim Jae-chun as it was. Jae-chun had tendered his resignation, and the Chairman had been worrying over whom to set in the new director's chair.
He smoked the cigarette halfway down, then began with Kim Yong-soon. In his own judgment, Yong-soon was the least likely of the three to be chosen. In the original history Park had made him the second director of the KCIA because of the friction between Class 5 and Class 8 of the Military Academy, reaching past both for a neutral who belonged to neither. But neutrality, in a political place, meant only that a man was held up by no one and struck at by everyone. Kim Yong-soon, second director, was out again in two months, without having managed to do a thing.
"Mr. Kim Yong-soon is classed with the moderates. His greatest strength is that he stands close to neither Class 5 nor Class 8, and so he can judge for himself and move on his own. But being a moderate is also his greatest weakness. He'll take fire from both sides, and he'll find cooperation hard to come by."
At that, Chairman Park nodded.
"The next one."
"Mr. Kim Hyung-wook stands for Class 8. He would have their backing, but Class 5 would move to block him. The split inside the revolutionary camp could only deepen."
Park raised an objection.
"The last director, Kim Jae-chun, was Class 5. They've had their turn. Wouldn't it be right to give Class 8 this one?"
Ki-jo had known the Chairman would think of balancing one academy class against another.
"The trouble is that Mr. Kim Hyung-wook's reputation is not a good one. Reporters from the Hankook Ilbo went and interviewed men who used to serve under him. What sticks with me is that he's greedy for money."
"Money? Ah. You mean the story from his battalion-command days, when he had his soldiers burn charcoal and sold it off. Hyung-wook had a hard enough time just eating. I know about that."
Park seemed to be looking back on the fifties, when an officer's pay would not feed a household and irregularities of every kind were common. He spoke as if it were no great flaw, and Ki-jo put a brake on him.
"But the Central Intelligence Agency is already in an awkward spot, tangled up in the Four Great Suspicions. There's a presidential election this year. Seat another man in that chair who'll stir up a money scandal, and it could turn into a real disaster."
"There is that…"
Park set the cigarette between his lips, and his face went thoughtful.
"Then what about Chang Kyung-soon?"
At the Chairman's question, Ki-jo asked one of his own.
"Do you happen to know his nickname, sir?"
"Minister of Agriculture."
Park knew it. Chang Kyung-soon was from Gimje in North Jeolla, and from his days as a junior officer he had talked so endlessly of farming that the nickname had stuck: Minister of Agriculture. As if the words themselves had taken root, after May 16 he did in fact become Minister of Agriculture and Forestry.
"And how was he, as minister?"
Park grinned.
"The man knows a great deal about farming. He never won much of the farmers' support, though."
He said it with a note of regret. Ki-jo nodded, then went on.
"Not long ago I tried, with the ministry's cooperation, to set up contract cultivation of loofah all across the country."
"Loofah?"
"Yes. I meant to export it. The dried gourd is widely used as a scrubber, and as filler for packing."
"And?"
"I came away feeling that the work of the Ministry of Agriculture is anything but simple. The minister asked the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation for help, and the local cooperatives wouldn't give it — even with orders in prospect of $275,000 from the United States and $100,000 from Europe."
"What? They can bring in $370,000 in foreign currency, and they won't cooperate?"
Park was a little roused.
"A good many farmers balk at planting a new crop, and the local cooperatives are demanding a commission in return for arranging the contracts."
"People like that… If the farmers don't know how to grow it, teaching them is what a cooperative is for. Pushing a crop that can earn foreign exchange — that's what a cooperative is for. And they pull this…"
Ki-jo spoke to the Chairman, who looked genuinely pained.
"Watching it, I found myself thinking the agriculture minister's job could not be an easy one either."
He held Park's eye. The Chairman was already noting, in his pocket notebook, the matter of the local cooperatives that had refused to help with the loofah.
Ki-jo judged that he had spoken for Chang Kyung-soon, and that it was time to move to the next step. Pushing a name in the open would buy him nothing. Better to set out each man's strengths and flaws, and leave the judgment to Park. That was the safer thing for Ki-jo himself.
He allowed that he might fail to stop Kim Hyung-wook from taking the directorship. History was not so pliable. It had a way of running on in the channels it had already cut, and if a rumor ever reached Kim Hyung-wook's ear that Ki-jo had pushed Chang Kyung-soon, survival itself might be in doubt.
So he chose another way. He wanted to lay an unexpected gift in front of the Chairman — something large enough to put weight behind his own words.
When Park finished his notes, Ki-jo spoke.
"A bigger problem? What is it?"
Park closed the notebook. He was interested.