The Ppippi Wire
Two weeks after Jacob of RCA returned to Japan, twenty U.S. Army trucks drew up in a long line before the Cheongsan Development building. Pedestrians passing along Sejong-ro slowed to stare, none of them sure what they were looking at, and for a while looking was all they could do.
Antennas, amplifiers, and speakers from RCA—come from America by way of Japan into Korea—were carried into the Cheongsan Radio building on the shoulders of American soldiers. Fifty amplifiers and antennas, and a thousand speakers: costly goods, but the Development office and the radio building between them could hold that much. Two hundred kilometers of military field wire, the line people called ppippi wire, was another matter. There was simply nowhere to put it.
They would keep twenty kilometers in the backyard of the Cheongsan Development office and send the rest to the brick yard in Cheongnyangni. The yard was wide, it had guards, and the wire would be safer there.
In 1954, wire was scarce in Korea—scarce enough that some thieves stole nothing else. The country could not yet manufacture communications cable of its own, and so it lived on the W-190 line that trickled out of the military.
American soldiers and Gijo's own people were not the only ones on the scene. Newspaper reporters, crew from the government newsreel Korean News, and civil servants of both Korea and the United States stood watching the equipment come in. On the American side were James Stewart, director of the United States Information Service; John Curtis, the broadcast officer; and Frank of the CIA. From the Korean government had come the director of the Broadcasting Administration Bureau in the State Council Secretariat, the director of the Seoul Radio Monitoring Bureau at the Ministry of Communications, the director of the Electricity Bureau at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and the vice minister of Education. There was even an official whose reason for being there no one could quite explain: the director of the Fourth Bureau of the Board of Audit, the organ that examined and certified the state's revenues and expenditures, forerunner of the later Board of Audit and Inspection.
The men who wielded real weight in the ministries had not gathered by accident. The USIS had asked the Korean government for its cooperation. America would put up the money; Seoul was not to strangle the work with needless regulation, but to help it along. The request bounced in a direction no one had intended. The State Council—where the president, the prime minister, and the cabinet sat to decide the nation's major policies—carried a report straight up to the president, and somewhere in that ascent Gijo's wired-radio project was dressed as a presidential priority.
The president liked what he heard and ordered every ministry to push the thing forward. The government promptly flew into an uproar. A fight broke out over which ministry would take the wired-radio program. There was no statute that covered it, and no office with a clear claim. Each ministry had some scrap of business that touched on radio, and each was busy shoving the project onto someone else, afraid that a failure would bring the president's reprimand down on its own head. After a bitter quarrel over jurisdiction, the State Council stepped in and dumped the whole affair on the Ministry of Communications. Communications would be the responsible authority. The other ministries were told to give it their full cooperation.
Saddled overnight with a presidential priority, the director of the Radio Monitoring Bureau came up to Gijo and asked,
"When will the wired-radio service be able to begin?"
"Not right away. The power supply is too unstable, so the amplifiers will have to run on storage batteries, and the twelve-volt batteries still haven't arrived from America. The fuse equipment hasn't come in either. If lightning hits the line, those expensive amplifiers could burn out."
The director took Gijo's explanation down carefully in his notebook, then said,
"I understand. If you need help, contact me at any time. Anything you might otherwise take to another ministry, bring it through me."
"I'll be counting on you."
They bowed, slightly, and shook hands. In ordinary times this was a senior official Gijo would hardly have been permitted to meet. Because of the radio project, the distance between them had closed, and they stood now on something nearer to equal footing.
Once the equipment had all been moved and the commemorative photographs taken, the Korean and American officials departed—all of them except Frank. Gijo walked with him out to the backyard of the Cheongsan Development office and stood looking at the piled field wire. A memory rose, unbidden, of the W-190 military line everyone had called ppippi wire.
Yeongsu would have been about ten. Gijo had found a tin can, punched it full of holes with a nail and a hammer, cut a length of ppippi wire, and tied it on. He had made the can so the boy could play the rat-fire game on the first full moon of the year, whirling a burning tin through the dark. To show him how, Gijo dropped in a scrap of wood, set it alight, and spun the can. Young Yeongsu had watched the flaming tin go round with a humming whoosh, his eyes wide with wonder.
"Yeongsu. If there are people nearby, you don't spin it. You play in an open field, where there aren't any houses."
Gijo had pressed the warning on him, over and over. But that day Yeongsu came home reeking of smoke, the hair at his forehead faintly singed. Even Yeongsu, calm and unhurried by nature, had gotten so carried away with his first rat-fire game that he played himself dizzy and never noticed his own hair was burning. The next day Gijo looked at the can. It was dented here and there and scorched black, but the ppippi wire he had used for the string was perfectly sound.
For a game like that, military field wire was the best there was. Heat the PP wire, whirl the can as hard as you liked—it would not snap. It held, tough and stubborn.
Gijo was just coming up out of that memory from the life before when Frank spoke.
"Looks like a sure thing."
Gijo nodded. It was not a business that could fail. In the history he remembered, a venture of the same kind had run on in success all the way to the end of the sixties.
"Before long, 'headquarters money' will be paid into Cheongsan's account."
Headquarters money, he seemed to mean, was CIA money. Which was as good as saying the Agency now recognized Cheongsan as a cooperating firm. Too pleased to hide it, Gijo broke into a bright smile.
"Thank you, Frank."
"Don't thank me. You did this yourself, Mr. Lee."
Gijo took the hand Frank offered and held it. At last he had the bare minimum of a safeguard against the regime. When the government came to him with some preposterous demand, he would no longer have to fear the cost of refusing. Let them try to seize Cheongsan's accounts, and the CIA would stand in the way. Let them send in a punitive tax investigation, and the special funds stirred through the books would make the accounts too dangerous to touch.
Seeing his pleasure, Frank explained the character of the money he meant to send.
"It'll come in three transfers. The first is for the radio distribution project. You can spend every bit of that."
"But the cost of producing the radios ought to come in lower than we first thought."
"That's fine. I won't ask where it goes, no matter what you spend it on. Don't file receipts, and don't send back whatever you don't use. That only gives me a headache."
Frank laughed as he said it, making a joke of the thing.
"The second sum, hold on to until I give you the word."
"And what is the second one?"
"The money for the MSG plant you mentioned. That has to be used at the right moment. It's for putting pressure on the Korean government."
Gijo nodded. Just then the two governments were at odds, divided over the purposes to which aid money ought to be put. He suspected Frank's approval would not come until after July 25, when Syngman Rhee visited the United States. The CIA would want to see whether the two leaders could settle the points of conflict at the summit. Gijo himself put that chance at zero. Of all the presidents in Korea's history, Syngman Rhee had shown the United States the hardest face.
He remembered, with perfect clarity, the figure Rhee would cut on that visit in 1954. In his address to the United States Congress he would loose a remark with the blast of a nuclear bomb and leave America aghast. He would spend twenty days there and come home bearing what he took for a considerable success, and the rift between the two countries would only cut deeper. The order to release the second sum, Gijo expected, would fall sometime between the end of August at the earliest and the end of October at the latest. That was the season when Washington, deciding it would not be played for a fool, would set about beating on Korea without mercy.
"The third transfer will be the largest. Don't ask me what kind of money it is. It's money Mr. Lee isn't meant to know about."
With that, Frank grinned. Gijo nodded. In the last years of the Rhee regime, astronomical sums would be loosed in every direction through the Liberal Party. He supposed this money was bound for something of that sort.
As if to say the talk of funds was finished, Frank clapped his palms together once, lightly, and rubbed his hands.
"I reported to CIA headquarters in Japan what you said to Jacob of RCA that day."
"Which part?"
"You told him to keep an eye on a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, didn't you? The Agency is going to start looking through that company's technical development files."
"Ah... yes."
"They'll also be watching to see whether it's taking technology off American firms."
Whether Sony had been engaged in industrial espionage at the time, Gijo could not say. But he was certain that if the CIA laid hands on Sony's technical materials, the Agency would be in for a surprise of its own. Should it send a report home on the rise of Japan's electronics industry, might that not help to check Japan? That was the thought he turned over.
After Frank had gone back to the American embassy, Gijo quietly called Shim Hansu out to the one-room outbuilding in the backyard. He wanted to hear how the task he had given him had gone. Hansu told him what he had observed of the student Jeon Hyeon-su.
"He's living with an elderly grandmother, looking after her. His father and mother seem to have died in the war, and he lives with his older brother and his brother's wife. Below him there's one younger sister, and a little niece."
"What's his reputation in the neighborhood?"
"They say he's diligent, and polite about greeting people. The neighbors say he does all sorts of odd jobs while he's in school and comes home late at night."
"And the grandmother's health?"
"Ah... well. Whether it was the shock of losing her son and daughter-in-law in the war, or whether her mind has begun to fail, they say she isn't right in the head. She cries out through the night, and if she wanders off, no one knows where she's gone. The whole family has to go out looking for her."
Gijo nodded, slowly. The family history alone, as Hansu had brought it back, was enough to catch the breath in his throat. That the boy had kept up with his studies through all of it was close to astonishing.
"But, sir. Why did you have me look into him?"
"I'm thinking of giving him work."
"Ah... From what I saw, he'd be better off earning money now than going abroad to study. The house looked ready to fall down at any moment. All of Haebangchon is like that, but the walls were so full of gaps you could see straight into the rooms. I kept wondering how anyone gets through a winter in a place like that..."
Gijo thanked him for the better part of two weeks of hard going, and sent him back to the office. It was time, he thought, to meet Jeon Hyeon-su himself. Now that the money to build the MSG plant was certain to come, there was no reason left to wait. All that remained was to sit down with the student and take the measure of his will.
When Gijo had interviewed him at the American embassy, there had been something uncommon in Jeon Hyeon-su's eyes. If he had seen truly that day, the boy was the man he had been looking for.
Jeon Hyeon-su looked as tough as ppippi wire—and sharp enough to take in what lay far off, and carry it home in his head.