Saving Kim Dae-jung: A tale of two dissident diplomats

By Donald A. Ranard  |  August 24, 2009

The Boston Globe

KIM DAE-JUNG, the former Korean president and dissident who died Aug. 18, repeatedly risked his life to bring democracy to Korea. As Koreans mourn his death, I am reminded of the little-known story of two dissident American diplomats who risked their careers more than 35 years ago to save Kim’s life.

Kim’s obituaries have referred to the 1973 kidnapping by the Korean CIA that nearly ended his life and the US intervention that saved it. “[A]gents from General Park’s notorious spy agency. . . kidnapped Mr. Kim from a hotel room in Tokyo, where he was leading an exile movement for democracy in South Korea,’’ wrote Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times. “He later said his kidnappers had attached a weight to him aboard a boat and were about to throw him into the sea when the United States government intervened.’’

The account of the kidnapping is accurate, but to attribute Kim’s survival to the US government is misleading. Kim was not saved by the US government; he was saved by a pair of US diplomats acting on their own initiative, without approval from their government - a government whose policy toward Korea may have contributed to Kim’s plight in the first place.

One of the men was my father, Donald L. Ranard, a Korea specialist at the State Department in Washington. Before he died in 1990, my father had talked about the incident from time to time, but it was only after I interviewed his old colleagues that I was able to piece the full story together.

As country director for Korea, my father was the State Department’s chief man on Korea - and its chief critic of our Korea policy. Under President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, US policy was to not comment on human rights violations by South Korea, a vital ally. Officials who voiced concern to Park’s government, even in private, were told to stop meddling in South Korea’s affairs. My father deeply disagreed with the policy and made his views known repeatedly and forcefully. The US still had enormous clout there, two decades after the end of the Korean War, and our policy of silence made us complicit in Park’s increasingly brutal regime. Silence, given our influence, was not noninvolvement; it was consent.

My father was determined not to be silent now. He picked up a phone and called US Ambassador Philip Habib in Seoul. They were both old Korea hands who had served as political counselors in the embassy in Seoul in the 1950s and 1960s. Together the men worked out a strategy: Habib would apply pressure from his end, my father would do the same from his. Neither would ask for instructions from Washington. Even if there had been time for instructions, they knew they were unlikely to get the kind of strong and unequivocal response needed to save Kim’s life.

In Seoul, Habib gathered the senior embassy and military staff. “I know how things work here,’’ he told them. “They’re going to wait 24 hours, and if we don’t say anything, Kim will be killed.’’ After the CIA station chief ascertained that the KCIA was indeed the culprit, Habib told his staff to contact every Korean of importance they knew. If they weren’t in their offices, he said, go to their homes. If it was the middle of the night, that was better still - then they would know the United States meant business.

“He told us: Don’t get caught up in an argument with the Koreans over whether they did it or not,’’ recalled Daniel O’Donohue, the embassy’s political counselor. “Just tell them the United States wants this man alive.’’

Habib himself met with the prime minister, Park’s number two, and told him straight: If Kim doesn’t come back alive, you are in deep trouble, although “trouble’’ was not the word that Habib, known for his scatological flair, used.

In Washington, my father worked on a statement with his deputy, Wes Kriebel. The wording would be critical. What Habib was doing in Seoul was essential, but not enough. South Korea’s place in the world - a weak country surrounded by stronger, aggressive powers - had trained its leaders to read the reality behind the rhetoric of friends and foes alike. Park would be watching to see what Washington would say, and if he sensed any indecision, any softness in the language, Kim would die.

Together, my father and Kriebel worked out the statement. In unusually strong language, it said the United States “deplored’’ the abduction, calling it “an act of terrorism.’’ Washington had a high regard for Kim and a great interest in his security. The statement invited Kim to the United States and called for his “imminent release.’’ There was no reference to the communist threat from the north or any of the other coded phrases that would tell Seoul, in essence: “We don’t like what you’ve done, but we’re not going to do anything about it.’’ The message was clear, and it reiterated what Habib was telling Park: Hands off Kim Dae-jung. Or else.

The statement went out - how exactly, Kriebel couldn’t recall years later. Important pronouncements are normally cleared by the seventh floor, the State Department’s top tier.

“I had the impression that someone on the seventh floor wasn’t paying attention,’’ a retired foreign service officer who was in Seoul at the time told me. Or perhaps, Kriebel hinted, my father somehow put the statement out himself. “I wouldn’t put it past him,’’ he chuckled. “Sometimes your father was his own seventh floor.’’

Five days after the kidnapping, a man turned up on the streets of Seoul. He was badly bruised, shaken, and dazed. But Kim Dae-jung, whose long struggle for democracy in South Korea and peace on the peninsula would one day earn him the Nobel Peace Prize, was alive.

Donald A. Ranard is a writer and editor living in Buenos Aires.