Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

On April 14, 1980, acting president Choi, now totally subordinate to Chun, promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general and appointed him acting director of the KCIA. These actions prompted student demonstrations throughout the country. Molotov cocktails were hurled at police formations, and the police retaliated with hypervirulent CS tear gas (the same type used by the FBI at Waco in 1993). Everyone knew that Chun had to consolidate his position before the National Assembly convened for the first time since Park’s death on May 20, when the Democratic Republican Party, the facade behind which Park had ruled, was likely to join with the opposition in ending martial law. That would have destroyed any legal basis for Chun’s political ambitions.

In a secret cable dated May 7, 1980, preceding a scheduled meeting with General Chun, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to his superiors in Washington: “In none of our discussions will we in any way suggest that the USG [U.S. government] opposes ROKG [Republic of Korea government] contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army [italics added].” The next day Warren Christopher cabled back, “We agree that we should not oppose ROK contingency plans to maintain law and order.” Pat Derien, who was President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, later said to Shorrock that this was “a green light as far as I could see then and as far as I can see now.” She went on to accuse Holbrooke of “pandering to dictators” and of “national security hysterics.”¹²

General Chun did not wait long after talking with Gleysteen to complete the coup d’etat he had begun the previous December. Late on the night of May 17, 1980, General Chun expanded martial law, closed the universities, dissolved the National Assembly, banned all political activity, and arrested thousands of political leaders.¹³ Unlike Park, Chun had no following whatsoever outside the army. All Korean cities were tense with fury at his usurpation of power, but only in Kwangju did the situation explode, much in the same way it had in Budapest twenty-four years earlier. What resulted was, in the words of historian Donald Clark, “the most notorious act of political violence in South Korea’s history.” Professor Clark adds that the explicit American endorsement of Chun’s recapture of the city “forever associated the United States with the Kwangju Massacre.”¹⁴

On May 18, 1980, a few hundred demonstrators in Kwangju took to the streets to protest the imposition of martial law. They were met by paratroopers of the 7th Brigade of the Korean special forces, known as the “black berets,” who had a well-known reputation for brutality going back to their service on the American side in the Vietnam War. The 7th Brigade also included a battalion of infiltrators and provocateurs, who wore their hair long and dressed to look like students. According to eyewitnesses, the special forces troops set about bayoneting all the young men and women they could find and attacked others with flamethrowers. In a May 19 cable to Washington, Gleysteen wrote, “Rumors reaching Seoul of Kwangju rioting say special forces used fixed bayonets and inflicted many casualties on students. . . . Some in Kwangju are reported to have said that troops are being more ruthless than North Koreans ever were.”

In reaction to these acts of state terrorism, the whole population of Kwangju and sixteen of the twenty-six other municipalities of the South Cholla region rose in rebellion. They drove the paratroopers from the city, which citizens’ councils controlled for the next five days. They appealed to the U.S. embassy to intervene, but General Wickham had already released from his United Nations Command the forces Chun would use to retake the city. Gleysteen later claimed that he was unable to verify the authenticity of the mediation request and therefore decided not to act. “I grant it was the controversial decision, but it was the correct one. Do I regret it? I don’t think so.”

On Wednesday, May 21, martial law command headquarters in Seoul broke its near total censorship of what was going on in Kwangju and reported that 150,000 civilians, about one-fifth of the city’s population, had gone “on a rampage” and that they had seized 3,505 weapons and 46,400 rounds of ammunition from arsenals and had commandeered 4 armored personnel carriers, 89 jeeps, 50 trucks, 40 wreckers, 40 buses, 10 dump trucks, and 8 tear-gas-firing jeeps.¹⁵ On the same day, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to Washington that a “massive insurrection in Kwangju is still out of control and poses an alarming situation for the ROK military.” He said that the Korean military was “concentrating defense on two military installations and a prison containing 2,000 leftists. . . . The December 12 generals obviously feel threatened by the whole affair.”

In the cables released to Tim Shorrock, there is ample evidence that the American embassy knew about the transfer of the special forces to Kwangju and what was likely to happen when they applied their well-known skills to civilians. In cables dated May 7 and May 8, Ambassador Gleysteen had gone into detail on the numbers of special forces brigades brought into Seoul and around Kimpo Airport “to cope with possible student demonstrations.” On May 8, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had sent a cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon saying that all Korean special forces brigades “are on alert.” “Only the 7th Brigade remained away from the Seoul area,” and “was probably targeted against unrest at Chonju and Kwangju universities.”

Under the Combined Forces Command (CFC) structure, Korean special forces (as distinct from all regular army units) were outside joint U.S.-Korean control and did not need U.S. approval to be moved. However, it was routine for the Koreans to inform the CFC of any troop movements. In Gleysteen’s May 7 cable, he speculates that the Koreans might ask for approval to move the ROK 1st Marine Division. “There has been no request for such approval yet, but CINCUNC [Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command] would agree if asked.” In a May 22 cable, Gleysteen describes “the extent to which we were facilitating ROK army efforts to restore order in Kwangju and deter trouble elsewhere.” However, he told the South Korean foreign minister, “We had not and did not intend to publicize our actions because we feared we would be charged with colluding with the martial law authorities and risk fanning anti-American sentiment in the Kwangju area.”

In Washington, D.C., on May 22, the newly created Policy Review Committee on Korea met at the White House to consider what the United States should do. Its members included newly appointed secretary of state Edmund Muskie, President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the director of central intelligence Admiral Stansfield Turner, and the secretary of defense Harold Brown, plus Christopher, Holbrooke, and Gregg. Brzezinski, himself a Polish-American and an authority on the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe, summarized the consensus of the meeting: “In the short-term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution.” According to the minutes transmitted to Gleysteen, “There was general agreement that the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later.”

On May 23 Gleysteen met with the acting prime minister and told him that “firm anti-riot measures were necessary.” He agreed to release “CFC [Combined Forces Command] forces to Korean command for use in Kwangju.” General Wickham withdrew the Korean 20th Division from its duties on the DMZ and turned it over to the martial law authorities. General Chun broadcast news of the American decision to release the troops throughout South Korea, thus cleverly bolstering the view that the United States backed Chun. At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of May 27 the 20th Division entered Kwangju, killing anyone who did not lay down his or her weapons. This was a highly disciplined unit, and the city was quickly secured, much as Budapest had been in 1956.

The endgame of the Kwangju uprising dragged on for another two years. In the summer of 1982, two special forces brigades were moved from the border with North Korea to the cities of Kwangju and Chongju in order to hunt down rebels who had fled into the hills when the 20th Division entered the city. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that these remnants were not Communist-inspired but were reacting against the brutality of their own country’s army.

Back in Seoul, General Chun arrested dissident leader Kim Dae-jung on trumped-up charges of favoring North Korea—Kim had spoken of a federal system for the future of a unified Korea—and on May 22 charged him with