American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War by Belletto Steven; Grausam Daniel;

Author:Belletto, Steven; Grausam, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2012-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

III

The Global Cold War

6

PYONGYANG LOST

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND OTHER FICTIONS OF THE FORGOTTEN WAR

CHRISTINE HONG

The task of intelligence is thus to penetrate into the forbidden and protected space, cross borders, and investigate the enemy’s territory. This space is by definition an uncharted, secret-filled, necessarily dangerous zone.

—Eva Horn, “Knowing the Enemy”

Ruse de guerre

In his preface to The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), an investigative report published when “truce talks [were being] dragged out” and the prospect of peace was serially deferred, American journalist I. F. Stone likened writing the Korean War’s “hidden history” to “writing a novel, with suspense and with three-dimensionality.”1 After a series of plot twists and turns, Stone, whose initial investigative pieces on the war were titled “The Korean Mystery” and “The Origins of the Korean War,” arrived at a military-Keynesian explanation for U.S. involvement in the Cold War’s first hot war. Presaging a permanent war economy with “new Koreas in the making” (348), the war—which Stone described as a “deadly stimulant”—was seized upon by an “American leadership . . . gripped by dread of the consequences of peace upon the economy” (346, 347). That the war sparked an “economic boom” domestically and “legitimated the unprecedented, worldwide garrisoning of large numbers of American troops in a network of bases”—in essence furnishing the occasion for a militarized remapping of the globe that in turn enabled the “reconstruction of a world market under American auspices”—is an argument that has since been more intricately theorized and elaborated.2 What Stone’s account strikingly modeled, however, was a hermeneutics for reading the Korean War that exploited the narrative method of U.S. war planners and politicians while taking inspiration from detective fiction. Seeking to challenge the fictitiousness of U.S. war propaganda with truth told in a novelistic spirit, Stone strategically mobilized narrative as a mode of speaking truth to power. Beyond simply borrowing its structuring logic from the official proclamations he subjected to scrutiny, The Hidden History of the Korean War wielded narrative as a malleable form whose very instrumentality derived from and therefore must be understood within the context of war.

Offering what he called “a case study in the Cold War” (xvi), Stone’s report pointed damningly to the role of narrative pretext in the instigation of U.S. military interventionism abroad, thereby calling attention to the lethal instrumentalization of information in U.S. and South Korean etiological accounts of the Korean War. That the war was triggered on June 25, 1950, by a “North Korean invasion” across the thirty-eighth parallel, belligerence that U.S. Army intelligence failed to anticipate, is not just a commonplace in U.S. and South Korean historiography of the war.3 As the casus belli at the core of the U.S.–South Korean alliance, it has served as the rationale for the unleashing of massive U.S. military might in defense of its ally and for the expanding of its garrison state to the Korean peninsula. In a July 19, 1950, radio address to a national audience estimated at 130 million, President Truman, deploring North Korea’s “sneak

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