King of Spies by Blaine Harden

Author:Blaine Harden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

When the United States, the Soviet Union, and China negotiated an end to fighting in Korea, Nichols’s most important intelligence source in South Korea, Syngman Rhee, fell into a near-paralyzing funk. The South Korean leader wanted, more than ever, to unify the peninsula under his control and put a stake through the heart of his nemesis, Kim Il Sung. The only way to do that, he believed, was with war. It was infuriating to Rhee that the new American president, Dwight Eisenhower, had accepted the permanent existence of a sovereign North Korea under Kim’s leadership. “You can’t cooperate with smallpox,” Rhee whined.

Without a war, Rhee worried that he would lose his leverage with the United States. He feared the Korean people would view him as weak. He threatened, rather emptily, to fight on alone against China and North Korea. He organized mass rallies, demanding unification by force, and refused to accept the idea of peaceful coexistence with North Korea. His government staged a “spontaneous” protest by five hundred young schoolgirls who marched through the streets of Seoul in pigtails, waving white handkerchiefs, weeping, and screaming at the United States: “You are murdering our country. Why are you murdering our country?”

When such histrionics failed to change American policy, Rhee tried to sabotage the emerging peace deal. On June 18, 1953, he released about twenty-five thousand North Korean prisoners of war from camps in South Korea. At that point in the armistice talks, Kim Il Sung’s negotiators had been demanding the return of all North Korean prisoners of war to North Korean territory. By releasing them in the South, Rhee hoped that the Communists would accuse the Americans of bad faith and break off negotiations.

China and North Korea, however, were eager to end the war, and although they complained about the prisoner release, they did not walk away from the armistice deal. Rhee did succeed in infuriating the Pentagon, the State Department, and Eisenhower. More than ever, they came to see the elderly Korean leader as ungrateful, irritating, and dangerous. General Mark Clark, commander of the Far East Command, lamented having to wrestle with both Communists and Rhee in the peace talks, but said the “biggest trouble came from Rhee.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Rhee that American GIs had paid a high price in “blood and suffering” to save South Korea—and that Rhee had no right to waste their sacrifice by trying to torpedo the peace talks.

But it was Eisenhower who delivered the most sustained scolding when Rhee visited the White House on July 27, 1954.

“[W]hen you say that we should deliberately plunge into war, let me tell you that if war comes, it will be horrible,” the president said. “Atomic war will destroy civilization. It will destroy our cities. There will be millions of people dead. . . . If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate.”

Rhee was neither intimidated nor chastened. The day after his combative meeting

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