Kim Shin-jo, the one captured member of a workforce of 31 North Korean commandos who got here inside placing distance of the South Korean presidential palace in central Seoul earlier than they had been repelled in 1968, died on Wednesday. He was 82.
Mr. Kim’s dying at a nursing hospital was confirmed on Thursday by his Sungrak Church in Seoul, which cited outdated age because the trigger.
In January 1968, Mr. Kim and his colleagues did the unimaginable — slipping undetected via the closely fortified border between North and South Korea and trekking 40 miles into Seoul on a mission to assassinate Park Chung-hee, who was the army dictator of South Korea on the time, and his employees. They bought inside a whole lot of yards of Mr. Park’s presidential Blue Home however had been stopped by South Korean forces in a fierce gun battle.
All of the North Korean assassins had been gunned down or killed themselves besides two. One of many two was believed to have made it again to the North. The opposite was Mr. Kim, who surrendered and later reinvented himself right into a fiery anti-Communist lecturer and Christian pastor within the capitalist South.
“We got here to slit President Park Chung-hee’s throat,” Mr. Kim said shortly after his seize.
The commandos’ raid into the guts of Seoul on Jan. 21, 1968 — and North Korea’s seizure of the American reconnaissance ship USS Pueblo two days later — marked one of many peaks of Chilly Battle tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Stung by the assault, Mr. Park’s authorities secretly skilled its personal assassins to precise revenge in opposition to the North’s then chief Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the present chief Kim Jong-un. (The unit was disbanded after the South Korean commandos mutinied in 1971.) South Korea additionally created a reservist military and launched military training at excessive faculties and universities. The 13-digit residential ID card, launched on the time to assist guard in opposition to North Korean spies, stays obligatory to this present day for all South Koreans aged 17 or older.
A part of the mountain route behind the Blue Home that Mr. Kim’s raiding celebration used to infiltrate the South Korean capital remained closed to the general public for safety causes till a couple of years in the past.
“If our mission had succeeded, South Koreans can be residing underneath Communism now,” Mr. Kim mentioned in an interview in 2008.
Korea was divided into the pro-Soviet North and pro-American South on the finish of World Battle II. Their three-year Korean Battle was halted in a truce in 1953, leaving them technically at warfare ever since. Within the ensuing many years, each side waged a clandestine warfare, with thousands of commandos and spies infiltrating one another’s territory. Mr. Kim’s fallen comrades stay buried in an “enemy cemetery” north of Seoul, unclaimed by their authorities, which formally denies each their mission and existence.
Again in 1968, Mr. Kim’s workforce breached a bit of the western inter-Korean border guarded by American troops. As they had been hurrying via the hills towards Seoul, the North Koreans encountered 4 South Korean brothers amassing firewood. After a lot debate, they let the South Koreans dwell, warning them to not contact the police. That was their deadly mistake.
The villagers alerted the police, and by the point the would-be assassins reached Seoul, the police had been ready.
A ferocious gun battle broke out round Bukaksan, a craggy hill behind the Blue Home, which was the seat of the South Korean presidency till former President Yoon Suk Yeol relocated his workplace to a different authorities constructing in 2022. The preventing and manhunt continued for 2 weeks because the North Korean raiding celebration scattered and retreated northward. Greater than 30 South Koreans had been killed, too.
Mr. Kim was hiding in an deserted hut, surrounded by South Korean troops and able to kill himself with a grenade. He modified his thoughts and surrendered.
“I used to be single, a younger man. I needed to save lots of myself,” he mentioned in an interview in 2010.
North Korean spies caught within the South usually spent decades in solitary confinement in South Korean prisons. A few of them refused to disown their Communist ideology, partly as a result of doing so would jeopardize their households within the North. However after two years of interrogation, Mr. Kim was pardoned. He efficiently argued that he didn’t kill any South Koreans, and likewise disowned Communism.
South Korea noticed propaganda worth in converts like Mr. Kim. Quickly after his launch, he traveled throughout South Korea with counterintelligence officers, giving lectures at army items, church buildings and workplaces wherein he railed in opposition to the North Korean authorities. He mentioned that defectors from his North Korean hometown, Chongjin, advised him that his mother and father had been executed and his brothers had disappeared.
“In North Korea, my useless colleagues are heroes, and I’m a traitor,” he mentioned throughout the 2008 interview.
Mr. Kim was survived by his spouse, Choi Jeong-hwa, whom he met in South Korea and who turned him to Christianity. Mr. Kim was ordained as a pastor in 1997. He was additionally survived by a son and a daughter.
