나오미 in korea

Just after midnight on the eighteenth of September 1996, a taxi driving a passenger along Gangneung’s coastal highway swept its headlights over a group of people huddled on the shoulder of the road. The men wore similar clothes and identical short haircuts, which made the driver, Lee Jin-gyu, suspicious. After dropping off his passenger he returned to the area for a closer look. The men had gone but beyond, foundering on the reef of An-in beach, a dark hulk lay in the water. Lee, thinking it was either a dolphin or a submarine, called the police and in doing so sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest manhunts in the ROK since the Korean War.

The police and Army spent the next two months engaged in a massive hunt for the infiltrators, involving helicopters, dogs and tens of thousands of soldiers combing the rugged Gangwon-do mountains in a furious search for the twenty-six stranded North Koreans who were racing the sixty-five kilometers to the DMZ, and home.

On the afternoon of the discovery, submarine navigator Lee Kwang-soo was caught at a remote farmhouse. He’d become separated from the group and, believing that he’d be unknown in such a rural location, dropped in to ask for a meal. The farmer called 113, South Korea’s Report-a-Spy hotline, and Lee was captured alive and held for interrogation. Lee had had a close shave; that evening, ROK soldiers and police discovered the bodies of eleven North Koreans, mostly submarine crew members, lying in a hilltop clearing. Fallen in a row, they had been shot by the AK-47 assault rifles that are standard issue in North Korea. As the submarine team consisted of twenty-one crew members and a reconnaissance team of five, ROK officials surmised that the highly-trained spies murdered the crew to increase their own chances of survival.

By November, there were three left. Eleven more North Koreans had died in clashes with ROK soldiers as they tried to make their way home to the Fatherland. The three were still at large. On their long march north they’d killed several civilians, including strangling an off-duty ROK soldier who was gathering bush clover alone. In Inje, 49 days after the submarine was discovered, the ROK Army finally caught up with two of the spies after a report from a civilian who’d spotted them crossing a highway. The spies had traveled 100 kilometers from Gangneung; twenty kilometers from the DMZ they were killed in a clash that left three South Koreans dead and 14 wounded. The North Koreans wore ROK soldier’s uniforms, carried ROK Army guns and had a diary outlining their escape. “Killed one enemy Sept. 21. Moved south,” it said. “Punished three residents at 2.20 p.m. Oct. 8 on a hill.”

The last infiltrator, Li Chul Jin, was never found and is thought to have successfully escaped through the DMZ to North Korea, the only one of the 26 to make it home.

The captured submarine navigator, Lee Kwang-soo, initially refused to give information out of fear for his family in North Korea. Somewhat unsurprisingly, four bottles of soju provided by the interrogation team helped him to loosen up and he became chattier. He revealed that the mission’s objective had been to collect intelligence on South Korean naval and air bases near Gangneung, and was on its way home when their vessel lost engine power and became stranded, forcing the spies and crew to swim to shore. Apparently, the small team of spies had penetrated South Korea’s defenses with little difficulty. More ominously, Lee also revealed that there had been two successful reconnaissance missions to the South in the past.

The repercussions of the submarine incident were immense and fraught with emotion, setting back North/South peace talks considerably at a time when President Roh Tae-woo’s “Sunshine Policy” towards the North seemed to be making relations more amenable. Initially, North Korea’s government denied that the sub was on a spy mission; they said it had drifted into South Korean waters by mistake, suffering engine failure while on an innocent training exercise. The South Korean government, apoplectic with rage, insisted the submarine was a provocative act of war designed to raise tensions on the Korean peninsula. North Korea’s reasons also didn’t explain why the infiltrators had well-rehearsed South Korean accents, ROK Army uniforms, weapons, and forged identification papers. Cans of Pepsi and South Korean food wrappers were apparently also found aboard the sub. Most tellingly, a written vow to Kim Jong-il, swore that they would accomplish their ‘mission’ even at the expense of their lives. Additionally, Lee declared in a later press conference:

“We were not on a training but a reconnaissance mission. The mission was to be prepared for a big war, considering the fact that [the] chief of the Maritime Unit of the Reconnaissance Bureau, a full colonel, was with us in the submarine.”

On 29 December, a North Korean official issued an official apology, expressing “deep regret” for the submarine incident. Though this was an expression of regret rather than an apology or admission of guilt, the statement went some way towards lightening tensions between North and South.

The ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff, no doubt pondering how an alert taxi driver had spotted what the combined forces of South Korea’s radar, sonar, coastguard and watchmen had failed to notice, later conducted an investigation on how the North Koreans were able to infiltrate the coastline so easily. A report investigated the failures of the Army and Navy in detecting the submarine infiltration and the slow military response time. Subsequently, twenty ROK officers and soldiers were punished for “negligence of duty” and a lieutenant general and major general lost their positions. The taxi driver, however, received a hefty reward for his keen eyes and quick thinking.

On 30 December at Panmunjom, the South Korean Government returned the cremated remains of the infiltrators to North Korea. The incident had been wound up, but a lasting scar of distrust remained. In Gangneung, the abandoned submarine sits on dry land, something of an anti-Communist propaganda vehicle. It serves as a reminder to tourists and young Korean school children that their mysterious, untrustworthy neighbor to the north might even now be watching.