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actually were intelligence or party officials. In the decades to come, because these agencies were powerful, discreet, and tightly controlled by their respective leaders, they would become frequently used channels for the many secret communications between North and South.
    The South’s bid for higher-level talks was promptly accepted. North Korean leaders were ready and very willing. Gathering in secret as the contacts were beginning, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers Party approved a large-scale peace offensive toward the South in response to “the changing domestic and foreign political situation.” The Central Committee was composed of the top-ranking members of the party in all fields, and its plenary meetings often marked key decision points in the regime’s domestic and foreign policy. This was definitely such a moment.
    On March 28, 1972, following eleven rounds of secret contacts with his counterpart, South Korea’s Chong slipped out the northern door of the North Korean pavilion of Panmunjom instead of returning to the southern side. He was taken by car to the nearby North Korean city of Kaesong and then by helicopter to Pyongyang—the first of many South Korean officials to go to that capital for talks. There it was arranged for the secret contacts to go to a higher level: the chief of South Korea’s intelligence agency would come to Pyongyang for talks, and a senior North Korean would reciprocate by making a trip to the South. In late April a direct telephone line linking the offices of the KCIA and the Workers Party was secretly installed between Seoul and Pyongyang.
    The man in charge in the South was Lee Hu Rak, a former noncommissioned officer in the Japanese army and former chief of staff to President Park before being named to head the KCIA. Although it took its name and some of the functions from its US model, in many respects the KCIA was more like the prewar Japanese kempeitai or the Soviet KGB in its unbridled power in the domestic as well as the foreign arena. The former US diplomat and Korea scholar Gregory Henderson called the KCIA “a state within a state, a vast shadowy world of . . . bureaucrats, intellectuals, agents and thugs.” By the early 1970s, the director of the KCIA was more powerful and more feared at home than the prime minister or any other governmental figure except the president himself.
    After receiving written instructions from the president about visiting the “special zone,” Lee traveled secretly through Panmunjom to Pyongyang in early May. Looking back on it, Lee recalled that “I felt the kind of anxiety that is quite indescribable” because “we simply had no ghost of a precedent to guide me as to how to open up some sort of mutually acceptable communication.” He was also mindful that, as the chief of intelligence for the Republic of Korea, he was the person the northern communists would like most to get their hands on, after Park himself.
    His hosts took him to see the sights of Pyongyang and to a revolutionary opera extolling Kim’s anti-Japanese exploits. Then on his second night in Pyongyang, Lee was awakened and driven through a rainstorm to a well-guarded building in the hills around the North Korean capital. He was not told where he was being taken. At fifteen minutes after midnight, at the end of the harrowing ride, the thoroughly shaken KCIA director, who thought he might never live to see the dawn, found himself face-to-face with Kim Il Sung.
    KIM IL SUNG
    The Great Leader, as he was known to his subjects, is among the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, dominating his country during his lifetime as few individuals are ever able to do. From the late 1950s his power was virtually unlimited within the borders of North Korea, and his decisions often had repercussions involving life and death in South Korea and beyond. As a national leader, Kim surpassed all others of his time in longevity. When he died in July 1994