A Message to All Who Will Listen

One sunny morning two months ago, a black sedan arrived at the "truce village" of Panmunjom on the boundary between South and North Korea. Its passengers included Hu Rak Lee, 48, director of South Korea's powerful Central Intelligence Agency, an aide and two bodyguards. At Panmunjom, Lee and his party transferred to a North Korean car, crossed the border and drove to the nearby village of Kaesong. There they boarded a helicopter for Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Lee was the first high-ranking South Korean official to visit Pyongyang since the armistice ending the fighting of the Korean War was signed in 1953. His secret trip paved the way for the most important event in Korea since then: an agreement by the two Koreas to work for reunification by peaceful means.

Last week South and North Korea disclosed simultaneously that the two governments had signed a seven-point agreement whose ultimate goal was nothing less than reunification of the country after 27 years. Among its specific points: a promise to refrain from armed provocation and propaganda defamation of each other, an arrangement to conduct various exchanges of personnel and equipment, and an agreement to install a hot line between the two capitals. Said Hu Rak Lee: "We have entered a new era of dialogue."

The agreement had been foreshadowed by a recent series of preliminary talks between Red Cross representatives of the two countries to deal with the problem of reuniting families separated by the armistice line. In reality, both "Red Cross" delegations contained members with wide experience in foreign affairs and security matters. The progress of the Red Cross negotiations, which will formally begin later this year with a precise agenda, led to Lee's visit to Pyongyang, where he talked with Premier Kim II Sung and Kim's younger brother and heir apparent, Politburo Member Kim Yong Ju. When he arrived back in Panmunjom from his historic journey, Lee subsequently confessed, "I felt dizzy." Three weeks later Kim sent his second Vice Premier, Pak Sung Chul, to Seoul for secret talks with South Korean officials.

The seven-point agreement flabbergasted Koreans on both sides of the truce line, if only because of the depth of the enmity that has separated the two countries. The North Korean invasion of the South in 1950 led to a war that lasted three years and took an estimated 1,000,000 lives (including those of more than 50,000 Americans). As recently as three years ago, a 31-man suicide squad from the North had attempted to assassinate South Korea's President Chung Hee Park.

Accommodation. But both governments have been afraid that a big-power directorate would once again settle their problems over their heads. North Korea's Kim II Sung has been concerned that his country might one day turn into a battlefield of a Sino-So-viet war. South Korean President Park, in the wake of President Nixon's trip to Peking, evidently decided that, instead of waiting for the withdrawal of the 43,000 U.S. troops still stationed on South Korean soil, it would be better to start talking with Pyongyang while the Americans are still there.

Like Nixon's Peking visit, the Seoul-Pyongyang agreement represented a further dissolution of the legacy of the cold war. As a senior State Department official put it, "The significance of this event goes far beyond Korea. It's a message to all who will listen that if the superpowers can rearrange their relationships, then so can the smaller powers. There's plenty of room for accommodation around the world."

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