Kim Shin-Jo, the only arrested member of the North Korean commando, died Wednesday at the South Korean Presidential Palace in central Seoul. He is 82 years old.
Mr Kim’s death at a nursing hospital was confirmed by his Sungrak Church in Seoul, which is considered elderly.
In January 1968, Mr. Kim and his colleagues did something unimaginable – a major reinforcement border between North Korea and South Korea was not found and hiked 40 miles into Seoul, executing a religion of assassinating the park, who was then a military dictator of South Korea, then a military dictator of South Korea. They were within hundreds of yards of President Parker’s blue house but were stopped by South Korean troops in a fierce gunfight.
All North Korean assassins were shot or killed except for two. One of the two is believed to have returned to the north. The other is Mr. King, who surrendered and later reshaped himself a fiery anti-communist lecturer and Christian pastor in the south of the capitalist.
“We’re coming to President Parker’s throat,” Mr. King said shortly after his arrest.
On January 21, 1968, commandos raided the center of Seoul – two days later, North Korea seized the seizure of the American reconnaissance vessel Pueblo – marking one of the peaks of the Cold War for the split on the Korean Peninsula.
Mr. Parker’s administration was stinged by the attack and secretly trained his own assassin to avenge his grandfather, Kim il-Sung, the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un. (The unit was disbanded after the Korean commando rebellion in 1971.) South Korea also established a reserve force and conducted military training in high schools and universities. The 13 residential ID cards launched at the time were designed to help prevent North Korean spies, and to this day, all Koreans over 17 still have to do so.
Part of the mountain road route behind the Blue House Kim Jong Il once infiltrated the Raid Party in the South Korean capital and kept shutting down the public for security reasons until a few years ago.
“If our mission is successful, Koreans will now live under communism,” Mr. Kim said in a 2008 interview.
At the end of World War II, South Korea was divided into pro-Soviet northern and pro-American southern. Their three-year Korean War ceased during the 1953 armistice, which left them in a state of war since then. In the decades that followed, the two sides launched a secret war, with thousands of commandos and spies infiltrating each other’s territory. Mr. Kim’s fallen comrades are still buried in the “enemy cemetery” north of Seoul, which was unclaimed by the government, which formally denies their mission and existence.
Back in 1968, Mr. King’s team violated part of the western mountain border guarded by the U.S. military. As they hurried across the hills toward Seoul, the North Koreans met four Korean brothers who collected firewood. After a lot of debate, they let Koreans live, warning them not to contact the police. That was their fatal mistake.
Villagers reminded the police that when the possible assassin arrives in Seoul, the police are waiting.
A fierce gunfight broke out on a rugged hill behind the blue house, home to South Korea’s presidency until former President Yoon Suk Yeol moved his office to another government building in 2022. The battle and Manit continued for two weeks as the North Korean raid party scattered and retreated northward. More than 30 Koreans were also killed.
Mr. Kim hid in an abandoned hut surrounded by South Korean troops and prepared to kill himself with a grenade. He changed his mind and surrendered.
“I’m single, a young man. I want to save myself,” he said in an interview in 2010.
North Korean spies arrested in the south often held decades of solitary confinement in South Korean prisons. Some of them refuse to reject communist ideology, partly because doing so will endanger families in the north. But after two years of trial, Mr. Jin pardoned. He succeeded in arguing that he did not kill any South Korea and did not reject communism.
South Korea saw the value of publicity among converters such as Mr. Kim. Shortly after his release, he traveled across South Korea with counterintelligence officials, giving lectures in military departments, churches and workplaces, and in which he opposed the North Korean government. He said defectors from his North Korean hometown, Chongjin, told him that his parents were executed and his brothers disappeared.
“In North Korea, my dead colleagues are heroes, I am a traitor,” he said in an interview in 2008.
Mr. Kim’s wife, Choi Jeong-Hwa, survived, and met him in Korea and turned him into Christianity. Mr. King was appointed pastor in 1997. He also has a son and daughter who survives.
