Why Did Syngman Rhee Release 27,000 Anti-Communist POWs?

The Mutual Defense Treaty between Korea and the United States.

Signed in Washington on the first of October, 1953.

For more than seventy years it has held up this country's security.

We mostly remember this treaty one way.

Something the United States gave to Korea.

Rhee was the president America installed, so America looked after him.

But open the documents that passed through Washington in those months —

The United States did not want to sign this treaty.

And it had drawn up a plan to take Syngman Rhee into custody.

Today we follow those few months.

Spring, 1953. The armistice talks were nearly finished.

One thing was left. The prisoners.

When a war ends, prisoners go home. That was the principle.

But there were men who refused to go.

You need to see what that refusal weighed.

Inside the wire, the camp was closer to a prisoners' self-governing zone.

The communist prisoners had built their own organization and chain of command.

They learned metalworking, made weapons of every kind, and took interior control.

The Americans did not go into the compounds at night, and the prisoners would not talk.

Inside, kangaroo courts were held.

In September 1951, fifteen prisoners were murdered by a self-appointed people's court.

The beatings and the murders went unpunished.

Then, on the eighth of April 1952, the UN Command began screening the prisoners.

Go back north, or stay. They asked each man, one by one.

Seven compounds refused to let the screening teams in. That was 37,000 men.

And then, the seventh of May.

The camp commandant, Brigadier General Dodd, was seized by the prisoners.

He had come to the gate for a meeting they requested, and was dragged inside.

The U.S. Army had lost its commandant to its own prisoners.

His successor, General Colson, signed a statement and got Dodd back.

It was a document admitting that prisoners had been killed and wounded.

The communist side put that statement to propaganda use at once.

After that the UN Command broke the camp into small pieces.

The prisoners were moved to several places on the mainland.

So in June 1953, when the anti-communist prisoners were released all at once, they were no longer on Koje-do.

Seen this far, that earlier sentence sounds different.

You die if you go back.

That was not a guess. It was already happening inside the wire.

Twenty-seven thousand men said they would stay.

Now let us go to Rhee's side.

He opposed the armistice.

The received account remembers this as the stubbornness of an old man shouting for unification by force.

But set it against what he had lived through three years earlier, and it reads differently.

In June 1949, American combat forces withdrew from Korea.

In January 1950, Secretary of State Acheson announced a Pacific defense perimeter and left Korea outside it.

And on the twenty-fifth of June, 1950, the North came down.

Rhee had learned three years earlier, first hand, what happens to a Korea without American troops.

What he feared was not the armistice itself.

It was an armistice, and then the Americans leaving again.

That would repeat 1950 exactly.

So what he wanted was one thing.

To bind the United States in a document. A mutual defense treaty.

But the United States did not want to give him that document.

America's attention was on Europe.

It wanted to avoid getting its feet caught on the Asian mainland.

Sign a treaty, and if Korea started the war again the United States would be dragged in.

All the more so if the other party was a president shouting for a march north.

Rhee had no cards.

No military strength, no money.

He had one thing. He could break the table.

Every time he refused the armistice, the whole American plan shook.

And the United States took that threat seriously.

On the twenty-ninth of May, 1953, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs sat down together in Washington.

There is a sentence in the minutes.

Clark was the United Nations Commander.

The plan even had a name. EVERREADY.

Detaining the president of an allied country was written down in a plan.

The received account calls Rhee the president America installed.

Then why did the ones who installed him prepare a plan to lock him up?

The eighteenth of June, 1953. Between midnight and dawn.

The gates of the camps opened all at once.

That sentence is from the U.S. State Department's diplomatic record.

Korean records count 27,389 out of some 35,000 in eight camps.

The two numbers differ. We erase neither.

It was the Korean army guards who opened the gates.

Men whose orders were to hold them in were told to let them out.

The prisoners scattered into the dark and melted into the Korean population.

Rounding them up again was effectively impossible.

That same day Rhee issued a statement.

And he wrote a letter to General Clark, the UN Commander.

It had already happened.

The news reached Washington at once.

That day the National Security Council met at the White House. It was the 150th meeting.

President Eisenhower.

Secretary of State Dulles.

These are not our words.

They are minutes published by the United States State Department.

When the received account calls Rhee an agent of the United States,

that same America's highest council saw him like this.

To the political leaders in Washington, Syngman Rhee was a severe headache.

And then the United States sent a man.

Assistant Secretary of State Robertson came to Seoul. The talks ran for more than two weeks.

On the twenty-sixth of June, Dulles cabled Seoul.

The treaty was on the negotiating table.

It was the document Rhee had been demanding for three years.

On the twenty-seventh of July the armistice was signed. Korea did not sign it.

And on the first of October, the Mutual Defense Treaty was signed in Washington.

So what does that treaty actually say?

Both sides inflate it. So we will read the text as it stands.

People often say this treaty guarantees automatic American intervention.

There is no such sentence in the treaty.

That is Article III. Not automatic — each side goes through its own procedures.

Article IV gives the United States the right to station forces in Korean territory.

There is no obligation to send nine times the troops, and no clause making America pay the entire defense budget.

But an automatic intervention clause was not what Rhee was after.

It was Article IV. That American forces stay.

The army that had left in 1949 — this time he pinned it down with a document.

The treaty is a short paper of six articles. The weight came from that one.

To the politicians in Washington, Rhee was a troublesome old man from a small Asian country.

The American commanders posted in Korea, by contrast, began saying something else as the years passed.

It had not been that way from the start.

Walton Walker, the first Eighth Army commander, never won Rhee's trust.

But the judgment of the men who knew him longest began to change.

Matthew Ridgway, second commander of the Eighth Army and second United Nations Commander.

Eighth Army commander James Van Fleet called him a great patriot and a man of steel.

When Rhee died in Hawaii years later,

Van Fleet flew in from Florida and accompanied the body all the way to Korea.

And he went home only after the funeral was over.

Later, Maxwell Taylor, Van Fleet's successor, said this.

And Mark Clark, who served as United Nations Commander.

As you saw in chapter two — the commander who had prepared to take Rhee into custody.

The man who drew up the plan to detain him called him that.

With MacArthur it went back further.

Rhee had known MacArthur since he was a major.

It was also MacArthur's doing that Rhee could return to Seoul after liberation.

In early 1950, in Tokyo, MacArthur made him this promise.

Of all the American generals, the ones President Rhee liked most were MacArthur and Van Fleet.

Washington and the field ran at different temperatures.

Those who saw him from far away took him for a nuisance,

and those who knew him up close, for years, saw him otherwise.

Let us put it together.

The United States did not want to sign this treaty.

It had even drawn up a plan to take Rhee into custody.

At its highest council the words were spoken that America might have to withdraw.

And at the end of those few months, the treaty was signed.

The State Department's own published record gave that stretch this title.

Remove him, or give him the treaty.

The United States had both on the scale, and it chose the treaty.

Even a scholar critical of Rhee writes this about this passage.

That is not a friendly historian talking.

What became of the twenty-seven thousand who were released, we leave for another time.

But one thing is clear.

The received account calls him the president America installed.

The man in the American documents is someone who shook the table on America.

He had seen three years earlier what happens to a Korea without American troops,

and he tried to bind America in a document so that it would not happen again.

The treaty was not given. It was extracted.