Kim Greets Visitor, Ends Rumors of Assassination

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung appeared in public at the Pyongyang airport this morning to welcome a foreign visitor, thus dispelling earlier reports from South Korea that he had been assassinated.

The New China News Agency, China’s official wire service, reported in a dispatch from Pyongyang that Kim, 74, had personally greeted Mongolian head of state Jambyn Batmonh upon the visitor’s arrival in North Korea.

The Chinese account was subsequently corroborated by Western European diplomats in Pyongyang. Shortly before 11 a.m. today Peking time, Wolfgang Entmayer, the commercial counselor at the Austrian Embassy in Pyongyang, telephoned his country’s embassy in Peking to say that he had personally observed Kim at the airport ceremonies.

“He (Entmayer) said he had seen Kim and that Kim was in the best of health and spirits,” Wolfgang Wolte, the Austrian ambassador to China and North Korea, told The Times.

North Korea’s Central News Agency, monitored in Tokyo, also reported that Kim met Batmonh at the airport and said that 100,000 people lined the streets in Pyongyang to greet the Mongolian leader.

The official Soviet news agency Tass reported without comment that Kim and “other party and state figures of the DPRK (North Korea)” were at the airport to greet Batmonh.

In Tokyo, Japanese diplomats privately said they are not ruling out the possibility that some kind of political trouble has occurred in North Korea. They also said they will seek more information from Seoul about its reports of Kim’s death.

Diplomats in Peking said it remains possible that some major power struggle has been taking place in North Korea and that this would account for the erroneous South Korean reports of Kim’s death.

‘May Be Some Disruption’

“There may be some major disruption, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said one Western analyst. He compared the recent events in North Korea to the turmoil in China in 1971 at the time of the death of Defense Minister Lin Biao.

At that time, for a period of more than three weeks, foreign governments knew only that there had been a major internal struggle in China, but not what it entailed.

“We didn’t even know if Mao Tse-tung was alive until he came out to meet (Ethiopian leader) Haile Selassie,” this analyst recalled.

Eventually, China reported that Lin had died in a plane crash, allegedly while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union.

Last month, North Korean Defense Minister O Chin U was reported to have been seriously injured in a traffic accident. Since that time, the defense minister has not been seen in public and has not been receiving visitors.

Loudspeaker Report

The reports of Kim’s death spread rapidly Sunday and early Monday. The South Korean Defense Ministry said its troops had heard loudspeakers along the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) broadcasting the news that Kim had been shot and killed.

South Korean Defense Minister Lee Ki Baek told the National Assembly on Monday that “judging from all such circumstances, it is believed that Kim has died or a serious internal power struggle is going on there.”

Early this morning, the South Korean Defense Ministry said it had heard a new report from the North Korean loudspeakers. According to the South Korean officials, the loudspeakers were broadcasting reports that the defense minister had seized power in Pyongyang.

DMZ Extends 151 Miles

The DMZ extends for 151 miles across the Korean Peninsula. South Korean officials said they had heard the broadcasts at six separate forward posts along the zone. However, U.S. military officials, who operate within a narrow corridor of the DMZ, said they had not heard the North Korean loudspeakers, and the South Korean report has not yet been verified by any foreign observers.

For years, the North Korean loudspeakers have been a fixture along the demilitarized zone, the boundary that divided Korea into a Communist north and a non-Communist south after the end of the bloody Korean War. Normally, they are used to broadcast propaganda and martial music aimed at demoralizing South Korean soldiers.

In Pyongyang, Entmayer, the Austrian diplomat, said that North Korean officials told him this morning that the entire South Korean report of Kim’s assassination had been fabricated--including the allegation by South Korea that loudspeakers along the North Korean side of the DMZ are making unusual broadcasts.

“The problem with these broadcasts is that no one else is hearing them but the South Koreans,” said one U.S. official. “It still seems peculiar that these broadcasts are only heard at the (South Korean) posts and not at the two we have there.”

Doesn’t Make Sense

Nevertheless, this official said, “I don’t see any reason for the south to be putting something out that would be shown to be demonstrably false within a couple of days. So I’d tend to the idea that there’s something going on in North Korea, but we don’t know what it is yet.”

Most analysts in Peking said they doubt that South Korea would have intentionally broadcast erroneous reports of Kim’s death.

“One question is whether they (the South Koreans) did this in order to distract attention from their own internal difficulties,” said one Western European diplomat. “I cannot believe it. Maybe there was some misunderstanding.”

Dynasty Dissension

There have long been reports from North Korea of unhappiness among senior military officers over Kim’s efforts to groom his son, Kim Jong Il, 45, to take over after his death. If the younger Kim took over, it would be the first time any Communist nation had established what amounts to a dynastic line of succession.

One Western diplomat here said that despite Kim’s truculence towards South Korea and the West, he is believed in recent years to have exerted a restraining influence upon North Korean military commanders.

“The military doesn’t like what’s going on in South Korea and wants to do something about it, but he won’t let them,” said this analyst.

Sam Jameson contributed to this story from Tokyo.