Seoul Worries About North Korea : Countdown to Olympics Brings Terrorism Jitters

The Olympic clock is ticking: On small digital displays in hotels and government offices and on a huge scoreboard mounted above the plaza in front of City Hall, South Koreans are counting the days until the Olympic Games begin Sept. 17.

But it is early August that many observers of North Korea, worried about terrorist attacks, are anxiously awaiting.

That is when international sports organizations, including delegations from North Korea’s major allies, China and the Soviet Union, start arriving in Seoul for a series of Olympics-related conferences.

“The coming months are extremely dangerous,” said Kim Chang Soon, director of the Institute of North Korea Studies in Seoul. “They (North Koreans) are constrained, but the danger will continue.”

Ever since last November, when an agent who said she was working for North Korea blew up a Korean Air jetliner with 115 people on board near the Thai-Burmese border, the threat of terrorism has cast a pall over the Seoul Olympics.

Exposure of North Korea’s responsibility for the incident has served to tighten anti-terrorist security and to ensure that the 24th Olympics will be the safest Games ever held, organizers say. Moreover, censure by North Korea’s allies is likely to constrain the North Koreans from striking during the Olympics and endangering visitors or athletes, security analysts say.

But North Korea, frustrated by its failure to prevent Seoul from being the site of the Games, is such an enigma that a desperate, irrational show of force cannot be ruled out, experts warn.

The last weeks before the opening of the Olympics could provide a final window of opportunity for North Korean terrorism aimed at spoiling Seoul’s moment in the spotlight, Kim said.

“If they’re confident they can get away with it, they’ll do it . . .,” Kim said. “Pyongyang fears the cultural and political center of the Korean peninsula will shift to Seoul if the Seoul Olympics is successful. They fear they’ll lose the contest without a single shot being fired.”

Watching Cautiously

Yook Wan Sik, head of South Korea’s Olympic Security Coordination and Control Headquarters, told reporters the other day that the authorities expect no further provocation from Pyongyang, but experts are watching cautiously.

“You do have in North Korea a belief that violence plays a key role in achieving political objectives,” a high-ranking Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

North Korea has said it will boycott the Olympics. However, a record 161 of the 167 countries with membership in the International Olympic Committee have announced that they will take part in what could prove to be the most apolitical of the Summer Games since the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The Soviets and other East Bloc countries refused to take part in the Games at Los Angeles four years ago. Only Cuba, Albania, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and the Seychelles have not responded to invitations to this year’s Games.

The bombing of the South Korean airliner suggested that Pyongyang had hoped to force cancellation of the Seoul Games, but many analysts agree that North Korea probably has given up on that goal. Now, one said, they may “hope to minimize attendence and create a bad atmosphere for the Olympics.”

Guerrilla Training Camps

Observers of North Korea believe that the Pyongyang government runs training camps that specialize in terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

North Korean operatives were determined by Burmese authorities to be responsible for an October, 1983, bomb blast in Rangoon that killed 17 South Koreans, including four Cabinet ministers. South Korean authorities blamed Pyongyang for a bomb attack at Seoul’s Kimpo Airport shortly before the 1986 Asian Games, but they were unable to produce any proof.

North Korea denied that it had anything to do with last November’s airliner bombing. However, a woman who was arrested for carrying a false Japanese passport after getting off the plane in Abu Dhabi confessed to having been trained as a North Korean agent for more than seven years. She said she planted a bomb on the plane on instructions from authorities in North Korea.

Both she and her male accomplice took poison while in detention, and the man died. However, the woman, identified as Kim Hyon Hui and widely known by a Japanese alias, Mayumi Hachiya, recovered and made a sensational confession before South Korean television cameras.

Intelligence agencies in the United States and other countries have confirmed that “Kim’s story checks out,” one foreign specialist said.

Diverting Suspicion

Analysts theorize that North Korea had hoped to hide its role and divert suspicion to Japanese terrorists, and by doing so create a political uproar against Japan.

Although experts here have no evidence of a link with North Korea, the Japanese Red Army, an underground organization with links to Middle East terrorists, has recently showed signs of resuming terrorist activities after a long dormancy.

Concern over the tiny band of Japanese terrorists increased with the arrest of Yasuhiro Shibata, a member of the Red Army, in Tokyo on May 7. The Japanese police thought he had been living in North Korea since he and eight others hijacked a Japanese airliner to Pyongyang in 1970. Although one of the hijackers is known to have died, the whereabouts of the others became a major worry.

Japanese officials, who noted that Shibata could not have left Pyongyang without the Communist government’s permission, expressed fear that North Korea may have given the group an anti-Olympics assignment.

Osamu Maruoka, a senior Red Army leader, was arrested in Tokyo last November with an air ticket to Seoul and what appeared to be a list of assassination targets, according to Japan’s Kyodo News Service. Maruoka, however, was not among the 1970 hijackers.

‘Attractive Target’

“The Olympics is going to be an attractive target for lots of terrorist groups, simply because it gives them an opportunity to dramatize their cause,” one security analyst said, asking not to be named. North Korea, he said, might underwrite an attack by such a group to “let somebody else take the fall . . . if it backfired.”

North Korea’s bombing of the Korean Air jet “came within five seconds of being the perfect crime” and might have been followed by further acts of violence had North Korea’s hand not been detected, the Western diplomat said. “The tendency to disrupt things has not gone away,” he said, “but they certainly now know the costs of getting caught.”

The security analyst said, “When their allies, their socialist brethren, express their alarm and publicly state their desire for a safe Olympics, I think that has an effect.”

In particular, North Korea is expected to be on good behavior because it is preparing to put on a Socialist Youth Festival next year and wants those games to be successful, analysts said. One expert said that North Korean disruption of the Olympics could “infuriate their socialist brethren” and precipitate a boycott of the festival.

It is also still remotely possible that North Korea will reverse its decision and send its athletes to Seoul, where organizers say they would still be welcome.

Clampdown at Airport

South Korean authorities have tightened their already strict airport security. In addition to metal detectors, luggage checks, hands-on body searches and soldiers carrying machine guns, there are rules that require passengers to surrender all batteries from their carry-on baggage, a measure aimed at making inoperative any timing devices that could be used to detonate explosives.

Access to Olympic facilities will be controlled by about 100,000 policemen and military personnel, with special anti-terrorist commando squads on alert--”the biggest security operation in Olympic history,” said security chief Yook.

Authorities are working closely with intelligence agencies in the United States, Japan and other countries, keeping track of an international roster of 6,000 known terrorists who might pose a threat to the Games.

Also, security should be made less difficult by the fact that political and social unrest in South Korea, which raged out of control last summer, has been largely defused by democratic reforms.

The political and social situation in North Korea, however, remains unclear. Scattered reports in late 1987 and early this year about a major explosion involving an ammunition train, a shake-up in the army command and a reorganization involving economic officials had led analysts to wonder whether major changes were taking place. But such speculation has declined recently.

‘Fragmented, Misleading’

“We know so little about that place, and the information that comes out is so fragmented and misleading,” one analyst said. “The whole situation is so opaque that it lends itself to the wildest interpretations. You can see anything you want.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. military, with 43,000 troops here, is alert for any external threat to South Korea. A military spokesman said naval strength will be increased by positioning an aircraft-carrier task force off the coast during the Olympics. Twenty-eight U.S. Marine aircraft have already been moved from Japan to South Korea on a temporary basis, and air surveillance of North Korea will be stepped up during the Olympics, the spokesman said.

An invasion of South Korea, however, seems extremely unlikely, U.S. military sources said.

“The whole world has been alerted to their history of doing things, and the whole world’s going to watch them,” said Bill Fullerton, a civilian spokesman for the U.S. 8th Army command and long an observer of Korean affairs.

However, a safe and successful Olympics will not resolve the tension and hostility that have divided the Korean peninsula since the Korean War ended in 1953 in a fragile armistice.

“The threat did not begin in 1981, when Seoul got the Olympics,” Fullerton said, “and it’s not going to end on Oct. 2, when the Games are in the books.”