The Blue House Raid

On January 17, 1968, North Korean commandos infiltrated into North Korea with the express purpose of assassinating South Korean president Park Chung-hee. Not only were they to kill Park Chung-hee but they were to chop his head off and toss it into the streets of Seoul. The belief Kim Il-sung had was that by launching a decapitation strike against the ROK regime it would cause chaos within the nation that his communist agents in place throughout the country could then take advantage of by launching a guerrilla campaign against the government in the hope of causing a final regime collapse.

The undercover guerrillas would target transportation nodes, TV stations, post offices, police, and military bases in order to cause chaos throughout the country. The conventional North Korean army could then use the guise of an internal uprising against the South Korean regime to legitimize his invasion of South Korea to reunite the peninsula under his rule. However, first Kim had to successfully assassinate Park which would be no easy task.
To do this a thirty-one man assassination team was specially selected from the infamous North Korean 124 Army Unit responsible for most of the infiltration and ambushes launched along the DMZ. These specially selected soldiers trained for two years solely for this operation. Before beginning their mission the team spent their final 15 days conducting mock raids against a full model of the Blue House set up near the North Korean city of Wonsan where their training base was located. Once their superiors were satisfied with their level of proficiency they were immediately sent to execute their mission.
The assassination team was divided into six different teams each commanded by a Captain in order to more easily infiltrate into South Korea. Each team member wore dark overalls, sneakers, a cap, and carried 66 pounds of equipment to include a sub-machine gun, a pistol, grenades, and daggers.

The commando team decided to infiltrate through the 2nd Infantry Division sector near the city of Yeoncheon because it was believed that by infiltrating through the US sector of the DMZ and then successfully assassinating Park Chung-hee that the Korean military would blame the US for the assassination causing tension between the two allies for North Korea’s communist agents to exploit. Each of the North Korean teams were able to successfully breach the DMZ fence and landmines without being detected.
Here is what the only commando to survive the attack had to say about the initial infiltration operation:

At 04:00 on January 18, 1968, 31 commandoes crossed the border. (The border fence they cut is preserved to this day). They wore South Korean uniforms and were trained in Seoul accents – “This is the basis of guerilla fighting!” They removed mines as they went. They halted before a South Korean observation post: Women were going in: “They were not very alert!” Covered in white sheets, the assassins crossed the frozen Imjin River. URL="http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?p=879277"][B][COLOR=#242195]Kim Shin-jo[/COLOR][/B][/URL

After successfully crossing the DMZ the six different teams regrouped and began their expected four day march south towards Seoul. For the first two days the commando team was able to successfully march south undetected. Their infiltration mission had gone so well that they even camped out one night just a few kilometers from the major US military installation in the western corridor, Camp Howze.
Using all the reports I could find about the infiltration here is roughly the course the North Korean commandos used to infiltrate the DMZ, cross the Imjim River, and enter into Seoul nearly undetected:

However, the luck of the North Korean commandos would change on the late afternoon of January 19th. The commando team came upon four South Korean woodcutters working in the mountains on the commando team’s approach to Seoul. This was a moment where the North Koreans made a terrible mistake.

Fatal Mistake

The North Korean commandos had been long taught that the oppressed masses in South Korea were just waiting to be liberated from their puppet government back by the Yankee Imperialists. So instead of killing the woodcutters the commandos decided to conduct an indoctrination sessions with them and teach them the wonders of Juche and the on coming communist conquest that would unit the country to free the oppressed South Korean masses that they figured the woodcutters were part of. It never occurred to them that the South Korean masses were not oppressed and in fact loyal to the ROK government.
To add some context the masses in South Korea were oppressed by the Park Chung-hee regime, but they were no where near as oppressed as the people in North Korea. Remember many of the Koreans during this time frame had lived through the Japanese colonization of the peninsula and knew what oppression was, Park Chung-hee was nothing compared to what they saw before. Additionally Park’s economic policies had brought unprecedented economic growth to South Korea and thus causing the average ROK citizen to be quite happy to put up with some oppression if it meant the continued economic growth of the country. The fact that the commandos were indoctrinated with communist propaganda led to them making a mistake that would ultimately doom their entire operation.
The woodcutters unimpressed with the communist propaganda immediately went and notified the South Korean police once the commandos left. The police notified the South Korean military and a massive counter-guerrilla operation was launched to catch the commandos. However, the South Korean authorities did not know what the mission of the group was and thus could not focus their operations into one area. The commandos were so skilled they were able to easily avoid the perimeter checkpoints by moving in two to three man teams before meeting up again on the outskirts of Seoul.
In Seoul security was much tighter and the commandos took off their civilian overalls which exposed the ROK Army uniforms they wore underneath them. The ROK Army uniforms were perfect replicas and even had the correct unit designation of the 26th ROK Infantry Division sewn on them. They were a mile from the Blue House and decided the best way to penetrate the city’s security would be to do something no one expected, march right through the city straight to the Blue House.
Final Shootout

The North Koreans posed as a South Korean platoon returning from patrol on the city’s outskirts. They marched right through the city right by a number of military checkpoints before arriving 800 meters from the Blue House around 10:30 AM on the morning of January 21, 1968. It is here where the commandos encountered a final police checkpoint that stopped the marching soldiers to question them. The North Koreans fumbled their answers to the questions and the commander of the Chongno police station Choe Kyu-sik. Here is how the Chosun Ilbo newspaper described the events that happened next:

But a jeep carrying Jongno Police Station chief Choi Kyu-sik was coming up the road. Choi shouted at the North Korean commandos, “Identify yourselves! What’s inside your coats?” He was taking out a gun to stop them when two city buses came up close and stopped. Mistaking the buses for vehicles that carried police or military reinforcements, the North Korean commandos shot Choi in the chest, tossed hand grenades into the buses, and scattered in every direction. URL="http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200807/200807300004.html"][B][COLOR=#242195]Chosun Ilbo[/COLOR][/B][/URL

From there chaos broke out as the North Koreans entered into a massive fire fight against the South Korean security forces. A platoon of South Korean infantry had been tasked to reinforce the Blue House’s security and they immediately maneuvered to engage the North Korean infiltrators. It was during this exchange of gun fire that a school bus got caught up in the crossfire killing the women and children aboard. The ROK security forces were only able to get the North Koreans to abandon their mission to kill Park Chung-hee when ROK Army tanks began to rumble down the road towards the North Koreans. With no effective way to fight the tanks, the commandos decided to abandon the mission and fight their way back to North Korea.

The operation to track down and kill the North Korean infiltrators would end up being even bloodier then the initial fire fight. Both US and ROK military units were mobilized to patrol the South Korean country side to find the infiltrators. More often then not the infiltrators when located would go down in a blaze of gun fire that would claim the lives of even more people. A few of the operatives committed suicide to avoid being captured. Overall, the operation to track down the commandos lasted for nine days where 29 of the infiltrators were killed, one unaccounted for, and only one captured.

The casualties the South Koreans received was steep with 68 South Koreans killed and 66 more wounded. Most of these casualties came during the operation to hunt down the commandos. Of these casualties most were military and policemen, but two dozen of them were South Korean civilians. American forces experienced three soldiers killed and three more wounded in the operation to track down the North Korean operatives.

It was later learned that the one unaccounted for commando had in fact successfully made his way back to North Korea and would later become an Army general. The lone captured commando was a young man by the name of Kim Shin-jo who was on just his second covert mission into South Korea. Much of the details of the Blue House Raid have come from the testimony of Kim Shin-jo. Kim’s statement upon capture that, “I came down to cut Park Chung Hee’s throat!” became a well known footnote of the aborted raid.
Today Kim is far less aggressive and in fact became a Protestant pastor in 1997. Kim received a Presidential pardon for the raid and was released from jail when a forensic investigation determined he never fired a bullet from his weapon. Besides being a pastor Kim is also a hard line anti-Communist:

“What has really changed while the South has been pouring out so much money on the North?” he said. “North Koreans are only becoming hungrier and hungrier while the unilateral support from the South is extending the North Korean government’s life.”
Kim said he wants to live “as long as possible” so he can serve as living evidence of North Korea’s spy program against the South. Otherwise, “North Korea will just say they are not responsible for the Jan. 21 incident once I’m gone, like many other incidents North Korea has caused,” he said. URL="http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2885337"][B][COLOR=#242195]Joong Ang Ilbo[/COLOR][/B][/URL

The Blue House Raid is quite possibly the most unbelievable provocation between North and South Korea ever since the division of the peninsula. The plan was so bold that it seemed certain to fail, yet these commandos came only 800 yards from completing their mission despite fully alerted authorities looking for them. The Blue House Raid may have been foiled but the ability of the commandos to so easily infiltrate the DMZ and allude detection demonstrated lacking weaknesses in the security plan and training of both the US and Korean troops.
As bad as these weaknesses were, not all the aftermath of the Blue House Raid was bad. The commandos’ mission was foiled by loyal citizens reporting their movements and one alert policemen who paid with his life for uncovering the commandos. This proved to Park that more then just the military was loyal to his rule, but that South Korean citizens were as well. This incident clearly showed that a true South Korean identity separate from the North Koreans had been formed during Park’s rule in the 1960′s.
However, before US and ROK military leaders could even cotemplate the negatives and the positives of the Blue House Raid, another crisis would break out two days later; the capture of the USS Pueblo.