Originally published on May 18, 2021, this article is republished five years later to that date with only a slight update.
More than a week before South Korea’s elite troops — sent to quell pro-democracy protests in the southwestern city of Gwangju — sparked an uprising by brutally treating citizens, would-be military rulers and their civilian aides were seeking to shift the blame for the problems the coup plotters were causing to North Korea.
Then-Prime Minister Shin Hyon-hwack on May 10, 1980, told South Korean reporters that a “close ally” had informed the government that North Korea’s infiltration-trained Eighth Army Corps had been out of intelligence surveillance for some time.
The unit could appear in South Korea, possibly between May 15 and 20, he suggested. I proved it Shin’s claim was a lie and reported the find in my paper, the Baltimore Sun, the next morning under the sarcastic headline, “Where’s North Korea’s Largest Army Unit?”
All these decades later, the effort on the right continues—indeed, it has accelerated, with the emergence in recent years of conspiracy theories (which we’re hearing about in 2026) to link North Korean infiltrators to the most horrific examples of brutality during the 10 days (May 18-27) that rocked Gwangju.
(I have been exposed to this more than most other foreigners because, as one of the junior journalists who covered Gwangju, I am asked every May to comment on what happened there and what it means today.)
Some of the arguments are almost laughable. I was unable to take seriously a proud graduate of the Korea Military Academy who met me for lunch in Seoul a few years ago. He earnestly told me that it was simply impossible for any officer trained by his glorious and honorable Alma Mater to allow or condone—much less personally commit—the atrocities being inflicted on the troops sent to Gwangju by the new dictator, Major General Chun Doo-hwan.
Other arguments, however, seem more plausible. And some of them are presented by people who have long been known to me—conservatives who I used to see as gullible before I started considering their Gwangju theories. I feel like I have to pay attention to what they say because of who they are.
One such senior insider speaks of actions in Gwangju that would be difficult for immediate civilian insurgents to carry out because they “require a lot of intelligence, planning, training and execution by well-trained personnel.”
Driver’s license?
Driving is a skill that sets her apart. “A lot of Koreans didn’t know how to drive back then. Hardly anyone had cars.” However, during a resistance campaign that focused on stealing and pushing towards soldiers, large armored personnel carriers, similar to tanks, large buses and military trucks, it turned out that there were “so many they could drive”.
“Driving large military trucks (if 2.5 tons or larger) and buses requires special training and licenses,” she noted. “APCs require special training, of course.”
The protesters “stole 779 vehicles, including 328 from (military contractor) Asia Motors and from elsewhere 34 military vehicles, 50 police vehicles and 367 regular vehicles.” With them, they clashed with the army and drove the government forces out of the city, temporarily.
Interesting argument, but I didn’t find it convincing – primarily because Gwangju only started as a student protest. As it progressed, somewhat older people became more deeply involved in the leadership and struggle for the resistance. Many of them were blue-collar workers.
“There were a few high school-aged youths who joined the citizen militia, but they were the exception,” recalls Donald L Baker, who was a US Peace Corps volunteer in Gwangju at the time and went on to a career as a professor of Korean history and religion at the University of British Columbia.
South Korea required most young men to serve three years in the military. Why couldn’t some of those who became rebels after their military service learn to drive those vehicles? Gwangju was South Korea’s center for the production of such vehicles. Someone had to know how to direct them.
Then I looked inside again a book on insurrection to which I had contributed and remembered that Park Nam-sun, the head of the local people’s fighting force that hijacked and planted those vehicles, was a 26-year-old transport worker. (A more recent article narrows his trade to “independent trucker”.) Of course, Park had to know a lot of people who were able to drive vehicles.
The involvement of South Korean military veterans also seems a good answer to the argument that someone in the resistance movement needed special training to rig the provincial capital building with explosives.
All that said, it’s still possible to point to loose ends — forensic questions about the origin of bullets found in some of the local dead, for example — and speculate that well-trained North Korean agents were in the country and took roles in the uprising.
Another conservative Korean suggests putting myself in the shoes of then-North Korean ruler Kim Il Sung, who was still reeling from the failure of his 195 invasion of the South.
Having spent much of my life doing my best to get inside Kim’s head, I have to take this point and admit that it’s logical to assume that Kim – even if he didn’t choose to invade again – would have made sure there were some North Koreans in Gwangju.
As that old acquaintance points out, there was a pro-North Korean faction in the South Korean student movement at the time, represented in the events in Gwangju in 1980.
It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that the faction was working alongside some Pyongyang agent during the 10 days, perhaps on missions such as attempted prison breaks.
But is the case for North Korea’s involvement more than speculative? We might have learned the answer if the South Korean authorities had been more open to a North Korean defector.
An article from one of the conservatives I know describes what happened this way: “Kim Myung-guk, a former member of the North Korean special operations forces who defected to South Korea … provided material and summarized his experience of being deployed to Gwangju in 1980 with a group of other North Korean forces.
“He went to South Korea in 2006 and told the National Intelligence Service (NIS) that he went to Gwangju during the Gwangju Uprising as a special forces operator. Kim thought the NIS would find the information valuable, but to his surprise, the NIS agent advised him not to mention it in the future.”
There are claims that the deportee eventually left the country. This bothers me, if true, as I would have loved to sit down with him and hear his story.
It is easy enough to understand why the citizens of Gwangju today and their allies in the national government would not want to entertain such a possibility. Koreans are very particular about “cleanliness”. To admit that “impure” elements may have participated in the uprising would be damning. Gwangju has become a holy and sacred event and casting doubt on it can land you in court.
My view is that it’s a complicated world. Even if some fifth columnists were deployed by Pyongyang before or during the events in Gwangju, I have yet to see convincing evidence that they were the dominant element or even close.
Anyone who was in the provincial capitol building on May 26, 1980 (the last day before government troops re-entered the city), talking to guards as they prepared to face their deaths, would be hard-pressed to argue North Korean involvement in the end game, to say the least.
I was there that day, and Seoul KTV produced in 2021 – and has just updated it in 2026 with a new interview – a program featuring my recollections (in English, with Korean translations as subtitles) of what I saw and heard:
The insurgency’s spokesman and, until then, de facto leader, Yun Sang-won, was the only insurgent I met in the building who was calm and collected. We know he wasn’t North Korean. I am familiar with his family. We know that within the South Korean democracy movement he had been a member of a faction that was against Kim Il Sung and North Korea.
Yun had completed his military service and was almost 30 years old, but his last day’s comrades I met inside the building were younger and scared—indeed, hysterical. None of them gave off even the slightest whiff of being a highly trained North Korean spy or a non-uniformed Korean People’s Army special forces fighter.
This is important, I think. Ending the uprising as Yun had planned, with him and other members of his last “pocket of resistance” fighting “to the end”, gave the democratization movement the information warfare momentum it needed to force Chun Doo-hwan and his other generals to surrender and allow free elections just seven years later.
I will continue to examine the theories that arise and any evidence that may emerge. However, even if one day it were proven that some North Korean infiltrators were also involved in the uprising, I would see such a development as impossible to deny the courage and resourcefulness of the Gwangju Immortals—those who faced the knowledge and fear of impending death, paid the ultimate price, and pulled it off.
Bradley K. Martin covered Gwangju for the Baltimore Sun and is the author of “Yun Sang-won: The Knowledge in Their Eyes,” a chapter in The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea’s Tiananmen. He is also the author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.
