Today I am publishing key US documents from the October 26, 1979, assassination of Park Chung Hee. Several of them have never been made public and others were previously released in the US and South Korean press in my 1996 stories about the hidden US role in the suppression of the Kwangju Uprising in 1980. They include five key sets of diplomatic cables from October and November 1979 (click each link to read the PDFs in full): snip

The first reports from the US Embassy in Seoul also include Gleysteen’s concerns that South Koreans believed that the United States may have been behind the assassination. “There has been great interest in US reaction and support, together with suggestion from many that now is the time to move towards democracy,” the ambassador wrote. “There is also some suspicion that US must have somehow been involved.”

The concern was real: KCIA Director Kim Jae Kyu had been very close to the the US CIA (Donald Gregg, the former CIA Station Chief in Seoul, told me in 1996 that he played golf regularly with Kim and that many US officials saw him as a moderating influence on Park). A month after the assassination, as I reported in my initial articles on my FOIA documents in 1996, Gleysteen persuaded a congressional committee not to hold hearings on the situation in South Korea because more reports about Kim Jae Kyu’s ties to the US embassy might be divulged.