Mock commandos from the North Korean People's Army Unit 124 infiltrate South Korea through a hole in the border fence with the aim of going to Seoul to assassinate the authoritarian president Park Chung Hee in January 1968.

The area around the North Korean border is rich in bizarre tourist attractions, but this re-enactment of the “January 21st incident” is by far my favorite. Not just because of its kitsch, but also because it recalls one of the most crazy and dangerous episodes in the history of the two Koreas. No James Bond film can match the reality of this incredible epic and its consequences.

Being located on the actual site of the North Korean infiltration, inside the Civilian Control Zone north of Paju City and at the edge of the DMZ, the place is not easy to get to. A military escort is mandatory. You will also need to book your visit a week in advance so that security background checks about you can be carried out.

Just before midnight on January 17, 1968, at the worst of the harsh Korean winter, 31 commandos from the North Korean Special Forces Unit 124 quietly slipped across the DMZ, clipping the barbed wires fences, bypassing the mines and skirting the U.S. guard posts, where the sentinels were busier fighting the freezing cold with campfires visible from afar than monitoring the border.

Their mission was to reach Seoul, and assassinate the South Korean president Park Chung-hee.

*South Korean soldiers escort visitors to the January 21 Incident place at the edge of the DMZ (October, 2024).*

They had been selected from over 10,000 soldiers for their physical strength and absolute loyalty to the regime. They had been training for two years, learning martial arts, marksmanship, knife combat, navigation, how to speak with a South Korean accent, as well as a tongue self-severing technique for a blood-letting suicide in case they were captured.

They had passed tough and gruesome tests such as walking for several days in the wilderness carrying their full 30 kg gear and without food, or digging into graves in a cemetery and sleeping next to corpses in order to hide. They had held rehearsals of the raid in a specially-constructed, full scale mock-up of the Blue House, the presidential palace in Seoul.

Each man, thought himself invincible, was carrying a Soviet-made PPS-43 submachine gun, an also Soviet-made TT pistol, knifes and eight hand grenades. All were instructed to “cut the head” of Park, shoot dead his advisors, and come back.

For four days, the killer platoon made cautiously its way towards the capital, crossing the frozen Imjin River, sleeping by day and trekking by night through mountains and forests.

On January 19, four woodpickers, all brothers, stumbled upon the North Koreans’ bivouac near the village of Beobwon. The orders were clear: if the squad came across any civilians on its march to Seoul, it was to kill them immediately and bury the bodies.

But burying four corpses in the frozen ground would have taken a long time. Meanwhile, the young men could have been reported missing by their family, triggering a search operation.

Perhaps blinded by his ideology, at a time when most North Koreans believed that South Korea was dreaming of being liberated by them, the unit's leader, Kim Jong Moon, made a fatal mistake.

Instead of slaughtering the innocent woodpickers on the spot as he was instructed to do, he gave them a long lecture on marxism and on the superiority of the North Korean regime, while holding them at gunpoint. Then he let them go, after making them swear allegiance to communism and promising not to report the infiltration to the authorities.

As soon as the North Koreans turned their backs, the four panicked guys alerted the police.

The South Korean army immediately mobilized four divisions - around 60,000 soldiers - to catch the infiltrators. But the North Koreans had a head start. They increased their walking pace and entered Seoul on January 20, divided into small groups. They decided to gather the next day at Seunggasa Temple, near the Blue House, to make their final preparations.

On January 21, wearing fake uniforms of the South Korean 26th Infantry Division they had brought with them, the infiltrators advanced towards the presidential palace without hiding, pretending to be South Korean soldiers returning from a counter-infiltration patrol, and smoothly passing through several checkpoints. By 10 P.M., they had arrived at the gates of the Blue House compound, a few hundred meters from the palace itself, when a sentry became suspicious upon seeing them.

Alerted, the local police commander, Choi Gyu-sik, approached the suspicious platoon, started grilling them and asked for their identity papers. Unsatisfied with their responses, he drew his service weapon. In response, the North Koreans opened fire with their machine guns, mortally wounding Choi and another policeman.

A fierce battle broke out around the Blue House between the infiltrators and the real South Korean soldiers, soon joined by tanks. In the midst of the confusion, a school bus passing by was caught in the crossfire, riddled with bullets and hit by several grenades that killed two passengers and wounded the driver. Even today, a number of old trees in the neighbourhood still show bullet holes left over from this crazy episode.

Unmasked and attacked from all sides, the squad dispersed and began its march back to North Korea.

A huge manhunt ensued, during which 29 of the 31 commandos were shot dead or blew themselves up with their grenades to avoid being caught (they are now buried in the Military Cemetery for North Korean soldiers). A total of 68 South Korean soldiers, police officers and civilians, as well as 3 American servicemen, were also killed during the 8 day-long mayhem.

One survivor, Park Jae Kyung, managed to make his way back to North Korea where he was promoted to general. He became a vice-minister of Defence and an influential adviser to the leader Kim Il Sung.

The other one, Kim Shin Jo, fled the battlefield without having fired a single shot and was captured in Inwangsan, a mountain park in central Seoul. After a year of interrogation, he was pardoned and became a South Korean citizen (following which, as is customary, North Korea executed his parents who had remained in the country).

Being granted a new life instead of being sentenced to death as he had expected, Kim got married, converted to Christianity and became a Presbyterian pastor. His weapons, as well as the wire cutters he used to cross the DMZ, are now on display at the Korean War Memorial in Seoul.

*Kim Shin Jo after his arrest, on a photograph exposed at the DMZ Museum in Goseong, South Korea.*

Kim Il Sung believed that the assassination of Park, an autocrat who had seized power in a military coup in 1961, would trigger an insurrection in South Korea and, ultimately, the reunification of the country under Pyongyang’s rule.

But although Park’s authoritarian regime was responsible for blatant human rights violations, including the killings of hundreds of protesters and political opponents and the suppression of the press, it had also begun to turn South Korea's economy around through a successful, export-oriented industrialization policy. In 1968, the formerly poverty-stricken South Korea was already a much more prosperous and advanced country than its northern neighbour, making the prospect of a communist revolution highly unlikely.

However, this incident was the most serious of what the South Koreans called the ‘Quiet War’ or the ‘Second Korean War’, a series of low-level border clashes and infiltrations that left hundreds of soldiers from both sides dead between 1966 and 1969.

Following the failed Blue House raid, South Korea started to get really worried. Fearing an imminent large-scale armed conflict with the North, it repatriated the 50,000 troops it had sent to Vietnam to support the United States in their war.

In the end, although it failed in its aim of eliminating Park Chung-hee, the January 21st Incident is considered to have been a strategic success for North Korea and the Communist block during the Cold War, as it weakened the United States in their fight against North Vietnam forces.

Park survived the Blue House raid, as well as another assassination attempt in 1974 when a North Korean agent fired at him during a speech and missed him, but killed his wife. He ended his life murdered by his own staff, shot in the head by Kim Jae Kyu, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency director, for obscure reasons during a boozy banquet in 1979.

Near the fence of the Blue House compound in Seoul, on the site of the 21 January 1968 attack, statues honour the memory of commissioner general Choi Gyu-sik (above) and assistant inspector Jung Jong-su (below), shot dead by the North Korean infiltrators they had just unmasked.

The Blue House raid had more bloody consequences years later…

In April 1968, to retaliate, the South Korean government created the secret and ill-fated Unit 684 with the aim of infiltrating North Korea to kill Kim Il Sung.

The 31 civilians, mostly petty criminals who were promised money if they succeeded, underwent three years of extremely harsh training on Silmido, an unhabited island located close to where Seoul-Incheon International Airport now is, during which seven of them died.

All for nothing: the assassination mission was cancelled in August 1971 following an improvement in relations between North and South Korea.

Desperate, fearing they would never be allowed to leave the island, the 24 survivors of Unit 684 mutinied.

They killed 18 of their military guards, leaving only six survivors, and made their way to the mainland where they hijacked a bus to Seoul. The bus was stopped in the Dongjak district of the capital where the army forced it to crash into a tree. Twenty members of the unit were shot or blew themselves up with hand grenades during the confrontation. Four were captured and later sentenced to death by a military court and executed.

In 2003, this dark story was the subject of the movie Silmido, directed by Kang Woo-suk. The South Korean government concealed all official information regarding Unit 684 until 2006.

The “January 21 Incident Place”

The UN crematorium

Biryong