Kim Shin-jo, the only captured member of a team of 31 North Korean commandos who came within striking distance of the South Korean presidential palace in 1968, died on Wednesday at the age of 82. He was 82.
In January 1968, Kim and his colleagues did the unimaginable – slipping undetected through the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea and trekking 40 miles into Seoul on a mission to assassinate Park Chung-hee, who was the military dictator of South Korea at the time, and his staff. They got within hundreds of yards of Mr. Park’s presidential Blue House but were stopped by South Korean forces in a gun battle.
All but two of the North Korean assassins were gunned down or killed themselves. One of the two was believed to have made it back to the North. The other was Kim, who surrendered and later reinvented himself into a fiery anti-Communist lecturer and Christian pastor in the capitalist South.
“We came to slit President Park Chung-hee’s throat,” he said shortly after his capture.
The commandos’ raid into the heart of Seoul on Jan. 21, 1968 – and North Korea’s seizure of the American reconnaissance ship U.S.S. Pueblo two days later – marked one of the peaks of Cold War tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Kim’s death was confirmed on Thursday by his Sungrak Church in Seoul. It did not specify the cause.
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