In 1983, Chun Doo Hwan, the president of the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), made a state visit to Burma (as Myanmar was then known). During that visit, the ROK delegation was attacked by a team of three agents sent by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). On 9 October, a massive explosion in the old Burmese capital of Rangoon killed 24 people (including four ROK cabinet ministers, one of whom was the Vice Prime Minister). Forty-six others, most of whom were Burmese officials and servicemen, were injured in the blast.

The North Korean attack was meant to occur during a formal visit by Chun Doo Hwan to the Martyrs’ Mausoleum, an open pavilion-like structure near the Shwedagon Pagoda that was dedicated to nine Burmese nationalists, including the country’s founding hero, Aung San, who were assassinated in 1947. Mistaking the arrival of the ROK ambassador’s limousine for that of the president, the watching agents, drawn from the DPRK army’s Reconnaissance Bureau, detonated the bombs prematurely.

The ROK president was still about four city blocks away, en route to the mausoleum, when the explosion occurred. Informed of the incident by radio, he immediately returned to the state guest house where he was staying.

The Burmese authorities immediately launched a nation-wide manhunt, during which one North Korean agent was killed and the other two were captured. Of the latter, one was tried and executed in 1986. The remaining agent, who confessed to his role and gave state’s evidence against North Korea, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died, reputedly from liver cancer, in Insein Jail in 2008.^[1] In response to the attack, a furious General Ne Win not only cut off Rangoon’s diplomatic relations with Pyongyang but withdrew Burma’s recognition of the DPRK as a sovereign state.^[2]

The full story of the 1983 Rangoon bombing is still to be told. Many published accounts are inaccurate in various ways, and most are incomplete. For example, almost all reports state that the ROK president was delayed in traffic on his way to the mausoleum (or, in some accounts, to the Shwedagon Pagoda). At least one claimed that he arrived shortly after the explosion. Several sources refer to a single time bomb. A few state that there were two or even four North Korean agents, who “attempted to flee through the jungle” after the attack.^[3] Almost all descriptions of the incident assume that the DPRK was immediately identified as the most likely culprit.

All these accounts are incorrect, yet they keep cropping up in press reports, other articles and books. A few publications manage to repeat almost all these errors, thus conveying a completely distorted picture of the incident. Conspiracy theories abound. Even some officials familiar with the incident have made misleading statements.^[4] This post, drawing on hitherto restricted documents and interviews with Burmese and South Korean officials directly involved, aims to correct such inaccuracies, to put the record straight and illustrate the scope for further research.

Very briefly, the basic facts are as follows.

Chun Doo Hwan’s failure to arrive at the Martyrs’ Mausoleum on time was not because he was held up in traffic. Due to a clash between his official program and that of his wife, which was discovered by protocol officers only the night before, Chun deliberately delayed his departure from the state guest house, leaving five minutes or so after he was originally due to do so.^[5] In any case, given how light Rangoon’s traffic was in those far-off socialist days, and the measures customarily taken by the local authorities to clear a passage for any official motorcade, his being delayed by traffic was inherently improbable.

The ROK ambassador to Burma, however, left the state guest house as originally scheduled, intending to forewarn the delegation waiting at the mausoleum of the president’s slight delay: hence the ambassador’s arrival at the advertised time. His car, which was flying the ROK flag, was mistaken for the president’s limousine by the Burmese honour guard, prompting the military band to begin playing the ROK national anthem. This apparently alerted the North Korean agents who, in the belief that the president had arrived, triggered the bombs, which were hidden in the mausoleum’s roof.

There is some confusion over the number and nature of the bombs that were planted. After an exhaustive investigation of the incident, the ROK’s Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP, before 1981 known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, or KCIA) concluded that there were in fact three bombs. Some sources claim that they were smuggled into the country beforehand by the North Korean embassy in Rangoon, but it is more likely that they accompanied the agents on the North Korean ship that brought them to Rangoon (disguised as seamen) the previous month.

Two of the bombs hidden in the mausoleum roof appear to have been “Claymore” type directional anti-personnel mines, filled with shrapnel. They were not set to explode at a particular time, as has occasionally been stated, but were remotely controlled. They could thus be command detonated by the North Korean agents watching the mausoleum from an elevated position nearby. The third bomb was an incendiary device specifically designed to increase the number of casualties. It is possible that it failed to explode.^[6]

After detonating the bombs, the three agents attempted to make their way back to the North Korean ship moored in Rangoon harbour, on which they had arrived. They may have also considered returning to the safe house which had been provided for them earlier by the DPRK embassy in Rangoon. Either way, they were obliged to make their way through the city’s crowded suburbs, where they were soon spotted and reported to the authorities. There was no fleeing through “the jungle”, as claimed by one source, although they did attempt to swim down a busy waterway.

Contrary to popular belief, the United States (US) intelligence community initially doubted that the North Koreans were involved in the attack. This was largely due to the assumed difficulty of anyone secretly entering and operating in a closed society like Burma under military rule. US analysts were more inclined to blame the Karen National Union (KNU) or another local ethnic armed group, hoping to embarrass the Ne Win regime.^[7]

The KNU already stood accused of planting bombs in Burma’s population centres. From the very beginning, however, the ROK side had no doubts about North Korea’s culpability and urged a cautious (and confused) Burmese government to share this conclusion.^[8]

Other published reports which mention the incident have been equally misleading. For example, it has long been the accepted wisdom among academic observers and others that the North Koreans were able secretly to enter Burma, move around Rangoon and plant their bombs in the mausoleum’s roof, due to a more relaxed security environment, the result of a major purge of the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence (DDSI) earlier that year.^[9] In the words of one diplomat living in Rangoon at the time, “The whole of the military intelligence service [was] gutted and replaced”.^[10]

Following the purge, the DDSI was certainly in disarray, having lost its top leadership and most of its experienced staff. In 1989, veteran Burma-watcher Bertil Lintner wrote in an article for the Far Eastern Economic Review that “Observers at the time asserted that the attack could never have been carried out if [former DDSI chief] Tin U had still been in charge”.^[11] However, these observers were overstating Tin U’s abilities and the DDSI’s capabilities.^[12] The North Korean operation was well planned and executed, and probably would have occurred anyway, even without the purge.

All that aside, it is clear that one of the main reasons for the disaster, which has rarely been addressed in discussions of the incident over the past 40 odd years, was a major falling out between the key South Korean and Burmese intelligence agencies.

The ANSP wanted to play a major role in making the security arrangements for the ROK president’s visit. However, this was denied by the DDSI. The Burmese told the South Koreans that there was no precedent for a foreign country to determine security measures inside Burma, even for a visiting head of state on an official visit. After considerable and sometimes acrimonious discussion, a joint security plan was agreed but it broke down almost immediately. Burma’s hapless Foreign Ministry tried to help resolve the situation but became caught between the two feuding intelligence agencies.

The ROK government sent a large multi-agency advance team to Rangoon to prepare for the visit, but it soon fell out with its local counterparts. In the words of one Burmese diplomat familiar with the episode, it was a case of “a highly sophisticated [intelligence] network versus a rather primitive network”, the latter being the DDSI.^[13] As a result, there was confusion, a lack of coordination and gaps in the protective security coverage. Competing national pride and different cultural approaches to the resolution of problems did not help. The language barrier posed another obstacle.

To add insult to injury, after the bombing the DDSI suspected that the ANSP itself had tried to kill President Chun. The Agency had an unfortunate track record in this regard, the chief of the KCIA having assassinated ROK President Park Chung-hee in 1979. At one stage, the Burmese even wondered if Chun himself had arranged for the death of his own Vice Prime Minister, as part of a domestic power play. Some members of the ANSP advance party also fell under suspicion, as they had earlier asked the DDSI if it had inspected the mausoleum roof, suggesting possible foreknowledge of the plot. On all these grounds, DDSI and the People’s Police Force’s Special Branch briefly detained and interrogated some members of the ANSP security detail. This only served to make a bad situation worse.

Needless to say, the DPRK rejected any suggestion that it was responsible for the attack in Rangoon. In a lengthy memorandum sent to the president of the United Nations Security Council in December 1983, Pyongyang accused the “Chun Doo Hwan clique” of “stage-managing” the incident in order to provide US President Ronald Reagan with a suitable setting for his tour of the Korean peninsula that November.^[14] The North Koreans were able to point to the many inconsistencies, tendentious comments and unconfirmed claims in the international news media to raise questions about the events of October.

An Australian research project currently under way aims to examine all these discrepancies and conflicting accounts. It also plans to look at the 1983 Rangoon bombing incident in the wider context of ROK-Burma relations during the 1970s and 1980s. In both countries, the shock of the bomb attack was keenly felt and had long term repercussions. Given the possibility of a retaliatory attack by the ROK armed forces against the DPRK, and the considerable efforts made by the US to prevent war from breaking out on the Korean peninsula, it could be claimed that the bombing even assumed global significance.

In these circumstances, a full, accurate and balanced account of the original incident would seem to be essential.