Riots, Made to Order

More than a year after the Communists set off their costly and humiliating prison-camp riots on Koje Island, the U.N. Command issued a thoroughgoing report on the subject which in effect conceded that the Communists were even cleverer than they had been given credit for. In a 44-page intelligence summary, General Mark Clark's headquarters last week officially acknowledged what has long been suspected: the North Korean regime had sent agents into U.N. prison camps to keep control over the prisoners and to create incidents calculated to embarrass the U.N.

Clark's new report was carefully documented ; it included, as proof, translations of code messages between North Korean intelligence officers and their agents in the U.N. P.W. camps. Furthermore, the report charged flatly that North Korean General Nam Il personally directed disturbances in the prison camps at the time he was blandly conducting armistice negotiations over the green conference table at Panmunjom. Other findings:

P: Nam II is a Soviet citizen and former Russian army officer. One of his principal assistants, General Pae Choi, also trained as a Soviet army officer, supervised the infiltration of agents into South Korea. Another truce delegate, General Lee Sang Cho, helped plot the riots. Said the report : "These two generals and their fanatical followers have exploited a new area of total war."

P: Nam Il's liaison officer at Panmunjom, Kim Pa, who showed up at the truce talks disguised as either a sergeant or lieutenant, is actually a general, and formerly an agent in the Soviet secret police.

P: Manyprisoners have admitted that they were ordered to surrender or be captured in order to get into the camps. Female agents slipped through the lines as "refugees," set up housekeeping near the compounds, or wangled jobs in prison hospitals where they could assist agents behind the barbed wire.

P: Agents were told to establish "cell committees" in each camp, to organize strikes, protests and demonstrations (which led, in many cases, to bloodshed and death for hundreds of prisoners). The boss at Koje was Pak Sang Hyon, one of the original 36 "Soviet Koreans" trained in Russia. Under an assumed name, as a simple private, he controlled all compounds.

Nam's overall aim was twofold: "Mass mutinies, riots and breakouts which had as their goal an eventual link-up with the Communist guerrillas and bandits in South Korea," and "direct violence designed to produce propaganda which might influence the armistice negotiations at Panmunjom." In the second of these ambitions, he succeeded only too well.

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