Kim Shin-Jo was one of 31 North Korean commandos ordered to infiltrate South Korea and assassinate its president, Park Chung-hee, in the late 1960s. He was one of just two who survived that suicidal mission and remained in South Korea for the rest of his life, preaching Christianity and the need for eternal vigilance against his native North Korea.
Kim was 27 and an army lieutenant at the time of the attack. He was chosen from thousands of elite North Korean troops to form the 124th Special Forces Unit to carry it out. “I felt gratified to be part of the revolution to free South Korea,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “We thought the president there was a stooge, an American collaborator. I hated him.”
At 8.30pm on the evening of January 17, 1968, after months of training, “Unit 124” slipped through the minefields and coiled barbed wire barriers of the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that had divided Kim Il-sung’s Chinese-backed communist North Korea from Park’s capitalist South Korea since the end of the Korean War 15 years earlier (and still does).
Dressed in South Korean military uniforms and divided into six teams, they hid during the day and travelled by night as they marched south in freezing conditions through the mountains towards Seoul. One night they encountered four farmers gathering firewood. They made the fatal mistake of letting them go, instead of killing them, because the ground was too frozen to bury their bodies. They warned the farmers to say nothing, but they swiftly alerted the police. “That’s when it all began to unravel,” said Kim.
On the morning of January 21, he and his colleagues arrived within a few hundred yards of the Blue House, Park’s official residence in the hills of northern Seoul. There, on a rocky hill called Bukaksan, they ran into South Korean forces and a ferocious gun battle erupted. It lasted not hours, but days. By the time it ended at least 35 South Korean soldiers, police and civilians were dead, and scores more injured.
Of Unit 124, all but two had been killed or taken their own lives to avoid capture as they scattered and retreated northwards. One miraculously managed to retrace his steps and reach North Korea, where he later achieved the rank of general. Kim was discovered hiding in an abandoned hut in the woods, clutching a grenade which he could have used to kill himself but chose not to. “I was single, a young man. I wanted to save myself,” he said.
Two days later Kim appeared in handcuffs on South Korean television. “I came down to cut Park Chung-hee’s throat,” he told millions of horrified South Koreans. Kim was interrogated for many months. The general in charge became almost a father figure, assuring his prisoner that “we have a problem with the North Korean regime, not you”.
Kim had been surprised by the bright lights of Seoul he had seen through his binoculars and by the size of its buildings and the number of cars on its streets. “We had been taught that South Korea was living in the Dark Ages … We began to sense a discrepancy,” he said. Gradually, through patient reasoning, his captors broke through Kim’s ideological brainwashing until finally he renounced communism.
Kim had expected to be executed, but to his surprise his South Korean captors pardoned and released him after two years because he had fired no shots and killed nobody in the attack. Keenly aware of his propaganda value, the South Korean authorities sent him on a tour of schools, churches and workplaces to denounce Kim Il-sung’s brutal regime north of the DMZ.
To begin with, his new life was not easy. He was dubbed “the mountain pirate” and treated with such suspicion that he briefly changed his name and considered emigrating to the United States. He was haunted by the fact that he had survived when his colleagues had not. “Because I was the only survivor, I got all the blame,” he told The New York Times. “I suffered the sins, if you will, of all 31 men.” He learnt that his parents in his home town of Chongjin, North Korea, had been executed because of his desertion, and other members of his family purged. “In North Korea, my dead colleagues are heroes and I am a traitor,” he said.
But in 1970 he adopted South Korean citizenship and married Choi Jeong-hwa, a South Korean woman with whom he later had a son and a daughter. She converted him to Christianity, and in 1997 he was ordained. He became one of a large team of pastors serving the huge Presbyterian Sungrak Church in Seoul.
After the 1968 attack, Park’s government moved swiftly to strengthen South Korea’s defences. It established a force of reservists, introduced military training at schools and universities, and created mandatory identification cards for all South Korean citizens so North Korean infiltrators could be more easily traced. It also created its own assassination unit to kill Kim Il-sung, but it never succeeded.
At times of heightened tensions between North and South Korea, Kim was deployed to warn his adopted country against letting down its guard. He argued for ending all humanitarian aid to North Korea, for obligatory military service and for South Koreans to adopt the same determination to defend themselves as the Israelis. “South Korea is superior to North Korea in everything except discipline,” he said after North Korean artillery fired on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in 2010, killing two soldiers and two civilians. “If there’s a war, and it comes down to psychology, they would still win.”
At about that time Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, appointed Kim, then 69, to be an adviser to the ruling Grand National Party. By then the party’s presumptive candidate for the presidential elections of 2012 was Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late president Park Chung-hee, the very man Kim had been sent to assassinate 44 years earlier. When the two met for the first time in late 2010 they embraced each other. “She took my hand and was so warm to me,” he recalled. “I think she sees me as part of the team. She likes me.”
Against his wishes, parts of the route that Unit 124 took through the mountains to Seoul have been turned into a hiking trail named the Kim Shin-jo Trail.
Kim Shin-jo, North Korean defector, was born on June 2, 1942. He died on April 9, 2025, aged 82
