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Asia Pacific|Kim Shin-jo, a Failed North Korean Assassin, Dies as a Pastor in the South
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/world/asia/kim-shin-jo-dead.html
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Kim Shin-jo famously said the mission of a hit squad sent by Pyongyang in 1968 was to “slit the throat” of the then South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee.
April 10, 2025, 12:22 a.m. ET
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 central Seoul before they were repelled in 1968, died on Wednesday. He was 82.
Mr. Kim’s death at a nursing hospital was confirmed on Thursday by his Sungrak Church in Seoul, which cited old age as the cause.
In January 1968, Mr. 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 fierce gun battle.
All the North Korean assassins were gunned down or killed themselves except two. One of the two was believed to have made it back to the North. The other was Mr. 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,” Mr. Kim 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 USS Pueblo two days later — marked one of the peaks of Cold War tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Stung by the attack, Mr. Park’s government secretly trained its own assassins to exact revenge against the North’s then leader Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong-un. (The unit was disbanded after the South Korean commandos mutinied in 1971.) South Korea also created a reservist army and introduced military training at high schools and universities. The 13-digit residential ID card, introduced at the time to help guard against North Korean spies, remains mandatory to this day for all South Koreans aged 17 or older.
