South Korean intelligence 'assassins' team to assassinate North Korean leader

The South Korean Central Intelligence Agency was once ordered to establish Unit 684 to train for a single mission: to assassinate the North Korean leader.

Unit 684 at a training camp on Silmido Island, South Korea. Photo: WATM

In the winter of 1968, a 31-member North Korean assassination squad secretly crossed the border and headed to the woods behind the South Korean presidential palace of Park Chung-hee before being intercepted by South Korean security forces, according to the New York Times.

After a fierce firefight with US and South Korean troops, 29 of the 31 North Korean commandos were shot dead or committed suicide. One of the two who survived after escaping back to North Korea was promoted to general, while the other was captured by South Korean soldiers, pardoned, and eventually became an archbishop in South Korea.

Three months later, hePark Chung-heeordered the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to plan retaliation. The KCIA recruited 31 members, including criminals serving sentences in prison and unemployed youth on the streets, and trained them with the sole purpose of assassinating North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

South Korea established Unit 684 on the deserted island of Silmido, off the coast of the Yellow Sea. The training process was very harsh for many years, resulting in the deaths of 7 members of the team. However, before the members of Unit 684 could carry out their mission, relations between the two Koreas warmed, and the assassination mission was no longer necessary.

Angry after three years of hard training and not being allowed to leave the island, the recruits of Unit 684 rebelled. One morning in August 1971, members of the group attacked the guards, broke into the instructors’ quarters, killed a captain with a hammer, and continued to attack others. Only six South Korean officers survived the rebellion.

The "assassins" then made their way back to the mainland. Once there, they hijacked a bus to Seoul but were stopped by the army. Twenty members of the unit were shot dead or committed suicide with grenades. The survivors were tried in a military court in 1972 and sentenced to death.

Location of Silmido Island. Graphic: Wikipedia.

Until 2001, South Korea denied having a unit to assassinate the North Korean leader.In February 2004, the country's Ministry of Defense first spoke out about the uprising on Silmido Island, saying that five people who went missing in 1968 were members recruited and trained on the island.

Brigadier General Nam Dae Yeon, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry, said the 31 members of Unit 684 were part of an air force squadron. General Nam said all of themDocuments about Unit 684's mission no longer exist, however the South Korean government does not deny that their mission was to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il-sung.

Yang Dong Su, 54, one of six guards of Unit 684 who survived the uprising on Silmido Island, confirmed that the unit's mission was to infiltrate North Korea and assassinate its leaders.During the 1971 uprising, Mr. Yang was shot in the neck but survived.

In 2006, the South Korean government released an official report on the existence and training program of Unit 684. In 2010, a Seoul court ruledcompensation of 217,000 USD forrelatives of the members of Unit 684 for the human and emotional losses they have suffered.

According to VNE