Book reveals Gregg's life in two Koreas

Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, signs a copy of his book during press event to announce the publication of his translated book “Pot Shards — Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas” at the Millennium Seoul Hilton hotel in central Seoul, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Changbi Publishers

By Kwon Ji-youn

Whenever Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, went by a construction site in Seoul, he would get out of his armored car and poke around the dirt, hoping to find ancient pot shards. Should he stumble upon a fragment, he would hold it in his hand and wonder, why did this fragment survive while the rest of the pot is gone?

“I realized that memory works in the same way,” Gregg said Tuesday at a press event to announce the publication of his translated book “Pot Shards ― Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas.”

“Certain memories survive, just the way some fragments survive. Pot Shards is a fragmentary account of my life.”

Gregg, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for 31 years, details in his succinct memoir the journey he has traveled as a politician, through Southeast and Northeast Asia, and the halls of power in Washington D.C. He spent ten years in the White House under George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

And while his recollections of Japan and Myanmar are mostly unruffled, those of his tumultuous experiences in South Korea are rather weighty.

The cover image for the Korean version of “Pot Shards — Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas” / Courtesy of Changbi Publishers

Gregg recounted one of his first complications as CIA station chief in South Korea ― in August 1973, then-liberal leader Kim Dae-jung ― later to become president ― was kidnapped. Philip Charles Habib, the then-U.S. ambassador to South Korea, asked Gregg to locate his whereabouts.

“I was able to tell Ambassador Habib the next morning Kim was in a small boat in the Straits of Tsushima, with his hands and feet tied, about to be thrown overboard,” Gregg recalled. “I’m not going to tell you how I found him. It was my job to do it, I did it and I cannot talk about it.”

Gregg’s account is alive and colorful, full of detail and attitude. It deals with diplomacy, intelligence and defense policy, some anecdotes of which have never been revealed in previous texts.

Especially striking was his introduction about his time in the military. He recalled one Japanese-American draftee, Takeshita, who was “so slender that his heavy cartridge belt slipped down over his hips unless he held it up with one hand.”

“The Texans thought it was hilarious, and constantly teased Takeshita,” Gregg writes. “The racial prejudice shown to Takeshita, and to all Japanese-Americans, was very common at that time.”

Pot Shards includes a sketch of Gregg’s visit to Gwangju, which he had scheduled to “lessen the hostility that the people of that city seemed to hold towards the U.S.” regarding alleged U.S. involvement in the May 18 Democratic Movement in 1980.

He called it a “deeply valuable” experience that showed him “how Koreans can hold feelings of ‘han’ (deep-seated resentment) when they are dealing with events caused by others, and which they feel are unjustified, immoral and unfair.”

Gregg singled out a chapter toward the end titled “Dangers of Demonization” as perhaps the most important.

“The U.S. has a tendency, when dealing with somebody we neither like nor understand, to fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice,” Gregg said. “We have done that about North Korea, the North Vietnamese and Saddam Hussein. In the case of the North Vietnamese, it caused us to fight a war we never should have fought. I’m against demonization. We do it in spades with North Korean leaders, and it’s something I constantly try to get us to stop doing.”

Gregg added that North Korea represented one of the longest-running failures in the history of U.S intelligence.

“But what do you have to gain by continuing to hate them?” he asked. “That means they will become more and more interested in nuclear weapons. When I go to North Korea, I feel comfortable because I’m dealing with Koreans ― they’re not that different. I think it’s better to forgive, forget and embrace in friendship than to carry hatred to your grave.”

He stressed the importance of dialogue.

“Totalitarian regimes change when they find that it is in their interest to change,” he said. “North Korea needs to find somebody to talk to in South Korea and the U.S. But I fear U.S. President Obama will not reach out to North Korea, as he would be severely criticized by our right wing should he do so.”

It took Gregg about four years to write Pot Shards and the clearance process that came afterwards equally difficult.

“Intelligence officers are not allowed to keep diaries, and so in this book is what I remember,” Gregg said. “I also had to get this book cleared by CIA to make sure I wasn’t giving away national secrets. This why I call these memories fragments.”

Changbi Publishers Inc. Translated into Korean by Cha Mi-rae. 488 pages. 25,000 won.