Dark Files: Across the Line — four cases where the Korean War never really stopped
Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & MysteriesShow Notes
Four cases tonight, and one line running through all of them — the line drawn across Korea in 1953 that everybody involved called temporary.
We start on an island in the Yellow Sea. In January 1968, thirty-one North Korean commandos walked to Seoul to kill President Park Chung-hee. South Korea's answer was a mirror: thirty-one men, recruited off the street as civilians, trained on a quarter-square-kilometre rock called Silmido to go north and kill Kim Il-sung. The order never came. Seven of them died on that island. In August 1971, the ones still alive killed their guards, crossed to the mainland and hijacked a bus toward Seoul — and for thirty-five years the state said they had never existed at all.
Then Panmunjom, 1976, where two American officers were killed with axes over a poplar tree that had grown tall enough to block a line of sight, and the peninsula spent three days at the edge of another war.
Then Rangoon, 1983: an explosive fixed to the ceiling of a mausoleum and fired by remote control, timed for a South Korean president whose motorcade had not yet arrived. Seventeen members of his delegation were already standing underneath it.
And 1987, over the Andaman Sea. A radio left in an overhead bin. One hundred and fifteen people who were never found.
Four cases. One border.
In this compilation: • Episode 40: Silmido Incident (Unit 684) • Episode 53: Panmunjom Axe Murder Incident (판문점 도끼 만행 사건) • Episode 52: Rangoon Aung San Mausoleum Bombing (아웅산 묘소 폭탄 테러) • Episode 23: Korean Air Flight 858 Bombing (대한항공 858편 폭파 사건)
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