International: The Man of Different Wisdom

In the wild Chiri (“Different Wisdom”) mountains of southwest Korea, Red guerrilla bands still maraud and plunder, sweeping down from their lairs to ransack villages and loot the creaky buses that bounce along the region’s rutted roads. There are at least 3,000 guerrillas, and the villagers on whom they prey call them San Sonnim (“Mountain Guests”). Until last week many of them were devoted henchmen of Lee-Hyun Sang, a plump, mustached Marxist.

Lee joined the guerrillas in 1949, a year after most of them had deserted Syngman Rhee’s army. He plodded up the mountains, muttered the proper passwords and quietly announced that the North Korean government had sent him to take charge. Lee’s tablets of authority were a Russian dictionary, a Russian-language history of the Communist Party, and a Korean history of Bolshevism. His books never left his side; his orders were never questioned.

Under Lee’s imaginative command, the San Sonnim wrecked thousands of South Korean trucks and trains. When the Communist army rolled south in 1950, he emerged from the hills and was made Red commissar of South Chungchong province (around Taejon). He ordered mass executions of captured South Koreans.

Later forced back to the hills, Lee became the No. 1 guerrilla in South Korea. Yet he himself never fired a shot. A scholar and ascetic, he studied three hours before breakfast, left his rice bowl to read his books until noon. From lunch until 3 p.m., he listened to reports, and studied. In the evenings he gave orders for the sabotage of U.S. convoys and studied again until precisely 8 p.m., when he lay down to sleep.

The San Sonnim looked on Lee as “a great man.” He had few possessions, but those he had he valued highly: a Parker 51 pen, a Ronson lighter, U.S. Army pants and a North Korean cap. He did not drink, he had neither wife nor mistress. In his personal household of 20, sexual intercourse was forbidden; drunkenness, even at the “Russian dances” which Lee occasionally organized, was forgiven three times, then ended with a bullet. “Lee himself hardly spoke at all,” said Koh Sang Kyun, his aide-de-camp whom the South Koreans captured early last year. “He didn’t run around.”

In the nine weeks since the Korean truce was signed, the San Sonnim has continued to loot and pillage. Recently, a South Korean patrol flushed a band of them from hiding and killed half a dozen. Five of the corpses were barefoot but one, better clad than the rest, wore a pair of torn tennis shoes. Last week he was identified. Seven well-aimed bullets had put an end to the studies of Lee Hyun Sang.