South Korea's History of Assassination Squads.
NOBLES: The Winter Olympic Games are now formally over. The closing ceremony was this morning in South Korea. And an enormous highlight of the games happened on the sidelines, apparent cracks in the ice built between North Korea and the United States. Word today on good authority that the North Koreans are willing to open diplomatic talks with Washington. While we wait to see if that develops, South Korea is still preparing for armed conflict with the North. CNN's Ivan Watson is there.</s>IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Faced with a hostile nuclear-armed neighbor, South Korea's military has announced the creation of a decapitation unit. In the event of a war, the mission of the special task brigade would be to take out the leadership of North Korea. But this is not South Korea's first attempt at creating a team of possible assassins. In 1968, after a bloody North Korean incursion, South Korea created a top-secret hit squad called Unit 684. The assassination squad was sent to this uninhabited island called Silmido for years of training. The initial plan was to recruit death row inmates. But in the end, intelligence officers chose 31 civilians from the streets of South Korean cities.</s>YANG DONG-SOO, FORMER UNIT 684 TRAINER, REPUBLIC OF KOREA ARMY (through translator): They were either a shoeshine boy, a newspaper boy, a cinema worker, or a bouncer. They would approach the ones who looked like they might have played some sports and had a strong physique.</s>WATSON: In 1970, Yang Dong-soo was a 21-year-old Air Force sergeant sent to Silmido Island to train Unit 684. The conditions on the island were often brutal.</s>YANG (through translator): There were accidents. In the middle of sea survival training, one recruit died of fatigue.</s>WATSON: In fact, five other recruits were executed for desertion or crimes such as threatening their trainers. For more than three years, unit members weren't allowed to communicate at all with the outside world. Finally, something snapped. On the morning of August 23, 1971, Unit 684 staged a bloody mutiny on this beach. They began killing their trainers one by one. When Yang heard gunfire that morning, he initially thought it was a North Korean attack. But then he says one of his trainees shot him through the neck.</s>YANG (through translator): When I woke up, I was bleeding from the neck. Everywhere. Trainers like me were being killed by recruits or running away. It was chaos.</s>WATSON: Yang says he dragged himself out onto these rocks and hid and somehow escaped being murdered. After killing 18 of their trainers, Unit 684 wasn't finished. They made it to the mainland and hijacked a bus to the capitol where 20 members died in clashes with Korean security forces. Four survived to be later executed. For decades, the brutal story of Silmido Island was covered up. Until the Korean blockbuster movie "Silmido" hit screens in 2003. Though it led to a public government investigation, this former Unit 684 trainer claims much of the film is fiction. The mutineers were victims who were sacrificed, he tells me, and so were the trainers. To this day, the survivor often preaches about how God saved him on that terrible day when the assassins turned on their commanders.</s>NOBLES: That's Ivan Watson reporting. That does it for me. I'll be back tomorrow morning, bright and early, 4:00 a.m. Eastern for "EARLY START." Thank you so much for watching. Jim Sciutto picks things up after this quick break.