The Korean War: Stalin's Green Light, Followed by "If the Chinese Comrades Do Not Agree..."

Cold War Encounters · Secret Files · 004

On January 30, 1950, the Soviet ambassador to North Korea, Terentii Shtykov, brought Kim Il Sung an answer he had long been waiting for: "Stalin is willing to receive him, and willing to help him."

The answer contained one more sentence. The question of the South was a large matter; it needed careful preparation and must not involve too great a risk.

After hearing it, Kim asked once more: did this mean he really could go and see Stalin?

The ambassador said yes.

The next day Shtykov reported to Moscow that Kim was very pleased with the news, above all that Stalin would receive him and would help.

The same report contained a second item. Stalin's telegram carried another request: the Soviet Union was badly short of lead and hoped Korea could supply at least 25,000 tons a year, with Soviet technical assistance and specialists available. Kim promised an answer within ten to fifteen days.

A reply agreeing to a meeting and a request for lead traveled in the same secret telegram.

This was not an order with a date for war written on it. It only opened a door. Once the door was open, troops, equipment, timing, and the attitude of another neighboring country all had to be negotiated one by one.

I. A Purchase List

The peninsula was already divided between two governments that did not recognize each other. In the North, Kim Il Sung wanted to change that.

Counting how many men he could mobilize was not enough. He also had to count how much equipment the Soviets would give, and who would stand where if the war grew large. Moscow, for its part, would not act on a mere wish for "unification." Turning a wish into action required transport, credit, advisers, and military preparation.

The telegrams that followed quickly came down to these practical matters.

In early February, Kim proposed forming three more infantry divisions, bringing the army to ten, and drawing early on Soviet credit originally scheduled for the following year. Shtykov had some doubts about how many resources Korea could provide. When the material reached Moscow, Stalin wrote approving notes beside several requests and pressed for a reply.

In March the purchase lists kept coming. Support was not a single word; it was weapons, equipment, payment, and transport. The Korean side proposed paying partly in gold, silver, and mineral products; the Soviet side agreed to let part of the next year's credit be used early. Kim then sent a list of the equipment needed for the expansion.

On March 18, Stalin replied that the requests for military equipment and specialists could be fully satisfied.

These telegrams cannot tell us on which day each crate of weapons arrived. But they make one thing increasingly clear: Moscow was no longer simply inviting a guest for talks. It was solving the practical problems of an army's expansion and its equipment.

II. To Moscow, Then to Beijing

In late March, Kim and Foreign Minister Pak Hon Yong asked to visit Moscow secretly in early April. The agenda: methods of unification, economic construction, and party questions. Stalin agreed.

Aircraft, ships, and trains all appear in the correspondence. These were alternative routes; we cannot treat every one of them as actually traveled.

By May, the next stop was Beijing. Kim planned to describe his talks with Stalin to Mao Zedong, discuss military unification, and also talk about trade and friendly arrangements after unification.

He told Shtykov he had not given the Korean party Central Committee a full account of the talks, only a limited briefing to Kim Chaek.

He also asked the ambassador: when he met Mao, what should he ask for?

Shtykov did not write the list for him; he left it to the Koreans. At one point Kim thought of asking China for ammunition for Japanese and American weapons, then said the staff departments reported existing reserves were sufficient and that Moscow had already met the requests made.

What he needed most from this trip to Beijing was not another purchase list but approval of the action itself.

III. Eleven-Thirty at Night

On May 13, Kim and Pak arrived in Beijing. That evening Mao Zedong talked with them.

This article has not seen a verbatim Chinese record of that conversation. What entered the Soviet archives is a different thread: at 11:30 that night, on Mao's instructions, Zhou Enlai went to see the Soviet ambassador, N. V. Roshchin.

Zhou conveyed the message: Kim had said the international situation had changed, that Stalin had agreed to Korean action but required consultation with China. Mao wished to hear Stalin confirm this himself.

The Korean guests would stay in Beijing only two days. The Chinese comrades asked for a quick reply.

This was a very concrete act of verification. What Kim had brought was not a meeting record that Beijing could consult, but his own account of Moscow's decision. Mao did not decide on the strength of that report alone. So Zhou knocked on the Soviet ambassador's door, sending the statement back along the diplomatic telegraph to the source it claimed.

IV. The Second Half of the Telegram

The answer arrived in the early hours of May 14. The Soviet Foreign Ministry telegram records that it was received at 4:10 a.m. and dispatched at 5:30.

Stalin sent his view under the name "Filippov," transmitted by Andrei Vyshinsky to Roshchin, who was asked to inform Mao. The answer confirmed that, in view of the changed international situation, the Soviet side agreed with the Korean comrades' proposal to move toward unification.

The second half added a condition: the final decision must be made jointly by the Chinese and Korean comrades; if the Chinese comrades did not agree, the decision should be postponed for further discussion. Stalin added that the Korean comrades could describe the details of the talks.

Compress the whole telegram into "Stalin gave the green light," and the second half is lost. Seize only the second half and claim Moscow did not agree, and the clear approval in the first half is deleted.

Both halves were written in the same telegram. Approval was taking shape, while the risk was handed to Beijing and Pyongyang to carry together.

How Mao answered at the time, this Soviet telegram cannot say for him. It proves that Moscow wrote the condition this way, and that Beijing asked for verification. It is not a recording of three-way talks, nor a full contemporary Chinese text.

V. Before the Rainy Season

On May 29, at his own request, Kim met Shtykov again. The conversation had reached the details of preparing an offensive.

He said most of the weapons and ammunition requested in Moscow had arrived and had been sent to the newly formed divisions; all would be in soldiers' hands before June 1. Of the ten infantry divisions, eight were fully ready to attack; the tank brigade and motorized regiment were ready too.

At his request the chief of the general staff had drafted an outline decision for the offensive and briefed him on it together with the Soviet adviser, General Vasiliev. It was Kim himself who approved the decision and chose the main axis of attack. He invited Shtykov to go over it with the chief of staff and Vasiliev; Shtykov declined, saying only that he could look in at Vasiliev's.

Kim wanted to move at the end of June. He gave two reasons: the South might detect the North's intentions and strengthen its army; and July might bring rain, in which case the offensive would have to wait until September.

"Might bring rain" was a decision-maker's estimate of the weather. It cannot be written as though we know which day the downpours came.

Kim was not a man who simply waited for others to nod. He was choosing the time and arranging the concentration of troops. He also said that he and Pak had agreed on political measures: first in the name of the Fatherland Front, then in the name of the government, they would propose peaceful unification to the South.

Shtykov's May 30 report sent these to Moscow together with the military preparations. In the same secret telegram, the political language the outside world would hear sat side by side with the action being arranged inside.

Kim said that, according to the chief of staff, concentration would take sixteen days, so troops would have to begin moving to their assembly areas between June 8 and 10. This was a plan, not a result; the actual dates of concentration must be checked against later reports.

Shtykov did not answer the timing question directly. It was a big matter, he said; first the military men must be asked how much preparation they needed, and then the political committee consulted. After the conversation he called in two generals, Vasiliev and Postnikov. At first they thought concentration and working out operations with division and regimental commanders would take a long time, making a June start unsuitable; but considering the July rains and possible Southern reinforcement once the plans were detected, they came to favor completing preparations and attacking at the end of June. Shtykov's own view: agree to the deadline.

Approval could not conjure supplies either. Kim asked the Soviet side to speed up delivery of medical supplies already ordered but not yet arrived, and to supply 10,000 to 15,000 tons of fuel in June and July; gasoline for motor vehicles, he stressed, was in a serious crisis. A war needs not only tanks that drive forward, but fuel to keep the vehicles moving and medicine to treat the wounded.

On May 31, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko replied—received at 22:30, dispatched at 23:55—with only one essential sentence: the superior (Stalin) agrees with your proposals, and deliveries of medical supplies and fuel will be accelerated.

From the late-January "willing to receive him" to this point, the telegrams had entered a new stage. The question was no longer whether unification could be discussed, but, around an army about to march, when it would be ready and how to make up what it lacked.

VI. "Counterattack"

On June 25, the Korean People's Army attacked southward.

The next day, Shtykov's report to the Soviet military leadership described the preparations in concrete terms: troops concentrated from June 12 to 23 and were ready on the 24th, after which commanders were given the time of action. The report also mentioned that Soviet advisers had taken part in planning and reconnaissance.

The same report recorded the political explanation the Korean side issued to the troops: the South had crossed the 38th parallel, and the North was counterattacking.

Being written into a military order does not make it the starting point of events. The concentration, deployment, and offensive preparations listed in this internal report already collide with "a sudden forced counterattack."

Even the first day of execution did not follow the plan. Shtykov reported that communications had failed, so the general staff could not command the front effectively; Southern forces were resisting, and the expected mass surrenders did not happen.

Once promises, estimates, and orders reached the battlefield, they ran into the enemy's actions, and their own mistakes.

VII. Washington's List

While Moscow and Pyongyang were preparing, Washington had spoken too.

On January 12, Secretary of State Dean Acheson discussed Asian policy. When he listed the American defense perimeter in the Pacific, he did not include Korea.

Later, this passage was often lifted out on its own, as though it were a guarantee that "America would not care if Korea were attacked."

But the same speech also discussed continued aid to South Korea; for areas outside the perimeter that came under attack, it spoke first of resistance by the people attacked, then of responsibilities under the United Nations Charter. It gave no simple, unconditional commitment to send troops, nor did it ever say "a war in Korea has nothing to do with the United States."

Letting a geographic list stand in for the whole speech turns an ambiguous policy into a definite answer that never existed.

Nor are several Soviet telegrams enough to conclude that this speech determined Stalin's choice. What can be seen is several threads tangled together: Korea pressed again and again, the Soviet Union supplied conditions step by step, Beijing demanded confirmation, and military preparations kept moving forward.

No single sentence can be kept as the master switch for the whole machine.

On June 27, Harry Truman announced that he had ordered American air and naval forces to cover and support South Korean troops. He interpreted the North's attack as communism moving from subversion to armed aggression, and at the same time announced related action by the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait.

That was the US government's judgment; it cannot directly prove a common motive shared by all communist states. But American military intervention had become a fact that had to be faced.

VIII. After the Green Light

The meeting Kim had pressed for in January led, in the end, to war.

Along the way there was no shortage of conditions, doubts, and unfinished tasks. One by one they were written into secret telegrams, and one by one the preparations pushed them toward action. The so-called "green light" was never an isolated moment: someone sought permission, someone supplied weapons, someone demanded verification, and someone believed the risks could be managed.

Yet once the fighting began, how the enemy would respond was no longer for those who approved it to decide.

By the June telegrams, the questions had changed: why communications had broken down, why resistance continued, why the Americans had come.

These questions were not settled along with the order to attack. The reminder once written into the reply—do not take too great a risk—only now began to show its true weight.

IX. Archives in Dialogue: Agreement, Conflict, Unknowns

Agreement: Stalin's January 30 telegram attached to Shtykov's January 31 report, the reply transmitted by Vyshinsky on May 14, Shtykov's May 30 telegram, and Gromyko's May 31 reply (all from published English translations) lie on a single line: Moscow agreed, but with conditions, and required Beijing's assent.

Conflict: Acheson's January 12 speech, later often taken as a signal that "America would not care," also discussed aid to South Korea and UN responsibilities; no provable causal line connects it to the Soviet telegrams.

Unknowns: this article has not obtained contemporary Chinese originals of Mao's reply; Beijing's position is known only through the Soviet embassy's account. Original internal North Korean decision documents were not obtained either. The Soviet telegrams are English translations of one country's material, not second-country evidence; this article's two-country threshold is met by contemporary American public texts together with the Soviet telegrams. This is where the difficulty of historical research lies.

Sources and Archives in Dialogue

1. Soviet contemporary evidence: Shtykov's January 31, 1950 report of his January 30 conversation and Stalin's message, published English translation, National Security Archive: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB14/doc7.htm . The translation was examined, not the Russian original. The publication gives AVPRF, fond 059a, opis 5a, delo 3, papka 11, listy 92–93; incomplete APRF identification is not supplemented with an invented reference. 2. Soviet documents edited by Kathryn Weathersby, CWIHP Bulletin 6–7 (1995–1996), printed pp.36–40, documents 1, 2, 5–10, 13, 14: expansion and credit, March equipment and travel arrangements, preparation for the Beijing visit, and the June 26 report on offensive preparation and the first day. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/CWIHP_Bulletin_6-7.pdf . The June 26 report belongs to a group of Soviet military records obtained by the BBC in 1994 according to the publication; no archival shelf mark is invented here. 3. Roshchin's May 13 report and Vyshinsky's May 14 transmission of Stalin's message for Mao, CWIHP Bulletin 4 (1994), printed p.61, published English translations: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/CWIHP_Bulletin_4.pdf . The publication identifies APRF without a complete archival reference. The Beijing exchange is a Soviet diplomatic reporting chain, not independently acquired contemporary Chinese evidence. 4. Shtykov's May 30 report of his May 29 meeting and Gromyko's May 31 reply, “Russian Documents on the Korean War, 1950–53,” CWIHP Bulletin 14/15 (2003/2004), documents 1–2, printed pp.372–373, translated by Vladislav Zubok: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/e-cold_war_crises.pdf . These published English translations were read; original images and full Russian texts were not examined. 5. Independently generated American contemporary records: Dean Acheson, “Crisis in Asia—An Examination of U.S. Policy,” January 12, 1950, Department of State Bulletin, Vol. XXII, No.551, January 23, pp.111–118; English transcription: https://worldjpn.net/documents/texts/docs/19500112.S1E.html . Its metadata gives New York as the speech's location, conflicting with the customary identification of Washington's National Press Club; no geographical index is built from that metadata. Truman's June 27 public statement, official transcription: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/173/statement-president-situation-korea . The two independently generating countries are the USSR and United States. Neither the UN nor China as described in Soviet reports is counted as another country-source. 6. Agreement: Soviet records connect reception, material assistance, verification in Beijing, and preparation for late-June action; the June report supports the existence of an advance offensive plan. Conflict: the political description of a counterattack clashes with advance preparations described in the same internal report. Unknowns: complete Moscow meeting records and independent contemporary Chinese records of the relevant discussions were not obtained. The documents do not recover everyone's full motives or establish Acheson's speech as a single determining cause. 7. Editorial and rights boundaries: this is an original narrative based on documented actions. No rooms, weather, expressions, thoughts, or unrecorded dialogue have been invented. Assessments retain their authorship. Modern archive publications and translations are not treated wholesale as public-domain texts: their factual content is paraphrased, protected long passages are not reproduced, and the source PDFs are not attached for public redistribution.