Many people know my byline from a series of stories I wrote in 1996 about the U.S. role in South Korea in 1979 and 1980. Published in The Journal of Commerce and Sisa Journal, my articles established for the first time that the United States played a significant background advisory role in the violent 1980 military crackdown that triggered the May 18 citizens’ uprising in the city of Kwangju – a turning point in the Korean democratic revolution.

My work on those stories grew out of my experience living in South Korea during the early 1960s and were based on more than 3,500 documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. The originals of my documents are now stored at the Gwangju City Archives. I will soon be adding a section here where those documents can be downloaded. Here are key links to my stories and archives on Gwangju, as posted on my personal website, MONEY DOESN’T TALK/IT SWEARS.

— “THE CHEROKEE FILES — KWANGJU: TURNING POINT IN THE COLD WAR IN ASIA,” my original story on the FOIA documents published by Sisa Journal (now Sisa-In) in February 1996.

— “EX-LEADERS GO ON TRIAL IN SEOUL,” my original story from the Journal of Commerce, Feb. 27, 1996.

— Kwangju Declassified/PDFs of key documents I obtained about Gwangju under FOIA.

— In May 2015, I was given an honorary citizenship in the City of Gwangju for uncovering the truth behind the US role in the 1980 uprising. Here’s what I wrote about it in The Nation.

— Kim Dae Jung: In 1985, while he was under house arrest and a decade before he was elected South Korea’s president, I interviewed Kim Dae Jung for The Progressive. It was the only time Kim ever publicly discussed the US role in Gwangju. “The Kwangju people kept order; paratroopers broke order,” he said. “You should have criticized the paratroopers’ side, not the Kwangju people’s side. Your attitude was not just, not fair.”