One event that always intrigued me about the life of Kim Dae-Jung was his release by the Korean CIA after their kidnap and torture of him in 1973, a release apparently forced on the Koreans by the US Government.  Such concern for the human rights of opposition dissidents in US-allied countries always struck me as very uncharacteristic of the brutal and cynical real-politic, bordering on madness,  of the Nixon-Kissinger White House, and I always wondered what prompted the concern on that particular occasion.  Now we learn from an op-ed article in the International Herald Tribune that Nixon and Kissinger knew little or nothing about the pressure their administration brought to bear on the repulsive Park regime to release Kim unharmed.  That pressure, which was intense and concerted, was the work of two brave US Government officials, State Department Korea expert Donald L. Ranard and then US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, Philip Habib.
Reference:
Donald A. Ranard [2009-08-25]:  Saving Kim Dae-jung.  International Herald Tribune, page 6.  For reasons known only to themselves, and as further evidence of the MSM’s failure to understand the 21st century, this article appears not to be in the New York Times online archive (at least, it is not accessible via its title, its author, or any of the people mentioned in it!) 
Postscript (added 2010-08-09):  Here is the article on the site of The Boston Globe.