SEOUL, South Korea — The United States ambassador to South Korea, Mark W. Lippert, was attacked Thursday morning by a knife-wielding man who said he opposed joint American-South Korean military exercises, according to the South Korean police and journalists who were at the scene.
Mr. Lippert was in stable condition after undergoing surgery for knife wounds on his face and left arm, said Robert W. Ogburn, minister-counselor for public affairs at the American Embassy. The ambassador suffered a four-inch cut on the right side of his face, which required 80 stitches, as well as stab wounds to his left arm and hand, which he appeared to have received while resisting the attack, said doctors at Yonsei University’s Severance Hospital in Seoul.
The injuries were not life-threatening, but it will take several months for Mr. Lippert to recover the full functions of all his injured fingers, the doctors said during a news conference.
“Doing well & in great spirits!” Mr. Lippert said in a Twitter message Thursday. “Will be back ASAP to advance US-ROK alliance,” referring to the Republic of Korea by its initials.
The South Korean media treated the unprecedented attack on the envoy of the country’s No. 1 ally as top news, carrying video footage and photos of the bloodstained Mr. Lippert being rushed to the hospital. He was covering the injury with his hand, and his shirt and pink necktie were spattered with blood.
Before he was taken away, the attacker, who identified himself as Kim Ki-jong, told reporters that he had attacked Mr. Lippert to protest the annual joint military exercises that the United States started this week with South Korea.
Some left-leaning activists in South Korea have criticized the exercises, saying that they raise tensions with North Korea and hamper efforts to build reconciliation on the divided Korean Peninsula. North Korea also condemned the exercises as a rehearsal for invasion, though both Washington and Seoul said the drills were defensive in nature.
Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said, “We strongly condemn this act of violence,” adding that the embassy in Seoul was “coordinating with local law enforcement authorities.”
Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for talks on the emerging Iran deal, said that he had spoken to Mr. Lippert. “He’s good as can be expected, his spirit is strong,” Mr. Kerry said Thursday morning. “He tends to soldier on, or as he said to me, sailor on.”
President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, who was visiting the United Arab Emirates, called the incident an “intolerable attack on the South Korean-United States alliance,” and she ordered a thorough investigation and beefed-up security for foreign envoys in Seoul.
The South Korean police said the attack occurred about 7:40 a.m. on Thursday, shortly after Mr. Lippert arrived at a restaurant attached to Sejong Center, a performance hall across from the American Embassy in the center of Seoul. He was scheduled to deliver a speech at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, a local group.
“He sat at the head table and was exchanging name cards when a man approached the ambassador and toppled him and attacked him in the face with a knife,” said one of the South Korean reporters at the scene, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his paper’s regulations on giving information to other news organizations.
Yoon Myeong-song, head of the Jongno Police Station in central Seoul, said Mr. Kim used a knife 25 centimeters long, or about 10 inches, in the attack on Mr. Lippert.
After an urgent meeting of vice ministers, the South Korean government on Thursday vowed a “stern punishment” for officials who failed to protect Mr. Lippert. But Mr. Yoon said the police did not check the people entering the breakfast meeting because the embassy did not request it. “We had received no request from the embassy for bodyguard service,” he told reporters.
He added that the police had taken their own security measure in deploying 28 officers around the restaurant. Some of those officers joined participants of the breakfast meeting in subduing the attacker, Mr. Yoon said.
He said Mr. Kim did not seem to have an accomplice.
Mr. Lippert, an expert on Asia policy, was named ambassador to South Korea in 2014 after spending years working for President Obama on the National Security Council and at the Defense Department. Just before moving to the State Department, he was chief of staff to Chuck Hagel, then the defense secretary.
A graduate of Stanford, Mr. Lippert has a long association with the president and was a foreign policy adviser when Mr. Obama was in the Senate. He served in the Navy and received a Bronze Star for service in Iraq.
Mr. Kim, 55, was described as a professed nationalist who ran a small activist group called Urimadang and was arrested in 2010 for hurling two pieces of concrete at the Japanese ambassador to protest Tokyo’s territorial claim to a set of South Korean-held islets.
“I kept my distance because I didn’t like his anti-Americanism,” said Kim Ky-baek, a fellow nationalist.
Radical South Korean activists often “view the United States as a colonial power unjustly subjugating South Korea with U.S. troops presence,” said Prof. Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, near Boston. They harbor deep grievances toward the United States and the former Soviet Union for dividing Korea into the pro-American South and the Communist North at the end of World War II and insist that the American military presence hampers the reunification of the two Koreas.
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