North Korea Undercover (14 page)

‘The military leadership is announcing from this moment that mainland America, Hawaii, and US military bases in the Pacific rim, South Korea and the surrounding area are being targeted. Our troops and long-range rockets are being prepared for war.’

That very morning we were going into the DMZ, which President Bill Clinton once called ‘the scariest place on earth’. The DMZ is certainly the mostbadly named place on earth, because it bristles with soldiery, landmines, barbed, wire and machine-gun
nests. From further back, the North Koreans have chemical and nuclear weapons targeted at Seoul, ready to rain down a ‘sea of fire’; the South Koreans rely on the American nuclear umbrella.

In the old days, the North Koreans could just have hit Seoul very hard – a tragedy for South Korea, but a local disaster, not a planetwide one. What is different now in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that North Korea has got serious missiles and nuclear bombs. Some missiles fizzle out and go pop shortly after launch, to the embarrassment of the dynasty and the relief of the rest of the world; but they have succeeded in lobbing a missile over Japan, which fell into the sea on the far sideof the island nation. This is very bad news.

North Korean propaganda has put out a graphic of deadly missile fire raining down on Washington DC, Texas, Los Angeles and Hawaii. The voiceover spouts: ‘If we compare it to body parts, the Washington missile is to take out the eyes and ears that monitor the world in one strike.’

We didn’t see masses of military traffic on the road down to the DMZ; a few lorries and jeeps, that was all. The land is barren, denuded of trees, because they were chopped down for firewood or even, during the famine, for bark to eat. It’s the least green country side I’ve ever seen outside of the Sahara. Big puddles walled by low cliffs of mud lined the road; in the summer they would be rice paddies; further off, dead fields stretched away to the horizon. It was late March, and there wasn’t that much agricultural work being done, but what we could see from our coach was being carried outby hand. Every now and then we would see an ox pulling a plough. Tractors were a rarity. By the side of the road, peasants carried enormous, ballooning bags of firewood or other
goods on their back. It was like driving through a film-set for the Middle Ages.

Modernity did intrude, though. On high escarpments we could make out the black fingers of anti-aircraft guns poking at the sky. Every five miles or so, and especially where the highway was channelled between high rocks either side, two twin concrete pillars faced each other, ashigh as a two-storey house, their bases conspicuously thinner than the bulk of the block. They were tank traps, so constructed that just a small fag packet of TNT would bring the concrete pillars crashing down, blocking the road. The road south to the DMZ is, of course, also the obvious route any invading force would take north. The twin pillars reminded me a little of the Two Kings in the
Lord of the Rings
film trilogy, warning travellers to turn back, before it was too late. We pressed on.

The coach slowed to a stop at a checkpoint. Generally, our coach would whizz through any official stop point, while ordinary folk had to go through the hoops, but today things seemed a little edgier. The checkpoints weren’t much: a concrete booth at the side of the road, a chain across the tarmac; in one case, just a line of small rocks. Mr Hyun called out: ‘No photos, no photos.’ The soldiers at the checkpoints seemed jumpy, and that edginess communicated itself to Mr Hyun. As the coach accelerated away, one of the students at the back took a sneak shot of the soldiers. At the next checkpoint, trouble. The soldiers at the last checkpoint had radioed a head to the next one, and when we turned up Mr Hyungot an earful. He went straight to Alex – not the culprit – grabbed him by the cuff and dragged him off the coach, and demanded he delete everything he had filmed.

Alex fiddled with his camera, selecting the‘stills’ memory, and deleted a couple of boring shots of the countryside. Mr Hyun came
back on to the bus, breathed a bit more fire, and then we were on our way again. To me, it felt like Mr Hyun was acting out a role, but then it wasn’t my collar that was felt.

The start of the DMZ proper was marked by an electrified fence, and past that a small lip in the road. To left and right we could see a concrete wall, not much higher than a man, and beyond that a depression or a waterless moat affair, making the job of the invader that bit tougher – if, of course, the invader was foolish enough to come through the front door, exactly as the defender expected. Edged around the moat was a decoration of barbed wire, the old-fashioned kind that you rarely see in the West, apart from at remote Welsh hill farms.

We passed two ox-carts while Mr Hyun announced that we were now approaching ‘the DMZee’ – he instantly corrected his American pronunciation into the Queens English, ‘the DMZed’ but we noticed all right. The coach slowed underneath a concrete block suspended above the road, another tank trap, and parked outside a building with the feel of a bad motorway service station from the 1960s. Inside was a lecture room, complete with photographs of the Kims, Major and Minor, and a map of the DMZ. Our host was the colonel in charge of the DMZ that day, a jolly chap in a too-large hat who didn’t seem to have a care in the world. If thermo-nuclear war was about to happen, this guy would most likely be dead in the first five minutes.

On foot now, we walked to the southern most tip of North Korea. Just before we got there, we passed a shrine to Kim Il Sung, on which the Great Leader’s wisdom was scrawled in giant Korean ideograms on a fat slab of marble. It clearly says: ‘1994.7.7.’Did the Great Leader get the wrong date? No, Juche Time didn’t come in until three years later. But no one had bothered to retrospectively
correct the generals old-fashioned use of the Western calendar.

Miss Jun addressed us urgently: ‘This area is a battlefront, be careful all the time. Don’t use your camera.’

This was, of course, rubbish. The DMZ was far quieter than, say, Hyde Park, although it was the only place I heard birdsong in our whole stay in North Korea.‘Landmines are great for biodiversity,’ a lunatic collecting butterflies for London’s Natural History Museum in the middle of a minefield in Angola once told me.
¹
I suspected the birds were South Korean, peering in at the misery of the North.

Bang on the DMZ crossing point – where no one crosses – you look down on three blue huts. On the other side, you can see the South Korean base, a fancy pagoda affair dripping with CCTV cameras. They filmed us. We filmed them, etc., etc. Not a soul was to be seen on the other side. Normally, South Korean guards strut their stuff, while North Koreans do likewise. Occasionally, American troops join the face-off. Today, no one was in sight, apart from a small coachload of students and a fake history professor. What the American and South Korean military made of our posturing in front of their cameras, who knows? The North Korean colonel happily posed for pictures with all of us: ‘Thermonuclear cheese!’

No better opportunity to find out what the prospects were of us being so much burnt toast. ‘At the moment,’ I asked the North Korean colonel,‘this is a war of words. Do you think there will be a shooting war?’

The colonel replied: ‘There is no shooting so you can’t say this is
a war. I don’t know if war will break out. Whether there is a war depends on the Americans.’

There was something about my grey beard which the colonel liked. Leastways, as the coach took us away from the very front line to a small museum where the original Armistice agreement is kept, he came and sat next to me. I was keen for Alex to shoot this cosy scene: proof, if proof were needed, that despite the official propaganda the North Korean officer in charge of the DMZ that day could not have been more relaxed. But Alex was so spooked by Mr Hyun back at the checkpoint that he didn’t take the snaps.

In the museum proper, the colonel picked my brains about the prospect of war. I tried to think of a diplomatic formula for telling him ‘I don’t thinkall-out war is that likely because your regime is full of shit’. What I actually said was: ‘In Britain, we’re less afraid because we’re further away.’ For some reason, Miss Jun translated that as: ‘He wants to leave now because he is afraid war might break out,’ to which the colonel slapped me affectionately on the back and, laughing, said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’

The new leader’s photograph was hanging inpride of place in the Armistice museum: Kim Jong Un gripping a pair of binoculars with black gloves, scowling at the unseen enemy, while elderly North Korean generals in Sovietische hats too big for them looked on nervously. Of all the fingers on nuclear triggers, Obama’s, Putin’s, Cameron’s, the leaders of China, France, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s are the most immature. In a society like North Korea, moulded by Confucianism, which venerates the wisdom of the old, and where the last two leaders were in office until they were very old men, Kim Jong Un’s youth is a negative.

Journalism, or at least the glamorous end of journalism, is about
breaking news, best intoned in a basso profundo with aticker running along the bottom of the television screen reinforcing the message. But perhaps the more interestingbit of the job is – so long as your evidence is strong – telling power and money: what you say is nottrue. Kim Jong Un had been screaming thermo-nuclear threats at the outside world through the loudhailer of the North Korean propaganda machine. When
Panorama
broadcast the colonel’s ‘Don’t worry about it’, that may have pricked Fat Boy Kim’s balloon.

Perhaps Kim Jong Un was talking up the threat to make himself look good in the eyes, not of his people – they don’t matter to him – but hisgenerals. ‘Behold, I am a man the West should be afraid of.’ But only a fool plays around with the ideaof making nuclear war a reality. And that is not good for the peace of the world.

After we left Pyongyang, we flew to London, and then after a few days flew almost all the way back, this time to South Korea. There, I met Professor Myers, whoselife’s work is to study the mind-set of the North Korean regime. Did he think war likely? Myers said that the regimedidn’t want war but it might happen by miscalculation. I asked him to talk me through a possible pathway to such an event.

‘It would be very easy actually. All it needsis for the North Koreans to launch another attack along the lines of the ones that they launched in 2010.’

In that year, the North Koreans shelled an island indisputed waters in the Yellow Sea, not far from the crumbling barrage we visited, killing two South Korean farmers and two soldiers. A South Korean frigate in international waters but not far from the disputed islands sank – and the only credible explanation for
the sinking was that a North Korean torpedo was responsible. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed.

Myers continued: ‘If they were to sink another South Korean ship or attack one of those islands in the Yellow Sea again the South Korean administration this timewould probably respond with more force than it did in 2010. Now, being a “military-first” state, North Korea cannot simply let even a small military defeat ride. If that defeat becomes known to the North Korean public as a whole ... the regime has to fight back, it has to raise the ante and come out of it with some kind of victory. So I do see that kind of a situation escalating quite quickly into war.’

In trying to calibrate the likelihood of a war, and of that war becoming nuclear, one should never forget the stance of the South. From its formation in 1945 by the Americans to the late 1980s, it endured a series of deeply unpleasant dictatorships, with a thin and unconvincing glossof elections and a muzzled free press. From the Seoul Olympics in 1988 onwards, democracy in South Korea has flourished, as has the economy, which, at number eleven in the league table of the world’s richest nations, puts into shade the miserable ruin up north. The South puts up with its neighbour from hell with great patience. The question is: has that patience got a limit? The darker war games in the Pentagon look at the following scenario: that North Korea kills a number of South Koreans in an attack that Seoul believes must be responded to; that the South’s response triggers the North to launch an artillery strike on Seoul, including using its chemicalarsenal; and that forces the Americans’ hand, requiring them to launch their tactical nuclear weapons topush back, at which point the North Koreans push the big red button for full-scale thermo-nuclear war.

But not everyone who knows the North intimately believes the
regime’s martial posturing is for real. The North Korean People’s Liberation Front works out of the top floor of a ramshackle house in a run-down part of Seoul, but its members are North Korean defectors with military experience, and their best contacts are in the North Korean military too. When I met Jang Se Yul of the NKPLF he told me that he had spoken to a military source inthe North just three days before. What did your source say? I asked.

‘There will be no war,’ said Jang.

Why was your source so certain that there will be no war?

Jang made an important distinction: ‘We should separate the army into two different groups: the senior officers and the ordinary soldiers. The senior officers don’t want a war but the soldiers have been brainwashed. They are in a state of conflict. The senior officers are aware that this whole thing is a political show but the soldiers consider real war a possibility. Theofficers are used to this kind of situation.’

How strong is the internal position of Kim Jong Un?

‘The regime’s opposition who can actually act are very rare but there are quite a few supporters. The opposition who can act? Maybe five people, maybe two.’

He wasn’t specific, nor I suppose could he be.

‘But their supporters,’ he continued, ‘are a much bigger number, generally the wealthy. You’d think the poor would support the opposition, but surprisingly most of the opposition comes from the upper-middle class. The reason behind this is that they have more information.’

How do they know the truth?

‘There are many routes for information about the outside world. Forced labour’ – North Koreans who work abroad, some in
logging camps in Russia, often under miserable conditions for little money but far, far better than they know in the North – ‘traders, people who have to goabroad on diplomatic missions, anyone who goes to China. If an ordinary person gets to see or hear one piece of information about the outside world, then the rich in Pyongyang get to see or hear a great deal. And the restrictions on information for these people are less rigid compared to those for “normal people”.’