North Korea Undercover (20 page)

Suddenly, she received a hint that he was alive, after all that time. ‘Her hope was relit. Then,’ said Izidor with immense melancholy, ‘she got a death certificate.’

He also told me about the tragedy of Doina Bumbea, a beautiful Romanian artist who vanished off the face of the earth in 1978. (See
Chapter 17
: ‘The American Who Went to North Korea and Stayed’.)

How long does Izidor think the regime will last? ‘Thirty, forty, fifty years . . .’

I said my goodbyes to Izidor and Emilia and returned to the city centre. At the heart of Bucharest is the square in front of the old Central Committee building, where Ceausescu made his last, stumbling speech before his helicopter took him away. On Christmas Eve night, 1989, the square was littered with tanks and armoured cars, residue of the battle that day. The old Royal Palace
was a pockmarked ruin; every building had its bullet acne, and some had been blasted into rubble. Here and there flames still licked at windows; roofs glowed a dull red. Despite the gunfire, people seethed around, shouting, singing snatches of songs. Small bonfires illuminated their faces, some black with dirt, others the colour of whey, all exhausted. Shards of glass and spent bullet cases crackled underfoot.

The songs died and the crowd flattened when an army gunner started blasting away pointlessly from a window inside the Central Committee building. There was no answering fire. The sniper he was furiously exterminating existed only inside his head. A student came up to me: ‘You must understand what a mind-fuck Ceausescu has been for us.’

On Christmas morning I went looting in the Central Committee building itself. The windows had been shot to pieces; the floor was peppered with spent bullets, broken glass, fallen masonry. In one room was a stack of photograph albums, including one picture of a man in a Mao suit and Ceausescu. I ripped it out of the album and stuffed it in my coat. The man in the Mao suit, I now realize, was Kim Il Sung.
²

After the shooting of the Ceausescus, the palace bodyguard in Pyongyang was increased from 4,000 men to 70,000.
³

¹
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd3H9X-Y12k

²
Sweeney:
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu
, p8.

³
Martin, p547.

13

The Washing of Brains

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ is the opening sentence of the novel that prefigured the horrors of North Korea, George Orwell’s
1984.
But even the Old Etonian seer would have been surprised, I expect, by the weird hollowness of the life of the mind, North Korean-style.

The Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages is no ordinary college. As always, we had a local guide who showed us that the foreign language institute had been created under the wise guidance of Kim . . . blah-blah-blah. The KITC video has a jaunty middle-of-the-road jazz number playing as our party wanders around the university. The video shows a great slab on a wall where Kim Jong I’ls giant ideogram hangs – dated ‘2009.12.17’, showing that only twelve years after Juche Time was established, it had been abandoned by the regime propaganda functionaries. They show us pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, empty corridors, emptier classrooms, a huge room where students might sit at the desks, listening to tapes whirring away of ‘The cat in the
hat... ’ or whatever, entirely vacant. Something is missing. This is a university with no students.

Where are the students? They are at a meeting, said Miss Jun. All of them? Yes, she said. This may well have been entirely true. It’s apparently quite common for the regime to demand 100 per cent presence of all students at a rally or even the rehearsal of a rally, and nothing takes precedence over obeisance to the state. ‘Sorry, I’ve got an essay to write . . .’ is not a functioning excuse in the DPRK.

They showed us an intranet computer terminal which was linked to a library catalogue, of sorts. On the KITC video, you can clearly hear me ask for a book by ‘George Orwell . . .
Animal Farm
?’ To my intense disappointment, they had Orwell’s great satire on Stalinism. Or, correction, the book showed up on the electronic menu. I never saw a hard copy of it. The computer may have been lying. But it’s entirely possible that they do have
Animal Farm
in a North Korean university, but only because its true nature – to my mind, the greatest satire ever written – has somehow escaped the clod-ears of the regime’s censors. If so, raise a glass to Orwell’s memory. In fact, do that anyway.

The tour of empty spaces continued. In the corner of one room was a stack of simple learn-to-read magazines, heavily thumbed. Knowing North Korea, one wondered whether any of the fancy computer terminals and voice-booths actually worked, or whether the foreign language students had to learn most of their English the old-fashioned way. As there were no students around, we could hardly ask them.

One reason for the absence of students may have been because the Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages is a spy school. Its most famous alumnus is, according to US Congressional testimony,
Kim Hyun Hee.
¹
Her claim to fame – and that of her school-cum-university – is mass murder. The victims were 115 innocent people, mostly South Koreans, the passengers and crew of Korean Air Flight 858, which blew up mid-air on 29 November 1987. Kim and her fellow agent had planted the bomb, then got off at its first stopover at Abu Dhabi. The two agents were tracked down to Bahrain; Kim’s partner dutifully killed himself by smoking a cyanide-laced cigarette but Kim failed to puff hard enough on her suicide smoke. She was arrested and detained. In her memoir,
The Tears of My Soul
, she records what happened next: ‘I was thrown onto abed and handcuffed to the frame. A moment later a middle-aged Caucasian couple entered the room. Both had blond hair and blue eyes, and they looked at me curiously, but without malice.’ They were a British couple, Ian Henderson, the Chief of Police in Bahrain, and his wife, Maria. Kim recalls Maria telling her: ‘It’s going to be all right, dear . . . Don’t worry about a thing.’
²

And so Kim Hyun Hee’s de-brainwashing commenced. The story is as grim as anyone could possibly imagine: a beautiful, gifted young woman, fluent in Japanese, good at English, trained to commit mass murder by the North Korean state. Hand-picked because of her talent at the foreign languages university, she was sent to a secret terrorist-training base in the mountains, and was then shipped halfway around the world to blow up her fellow Koreans. Kim Jong Il’s logic was that such an outrage would
frighten foreigners from coming to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Far from it; such was the world’s disgust at the bomb that all talk of boycotting the games by the Communist world ’ in 1988, at the very fag-end of its existence – stopped. Kim Hyun Hee was sentenced to death, but subsequently pardoned and served a relatively short time behind bars. She emerged from prison a chastened woman, and her book is a convincing account of someone who was effectively a victim of mental enslavement, a killing machine with no real idea of what she was doing to her fellow human beings when she planted the bomb.

At a press conference in 1990, she expressed deep remorse: ‘Being a culprit I do have a sense of agony with which I must fight. In that sense I must still be a prisoner or a captive – of a sense of guilt.’ She now lives in a safe house somewhere in South Korea, constantly guarded, for fear of revenge from her victims’ families, or, perhaps, more likely, from the North Korean regime, which has reportedly branded her a traitor.

In the twenty-first century, the Spy School/University of Foreign Languages has been keeping up the good work, with some of its students selling North Korean arms and nuclear materials on the international black market, according to an anonymous defector in 2010.
Chosun Ilbo
, the South Korean newspaper, reported that international sanctions against North Korea had made it difficult to export weapons in the ordinary way. The defector, who was under police protection and did not want his identity to be revealed, fearing reprisal attacks against family members still in the North, said that the black operation is run by ‘traders’ from the ‘Surveillance Division of the People’s Armed Forces’ – one of the DPRK’s myriad spy agencies – fluent in English and Chinese after studying at Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages.

The scam works like this: North Korea sends containers across the Yalu river to China, one third or half filled with weapons, missile components or technical equipment for higher-grade nuclear enrichment. The client, more often than not, is the research centre of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. As you may imagine, this trade is very black indeed. The ‘traders’ use their language skills in English and Chinese to broker deals with bent shipping agents in ports outside North Korea – presumably in China. The shipping agents or ‘forwarders’ fill up the rest of the container with innocent machine parts or whatever, own the paperwork, and all trace of the true origin of the black goods has vanished. The defector explained that these ‘laundered’ containers are relaundered in Hong Kong, Singapore or other ports. ‘The containers are mixed with other cargo in those transit points. They are searched, but not thoroughly,’ the defector added. ‘Even if customs or other officials roll their sleeves up and search for weapons, how can they possibly find the arms among the mountains of other containers headed to other countries?’
³

None of this was mentioned on our guided tour.

Off we went across town, to the Grand People’s Study House, a giant pagoda affair right next to Kim Il Sung Square. In our world, you might call the Study House the national library, but a clue to the real theme of the place was soon evident: an enormous marble statue of Kim Il Sung in a Mao suit, sitting down in an armchair, hewn out of rock, a newspaper in his hand. Behind him are mountain peaks, pink-tipped at dawn, with a sugar coating of snow. After a while you learn to date the propaganda from the
clothes the Kims wear. Kim Il Sung sports Soviet Commissar chic in the 1940s and early 1950s, shifting to Mao suits in the 1960s as the rupture with the de-Stalinizing Soviet Union was at its height. Mao suits may have become a tad unfashionable during the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards were taunting Kim Il Sung as ‘a fat revisionist’, but were back in fashion for most of the 1970s. However, the end of Maoism and China’s slide – or ascent – to free market economics means that by the start of the 1980s Kim Il Sung throws away his Mao clobber and starts wearing a proper suit. When Kim Jong Il pops up in the propaganda statuary a few years later, he’s down and dirty in the Mao suit, while his father looks more the conventional statesman in the classic CEO business suit. So I would place this statue of Kim Il Sung in Maoist garb no later than the 1980s, and perhaps a decade earlier.

They told us that the Grand People’s Study House was home to 30 million books. There were stacks of books around, but nothing approaching a fraction of that number. Down a corridor, Kims Major and Minor smiled down from the wall underneath a flickering fluorescent light. The walkway opened up into a chasm, lit by a dim-watted chandelier but the temperature was freezing. I wore my coat throughout. We were taken to a strange place, like the area in an Argos store where you sit and wait, and wait and wait, for the goods you’ve ordered. You file a request on an intranet computer. I asked for Solzhenitsyn. Nope. Did they, by any chance, have a copy of George Orwell’s
1984?
No joy. Instead, a miniature metal sleigh shot out from a mouse-hole kind of orifice in a wall bearing three books. One couldn’t help wondering whether there really were 30 million books in there, or just one man sitting behind a wall with three books, who gave the sleigh a push every time Western visitors popped into the Grand Study House.

The three books that whizzed down the ramp were:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, something so boring I can’t recall and
Discovering Food and Nutrition
, which is funny because North Korea’s stand-out event in the last twenty years, apart from three nuclear tests, is famine.

They showed us a reading room, full of ordinary North Koreans toiling over books. Were they for real? Or just for show? No one looked up as our chattering party of thirteen foreign weirdos, half of us filming everything that moved, and Alex continually filming me, wandered in and made our on-the-spot inspection. And that is extremely peculiar.

While investigating Scientology in 2007, our
Panorama
crew were given a tour of the Church complex on L Ron Hubbard Way in Los Angeles. I darted through the front door a split second in front of our minders, Tom Cruise lookalike Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder, who has since got out. What I saw was a whole room full of people, poised in stop-motion. Suddenly there was an unseen signal, and everybody started to walk purposefully crossways, just as they do in the Church’s surreally unreal promotional videos. In another room they showed us a grown man playing with plasticine. Mr Hubbard worked out, said Tommy, that playing with clay figures helps Scientologists.

The man lumped his figures into a ball, and then rolled out his clay.

In one long room there were dozens of people, bent over their studies or playing with clay, none of whom paid any attention whatsoever to the two agents, the reporter, the four separate people behind cameras and the sound person with a very long boom. And that is weird. It is a simple constant of working for TV, everywhere on the planet, that people come up to you and say, ‘What are you filming?’
and ‘What’s it for?’ and ‘When does it go out?’ and ‘Hello, Mum.’ When people not only don’t do that, but do the opposite and entirely ignore the cameras, one can reasonably deduce that they have been commanded to behave in that peculiar way, beforehand. It was like wandering around inside the set of
The Truman Show.
The reading room of the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang felt every bit as true to life as the Church of Scientologyon L Ron Hubbard Way, and that is not a compliment in this or any other galaxy.