North Korea Undercover (24 page)

The caprice of the despot even extended to marriage guidance, of a kind.

In 1978, Choi Un Hee, a South Korean film actress of ravishing beauty, was lured to Hong Kong by a Chinese film executive. She was driven to Repulse Bay where there was a small white boat waiting on the beach. Suddenly, men leapt from the boat and grabbed Choi and forced her on board. The boat pushed off and headed for open sea. ‘Where is this boat going?’ she asked frantically. ‘Madame Choi, we are now going to the bosom of General Kim Il Sung.’
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It wasn’t the old man who greeted her when she landed in North Korea, but his son: ‘Thank you for coming, Madame Choi. I am Kim Jong Il.’ As if she had some choice in the matter ...

Shin Sang Ok, her South Korean ex-husband and a film director, heard about Choi’s disappearance. In Hong Kong he, too, was lured to Repulse Bay in a white Mercedes. The car stopped,
four men got in, threatened Shin at knifepoint, put a nylonbag entirely over him, and the goons headed off to sea with their human parcel. In the morning they transferred to a freighter, the
Sugun-Ho.
A few days later, two men in Mao tunics greeted him at Nampo, saying:‘Welcome to the Socialist Fatherland.’
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Neither Shin nor Choi knew what had happened to each other. Shin spent five years fighting his captors. He escaped for a few hours, only to be recaptured and thrown into Prison 6, where, half starved on thimblefuls of rice and grass, he endured endless indoctrination for four years. ‘Tasting bile all the time, I experienced the limits of human beings.’ Eventually, he realized that cunning would be the key to unlock his gaol, and went along with Kim Jong Il’s whims. He wrote reams of rubbish, praising the Dear Leader. ‘What a wretched fate,’ he recalled towards the very end of his life, ‘I hated communism, but I had to pretend to be devoted to it, to escape from this barren republic. It was lunacy.’
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Eventually, after banks of security screenings, he was taken to a plush villa in Pyongyang, and ended up face-to-face with his ex-wife, who had not known until that moment that he was in North Korea. The Dear Leader said: ‘Well, go ahead and hug each other. Why are you just standing there?’ The marriage counsellor from hell suggested that they remarry. Why? Who knows? They did as they were told.

From their accounts, Kim Jong Il was like the psychotic character in the novel
The Collector
by John Fowles, snatching human butterflies with his net andimprisoning them in a jar.

And yet Kim Jong Il does come across in their accounts as
weirdly charming. At that first dinner party in Pyongyang in March 1983, when Shin and Choi are reunited, the first thing Kim says to Shin is, ‘Director, forgive my “act”. I must apologize for this situation in which you have had to suffer so much,’ after which Kim takes his hand and shakes it. Shin writes, ‘I instinctively understood the implications behind Kim’s words, “Forgive my act”.’
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Shin doesn’t explain explicitly but he implies that his imprisonment and harsh treatment have been a front that Kim has had to put up to display his authority, to others and to Shin, especially as he had tried to escape several times. The next day, there was another party, and it was at this party that Kim told Shin that the whole show was ‘bogus. It’s just apretence.’ Shin writes that these two ‘blunt statements left a long lasting impression’.

After this night they do not see Kim for another few months, even though he has promised to meet soon after. Shin later finds out that it is because Kim had been on a trip to China. During this time Shin and Choi study North Korean, Chinese and Russian films. Shin notes that North Korean films combine songs and acting, much like operettas.

After a few months, they are invited to Kim the Second’s office, and before they start their talk, Kim switches on his TV to check what’s on. To Shinand Choi’s surprise, Kim is watching South Korean channels, and even notes that one star on a drama show is avery good actress. It is clear that he watches a lot of South Korean TV and films from around the world.

Shin and Choi were terrified that, if they ever made it back to South Korea, no one would ever believe them that they had been
kidnapped. This is long before the regime admitted to kidnapping thirteen Japanese citizens in 2002. So they secretly tape-recorded the Dear Leader, the device hidden in Choi’s handbag.

Shin writes: ‘First, once Kim Jong-Il opened his mouth he didn’t seem to know how to stop talking. He hardly allowed us any gaps to speak at all, and he kepton talking one-sidedly. While he spoke, when we tried to say something briefly, he quickly interrupted and carried on talking. His voice was loud and high, and he spoke very fast. There seemed to be so much that he wanted to talk about, that it seemed like he could not organize his words as he spoke, so he would stutter at the end of his sentences. When I tried to transcribe what Kim had said, not one sentence he spoke can be written as a complete sentence on paper. The subject noun is normally repeated two or three times; before one sentence is even complete he will rush into another sentence, when the point he was trying to make was not clear in the first place, and therewere many instances where the beginnings and ends of what he was trying to say did not connect or makesense.’

Shin transcribed word for word what Kim said. It’s fairly long-winded and ranting. He talks about why the recent North-South talks broke down, why he kidnapped Shin and Choi, the state of North Korean cinema, what’s wrong with it, how he wants to develop it and how he wants to take films to film festivals and even maybe set up a film festival in Pyongyang.

He comes across as bullish, the way he rants endlessly without letting Shin or Choi talk. He seems sly but naive at the same time. There does seem to be a lot going on in his mind, but it’s muddled and incoherent.

On tape, Kim Jong Il says:

Eh, the first thing in the North –South relations is the cultural exchange, cultural cooperation, that’s what I think. Already, people were goingback and forth on their own accord, and I asked whether there was a way for you .. .
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This is rubbish. No one goes back and forth between North and South Korea. The ‘cultural exchange’ happened by force. And Shin and Choi were not free to leave. Shin made seven films in North Korea, with Kim Jong Il his producer. The best, that is, least bad, is
Pulgasari
, about a giant metal-eating monster with a social conscience, similar to the Japanese
Godzilla.

Film journalist John Gorenfeld summarized the dramatic ending: ‘Pulgasari leads the farmers’ army in an assault on the king’s fortress – andagainst thousands of North Korean military troops who were mobilized and dressed up as extras. Ultimately, the kinguses his experimental anti-Pulgasari weapon, the lion gun. But the enterprising Pulgasari swallows the missile and shoots it back at his oppressors. Finally, the king is crushed beneath a huge falling column.’

But the monster starts eating the people’s tools. Gorenfeld, one of a thousand people outside North Korea who have seen the movie, carries on: ‘When the blacksmith’s daughter tearfully pleads with Pulgasari to “go on a diet”, he seems to find his conscience, and puzzlingly shatters into a million slow-motion rocks... It’s a terrifically bad movie.’
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Shin and Choi had a Mercedes, good food and a $3 million-a-year budget to make great films in the North. But they hated it.
Shin wrote: ‘Living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony.’ In 1986, eight years after being kidnapped, Shin and his wife went to a film event in Vienna. They gave their minders the slip and haretailed it for the American embassy in a taxi. A minder followed in another taxi, but they managed to lose him. Free at last, the film director and his wife had endured an episode far more exciting and incredible than anything in any of their movies.

Other eyewitness testimony speaks of Kim Jong Il’s subtlety and consideration, before mentioning his darker side. For example, Sung Hye Rang, Kim Twos former sister-in-law, writes:

He is a cultured man and respects knowledge .. . He enjoys beauty ... I think he has inherited some good points – generosity and a warm heart. He was always considerate and wanted to do well by others. His extreme, harsh personality makes him seem like a bad human being .. .
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In the same paragraph, two wildly different views of the same man are put forward in neighbouring sentences by someone who knew him well:‘considerate’ and ‘extreme, harsh’. The truth is that both are right: Kim Jong Il was like a malfunctioning television set, which, much of the time, would present a perfect picture, clear, sometimes even beautiful; and every now and then the set would flicker, then go ponk and you would see a forest of angry dots and hear a screech of white noise. Power magnifies faults or, as the old Swahili proverb has it: the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you can see its bottom. Mood changes, whims, paranoid
insecurity and absolute power are a bad mix. For people who had to work with him in the lower tiers of power, that mix would prove to be nightmarish.

No man is a hero to his valet. Ri Young Kuk was a palace bodyguard who managed to escape to the South. He recalls of his master:

He is generally impatient and sly. There’s more to him than his pleasant exterior. Inside, he is always scheming, making secret plans. And he is very clever about planning escape routes in case things go wrong. There are two sides to him, always. He is not a good listener ... He is extremely cruel toward those who disagree with him. Many people have lost their lives trying to point out their problems to him.
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A courtesan in the palace describes Kim as sensitive, preferring girls of classical beauty, never taller than him, and once he got to know the girls, happy to‘pass gas’ – to ‘break wind’ – in their company. How very attractive.

Not quite the Prince Charming was the view of some of Kim Two’s old military classmates, who in 1992 were accused of plotting against him. They reportedly said that he was ‘incapable’ and ‘bad-natured’, according to Ken E. Gause’sreport for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. They lost the fight and three hundred senior officers were executed. The sound of the firing squads at work disturbed the night outside one military barracks for a month. One should note that although Kim Il Sung died in 1994, by the turn of 1990 it seems likely that the old man’s powers
were waning, and that by 1992 Kim Jong Il felt secure enough to stage mass purges of his enemies, real or imagined. This 1992 plot is only one of an astonishing number of conspiracies against Kim Two, and an astonishing number of executions, cited by Gause.
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In 1995, officers in the Sixth Army Corps, based in the ever-suspect north-east, were found to have been plotting against the Party Centre – Kim Two – and they were executed too. In 1997, writes Gause, the regimes ‘Operation Intensification’targeted Korean Workers’ Party officials suspected of sabotaging food supplies. (The true cause of the famine, the folly of Kims One and Two, was not addressed.) This operation led ‘to the rounding up of more than 30,000 officials and their families, many of whom were incarcerated or executed. Top secret policeman Chae Mun Tok went to the firing squad.’
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In 1998, at the height of the famine, people stripped the Hwanghae Steelworks of machinery to sell and exchange for food: nineteen culprits were executed.

Jang Jin Seong was part of North Korea’s propaganda machine. He spent his working day writing syrup in verse about Bad Elvis, before he ran away in 2004.
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The poet met Kim Jong Il twice. The first time, in 1999, he was overwhelmed and full of emotion.‘But at the same time,’ he told the BBC, ‘I thought the image I had received of him – through brainwashing – was very different to how he appeared in person. He is a god-like figure. But when I met him I felthe was much more individualistic, even a bit selfish – and I was disappointed.’

Kim Two gave Jang a Rolex watch worth, he later worked out
when he defected to the South, about $11,000 or£7,000. Though the population was going hungry, said Jang, Kim was using gifts as a way of buying loyalty. Once in theroyal circle, Jang was protected, even from prosecution. He received the very best level of rations throughout the famine: ‘I realized North Korea was the poorest country in the world, presided over by the richest king – and that’s why I wrote poems that were critical of the regime while I was still there.’ He got away with it because he never committed them to paper.

Selling my daughter

A poem in Korean by Jang Jin Seong

The woman was paper-thin / A sign hung from her neck /

‘Selling my daughter for 100 won’ /With the little girl standing

next to her / The woman stood in the market place.

The woman was a mute / She gazes at her daughter /

Her maternal feelings are being sold / Cursed at by passers-by /

The woman stares only at the ground / The woman has no more tears.

Clutching her mother’s skirt / ‘My mother’s dying,’ cries the

daughter / The woman’s lips tremble / The woman knows no

gratitude / The soldier gave her 100 won, saying / ‘I’m not buying

your daughter, I’m buying your motherly love’ / The woman

grabs the money and runs off.

The woman is a mother / With the 100 won she received for the

sale of her daughter / She hurries back, carrying bread /

She shoves the bread into her daughter’s mouth /‘Forgive me,’ wails

the woman.

Jang Jin Seong poem; 100 won is roughly equivalent to 73 US cents or 47p.

When Jang met Kim Jong Il the second time it was shocking: ‘We sat at a performance together, and he kept on crying while he watched it. I felt his tears represented his yearning to become a human being, to become an ordinary person.’

One more palace witness is a Japanese wideboy-cum-sushi-chef adopted by their majesties, Kim Jong Il and son Kim Jong Il, as an all-licens’d royal fool. Kenji Fujimoto is a thuggish, drunken but somehow charming tough, who went drinking with the boss, Kim Jong Il, the night before he was to marry a hand-picked courtesan, and woke up with his pubic hair vanished, a practical joke by the palace. Fujimoto’s gift to posterity is a number of bow’n’tell books, ghost-written after he fled back to Japan, including
The Honorable General Who Loved Nuclear Weapons and Girls
and
Kim Jong Il’s Cook – I Saw His Nailed Body.