North Korea Undercover (6 page)

In late March the cold in North Korea still bites, with
temperatures way below freezing inside the hotel. Those last three words are not a typo. Heat is not something to be wasted if you are not a member of the charmed circle of the Kim dynasty, and the Haebangsan, in the bottom tier of upmarket tourist establishments in the capital, was not somewhere the ruling class frequented. The Kims were on show, of course, Major and Minor in black suits looking downat us from an immense painting in the lobby, set against a backdrop of a silly pink dawn, handing out ‘on-the-spot guidance’ to all and sundry. Above the reception desk proper was a plywood cut-out map of the world, seemingly hand-crafted by five-year-olds. The lobby itself was fronted by large windows, providing a fair chunk of natural light. As we moved to the back to take the lift, the gloom deepened. The lights either did not workor someone had decided not to switch them on. I went for a pee. The men’s toilet was dank and dark, much of the floor covered in puddles of wet, cisterns gurgling incontinently. The last time I was in a hotel toilet that squalid was in the Congo, but no one there claimed that it shined a light for the rest of humanity to follow.

On the telly there was only one channel to pick. Througha very fuzzy picture, we could see Kim Jong Il doing his take on Elvis, sorry, giving ‘on-the-spotguidance’ or OTSG to some poor sods somewhere, nowhere, in the sticks. The voiceover was comic, a sub-hysterical woman announcer sobbing and quivering with emotion as she intoned something-something in Korean. You could tell that it wasn’t critical.

Outside our hotel room, scores of ant-like builders were constructing a building, 24/7: a new joint venture with a Chinese bank – a sign of the economy opening up? Or was it just a new channel for slush money, to keep the dynasty in cognac? The construction
site wasn’t that noisy, because they were prettymuch building the place by hand.

It crossed my mind, were the hotel rooms bugged? Breentells a story about two Danish engineers working on a project in North Korea, and complaining in their hotel room about how boring it all was. ‘If I’d known, I would have brought a pack of cards with me,’ one said. The next day at work, their minder presented them with a pack of cards. The creepy bit is that they had been talking in Danish.
¹⁰

Downstairs in the hotel bar, plastic toads of implacable creepiness sat immobile in a large smelly fish tank, empty of water and open at the top. On critical inspection one jumped, scaring the life out of us. It felt like the first real thing we had seen all day.

¹
Hyok Kang: This is Paradise!, Abacus, London, 2007.

²
Tiziano Terzani,
In Asia
[in Italian], Longanesi, Milan, 1999, p53.

³
Bradley K. Martin:
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
, St Martins Press, New York, 2004.

⁴
Christopher Hitchens: ‘Visit to a Small Planet’
Vanity Fair
, January, 2001: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2001/0l/hitchens-200101

⁵
However well ensconced the Kremlin's popsicle Ramzam Kadyrov may appear to be in Grozny, whether the tsarist goal of subjugation of Chechnya is ever, in the long term, going to succeed is open to doubt.

⁶
B.R. Myers:
The Cleanest Race
, Melville House, New York, 2010, p25.

⁷
Michael Breen:
Kim Jong Il,
p6.

⁸
Andrew Holgate:
Sunday Times
, Culture section, review of
What's in a Surname
, 25 August 2013, p31.

⁹
Alexander Frater:
Observer Life Magazine
, 7 January 1996.

¹⁰
Breen, p100.

2

Zombie Gods Seep Goo

Breakfast lay in wait in a large gilt-effect ballroom, belowzero, entirely empty apart from our party and several jolly Korean waitresses who wafted in, bearing dishes of increasing weirdness. Seahorse brain, hamster droppings on catarrh, and puddles of a sinister jam-like entity jostled for our attention. OK, I’m making this up, but the cosmic good of bacon and eggs has yet to penetrate the Big Zombie. Their favourite is kimchi, cabbage steeped in brine. The food wasn’t bad. But it was strange.

The magnificence of the restaurant was out of kilter with the rest of the hotel: spooky, unlit, freezing cold corridors; on the stairs, the faint scent that a small creature died in the night; the bedrooms old-fashioned, museum pieces from the 1950s. The doors didn’t quite fit the frames; the carpets were ridged and rucked; the lifts clunked and snickered, and every now and then the doors would not open. It was like staying in a mega-Fawlty Towers, but with Basil, Sybil, Manuel, Polly and the Major all missing, perhaps gone away ‘for a stay in the mountains’ – that’s North Korean slang for
the gulag. The hotel’s boastful grand rooms and shoddy everything else left an abiding impression that this was a society that looked great on the architect’s plans but so lacked proper attention to detail as to be almost unfit for habitation.

On the steps of the hotel drive, the cold bit deep into our bones. The Korean peninsula is ten degrees further south than London, but in winter it is very much colder. The British Isles benefit from the wet, warm winds of the Atlantic beating in from the west; Korea suffers from being at the end of the Eurasian continental landmass. It felt Siberian.

There were more cars on the roads than expected, with little jam-ettes of eight or nine motors building up here and there for what passed as the Pyongyang rush-hour. In town, as on the airport highway, the cars were generally posh-ish Japanese saloons, for the elite. The absence of vehicles of the poor – two-stroke rickshaws, scooters, horse and carts – was striking. The vast majority of people moved by bus or on foot. Packs of black-clad workers moved like shoals of fish hither and yon; every third person seemed to be in army uniform.

We were calling on two dead men. On the road to the Mausoleum, Mr Hyun explained that the DPRK would be no walkover: ‘Our people will beat their fists to defend our sovereignty.’ No one dared get in to that double entendre. He went on to explain the dos and don’ts of visiting the dead: ‘The Korean people believe that our President Kim Il Sung is always with us, so when we go to the Mausoleum we don’t think we are going to a mausoleum, we are going to meet him.’

The Kumsusan Palace of the Sun is a cathedral to an alien god, and son. During his life, it was home to Kim Il Sung, in death it has become his tomb. When Kim Jong Il followed him to the grave, he
too ended up there. It’s a vast low granite grey-on-grey building, as imposing as a battleship, with concrete patches of greyness where the windows used to be. You enter at basement level along the left side. First up is a Heath Robinson contraption to clean the soles of your shoes.You step on a wet area and then walk forwards on to a living green mat which spins tufts of plastic greenery against your soles. It’s like having your feet tickled by robot ferns. No mud enters the palace.
¹

You dump your bags, wallets, cameras – anything that could record the dead – in vast cloakrooms, efficiently run, and you are then commanded to square up inlines of four. The robotization of your mind begins. Step out of line, someone hisses at you. Pretty quickly, you yourself end up helping to enforce the system that encoils you – a very small and simple edition of the mental enslavement that the regime practises against its 23 million people. We are transported along what feels like the longest Travelator on the planet. There is a second security sweep at the end, just to make sure that you’re not being a naughty boy and have smuggled in a hidden camera. We hadn’t.

The first thing you see when you enter the palace proper is an enormous marble statue of Kim Il Sung, belly gently swelling under a business suit, in a display of bourgeois amplitude. ‘Look at me, I’m fat,’ says the stone god. Kim-in-marble is attended by mega-vases flowing with flowers and guarded by dead-eyed soldiers of abstract, mathematical beauty. You are firmly guided through a series of chambers, well lit and pleasantly air-conditioned, decorated with photographs and paintings of Kim the
First meeting Tyrants’R’Us: Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, Ceausescu, Erich Honecker of East Germany, Gustáv Husák of former Czechoslovakia, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria, János Kádár of Hungary... Of that crowd, only Jaruzelski – perhaps the least bad, or certainly the most tormented of the old school of dictators – is still alive.

There’s a sameness about all the poses, all empty smiles and smooth bottoms, while the weeping of the tyrants’ victims takes place, unheard, elsewhere. Oh, look, there’s Kim One with Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, who reportedly likes eating his critics’ testicles in a white wine sauce with heart-shaped croutons. Plus some nabobs you’ve never heard of. Step forward Moktar Ould Daddah of Mauritania. I looked him up. He was a tyrant, too.

Next you walk through a sinister grey machine, black rubber nozzles on its side blowing great gusts of air at you. It’s hard to see what good this machine can do, apart from making the point that you are somehow unclean. It’s decorated with antiquated 1960 sdials with arrows a-flicker. I looked around for a one-eyed Donald Pleasance in a Mao suit stroking a large white pussy, but it must have been his day off.
²

The chamber of death is so back-lit with an early morning bright pink it is like walking around inside an enormous pig’s bladder. This is perhaps not quite the effect that is intended. The old dictator lies in a large glass box, a prize beetle. A blanket shrouds much of his body. His neck, once deformed by the enormous goitre, is perfect; so is the blackness of his artificial hair. The goitre should have been powerful evidence of the imperfect nature of humanity.
Instead, it did not exist, airbrushed out of official portraits and sculptures. The writer Michael Breen met Kim Il Sung in 1994.

One notable personal feature of Kim Il Sung was the massive grenade-sized goitre on the back of his neck ... when we had the pre-lunch interview session with Kim ... aguard stood on the offending side to block the photographers. I wondered whether the security folk planned this deployment using a code name for it.
³

Breen, answering his own question, called it the Thing.

The first reference I can find to the Thing is in 1980, when Tiziano Terzani was smuggled into Pyongyang on the back of an Italian Communist Party delegation, led by Enrico Berlinguer. In a chapter on North Korea entitled ‘Red Flag, Blue Blood’, Terzani
wrote: ‘The cyst on the back of his neck is bigger than a fist, but it does not seem to hinder his movements. For years, the cyst has continued to grow, but no one has dared operate. Although it seems unlikely that it is a malignant tumour, the cyst is now at the centre of endless rumours and speculation.’
⁴

Professor Myers believes that North Korea’s veiled ideology of racial perfection made keeping the Thing secret a necessity of state. He told me:‘Whenever you have a race theory, whenever you have an ideology that asserts that the purity of the race is important you’re naturally going to have an even greater aversion to physical defects and birth defects then you would have in countries without such an ideology. This is one of the reasons why the North Korean regime was so averse to showing the growth on Kim Il Sung’s neck. He could only be photographed or filmed from a certain angle so that he would look to be in perfect health to the North Korean people.’

Why couldn’t he get rid of it?

‘Apparently it was too big to be removed,’ said Myers.

Nicolae Ceausescu’s translator, Izidor Urian – of whom more later – met Kim Il Sung at least fifty times and got to know the Thing well.‘It was an accumulation of fat,’ the former Romanian diplomat told me. ‘Nothing more than that.’ (This may not be medically correct. Goitres are normally associated with a benign tumour of the thyroid gland.) How big? He motioned to a bowl of peanuts on the table between us, bigger than my clenched fist.‘There was no official ban on photographs. But if a photograph was taken, then it would go to the censors .. .So the photographers would avoid it. He was favoured on the other side of his neck.’ And, then, confidentially, Izidor leaned towards me: ‘He was very afraid of doctors.’

The Thing is no more, but the corpse is still with us. In his glass box, Kims face oozes a waxiness that is monstrous. But you can’t take much of this in before your robot-four shuffles towards the holy mummy, and then you bow. You shuffle to the next side, bow again, shuffle to his head, where, weirdly, you don’t bow, and then to the fourth side for one last bow, and you’re out. Let there be no doubt: North Korea is seized by a political religion.

The next chamber boasts a Bond-villain map of the world with snail trails of bleeping lights where Kim Il Sung went ‘Choo-choo, choo-choo’ on his royal train: mostly through China to Moscow, and back. The royal train carriage sits sweetly on oiled wheels, going now here in a hurry. It may have seemed immensely luxurious in 1953. In the twenty-first century, though, it looks train spotterly naff. By the royal train is a royal Mercedes of roughly the same era, its radiator grille snarling, A1 Capone’s teeth set in chrome.