North Korea Undercover (8 page)

Through out our trip, a North Korean cameraman from the Korean International Travel Company followed us everywhere. He filmed us. He didn’t know it, butwe filmed him. He filmed us filming him filming us. Once Alex, being mischievous, said to me, po-faced:‘You know this place is so fascinating it would be great to make a documentary here.’ I replied quick as aflash: ‘We are, Alex, we are,’ forgetting that this was our ultra, code yellow, secret. Alex used a Canon 5D camera, readily available in the high street. It looks life a hefty stills camera but it can shoot broadcast quality high definition video. Alex’s problem was that he didn’t want to look like a professional cameraman with the 5D pressed against his eye all the time, so he nursed it at chest height, unable to check the image. The result was mental torture for Alex. Wobble Vision for much of the time, but it worked. Sound was a muchbigger headache. The microphone in the 5D is so-so, and normally we would have used radio mikes. Vetoing that astoo risky, we busked it, hoping that we would be able to capture moments here and there. Tomiko had another stills and video camera, much smaller, and mine was the least fancy of the lot, as big as a packet of fags.
We took in loads of electronic cards but no laptops, and hoped that they would not twig our game. There being no internet or shops selling electronic stuff in North Korea, how would the cameraman know that we were filming him filming us?

At the end of the trip, we paid €40 a head forthe KITC video, complete with uplifting voiceover from an excitable, no, preposterously melodramatic Korean lady. Onthe three prongs-in-concrete, she proclaimed: ‘This monument was erected in October 1995 to mark the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea.’ The Party, according to the North Koreans, can trace its origin back to the Down With Imperialism Union, founded in October 1926 by Kim Il Sung, then just fourteen years old. This is, of course, rubbish. The back history was invented years later to make Kim look good. When he was fourteen, he was still playing the church organ.

The obelisk was empty of people, of life, of movement. And that is odd. Go to Trafalgar Square in London. You may care to salute the one-eyed pirate atop his column, ornot. But you will be accosted by people selling you something: maybe a life-choice or a DVD of
I, Robot
in Russian or ‘All the Mongolian food you can eat for a tenner’. The same goes for any big public space in DC or New York or Paris or Berlin or even these days Beijing, though not Tiananmen Square, just in case anyone starts getting funny ideas about Chinese democracy. What was odd was that no one pounced on the evidently prosperous foreigners in the vast empty space by the KWP obelisk in Pyongyang. Clearly, there was an order not tomake contact. It was the same in Ceausescu’s Romania in 1985. Not a single ordinary Romanian came up toour group of journalists. Only in 1989, when I spent Christmas with the Ceausescus, as it were, did I begin to appreciate the power and terror generated by
the secret police, the Securitate, before the Revolution. There was an order for any person who made contact with a foreigner to report it to the police within twenty-four hours. The police would then pass on the file to the Securitate. As a consequence, foreigners were shunned. Anorder very much like the Romanian one must be in place in North Korea, and it is absolutely obeyed. In eight days in North Korea, not a single ordinary individual started a conversation with us.

Our minders did not mention the regime’ssecret police, but they do exist. The Security Department, in Korean, Bowibu, is
the
power in the land. The world expert on the Bowibu is a former US intelligence analyst, Ken E. Gause. He reports that the Bowibu employ around 50,000 people, are based in the Amisan area of Pyongyang – there are satellite pictures
¹⁶
– and were effectively led by Kim Jong Il from the late 1980s to his death in 2011. The Bowibu are officially known as the Korean People’s Army Unit 10215, which just so happened to host Kim Jong Un’s second publicon-site inspection since he became heir apparent in September 2010.

The Bowibu spy on everyone worth spying on: the palace’s most loyal retainers, officials in the government and the Party, generals in the army, the dynasty’s trickier relatives, the police, ordinary people and, of course, foreigners.

Did the Bowibu spy on us? Were our minders Bowibu orreporting to them? The answer, according to Greg Scarlatoiu, Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the publisher of Gause’s report, is, ‘Yes, of course.’

They spy on ordinary people through an entity called the
Inminban, which roughly translates as‘Neighbourhood Watch’. In every single city district, town and village in the North, the local watch committee consists of between twenty and forty households – roughly around a hundred to 250 people, including children – ledby busy-body snoopers who know they might get some advantage by reporting a neighbour listening to South Korean pop songsor flashing around more money than they ought to have.

The Inminbans are responsible for keeping the streetsclean, polishing statues and portraits of Kims One and Two and making sure people attend the regime’sself-criticism meetings. They combine being neighbourhood snoopers with the eyes and ears, at street level, of the secret police.

Leaving the concrete colossus behind, we set off forlunch, a hotpot restaurant where you cook your own meat on a kerosene stove placed on the table. The results were OK-ish, either a bit too chewy or a bit overdone. Everywhere we ate, one got the impression that the quality and quantity of food was spectacular by North Korean standards, but pretty depressing for anyone used to eating, say, street food in China or KFC in Des Moines or fish and chips in Liverpool.

Back on the tourist bus – with one exit andone microphone in Mr Hyun’s hands, it was proving a brilliant totalitarian tool – we headed south-west from the capital, towards the Yellow Sea. We visited the Kangso Mineral Water Plant, above it the proclamation:‘Hail the light of Korea’s military first-ism, General Kim Jong Un!’ It’s possible that this was a brand new slogan. Or that they only had to change the last two characters to accommodate the change from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un. Outside three bears glugged water. They were, of course, fake.

Water from a hot spring gurgled into a thick glass deadend.

There was a handsome Italian-made production line, full of brilliantly polished stainless steel vats but no sign of production at any time in the recent past. We were offered bottles of the water to taste. It had the bouquet of sulphurous muck. Being a natural diplomat, I proclaimed:‘Ah, the champagne of water!’ which Mr Hyun found so funny he spat his out and bent double, giggling.

If you bottle mineral water, you should have a yard full of stacked pallets with empty bottles to be processed and packed bottles ready to be shipped off to your customers. Of that, there was no sign.

The story behind the bottling plant with no bottles starts well, with an exciting joint venture between the two Koreas, and pretty much stops with two hammer blows: the killing of a tourist and a nuclear test.
¹⁷
In 2011, the
Hantyoreh
newspaper told the melancholy tale of South Korean investor Lee Dae Sik. The ‘Sunshine’ or engagement policy ofleft-of-centre governments in Seoul had encouraged him to start up a trading business with the North. The Sunshine Policy sounds nice, but critics accuse the South and the Clinton administration of being overly credulous towards an entirely dishonest dictatorship; they satirize the ‘Sunshine Policy’ as the‘Moonshine Policy’.

To begin with, Lee imported Pyongyang rice vodka – soju -and sought-after agricultural products like bracken, balloon flower roots and pine mushrooms. The mood music between the two countries improved, a little, in June 2000 when Kim Jong Il hosted a visit to Pyongyang by the South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung. To the South Korean media, starved of news of the North and bored with the horror stories from defectors, Kim Jong Il came
across as witty, clever and willing to poke a little fun at himself – as it turned out, a massive misreading of a cunning psychopath. Still, the business climate improved and Lee put in serious money to build the mineral water plant. He would provide the capital – the machinery, bottles, caps and labels – and the North Korean side would provide the water from the ground and the labour. Kim told the paper that sales increased to 400,000 bottles amonth.

But the political weather began to turn when President Lee Myung Bak – a big sceptic on the Sunshine Policy – won the election in the South and took power in 2008. That July, a South Korean woman tourist enjoying a walk on the beach in the Mount Kumgang tourist resort was shot dead by a trigger-happy North Korean soldier, terrified of allowing her into a restricted area.

Relations froze overnight, as the North stuck absurdly to the line that the killing was the fault of the tourist. In April 2009 the North launched a missile; in May that year a nuclear test took place, nailing the coffin lid firmly down on the Sunshine Policy. And that meant that Mr Lee, South-North entrepreneur, was screwed. ‘When you apply for contact with North Korea, the [South Korean] government tells you to “please refrain from doing so”. They say“please refrain”, but who is going to refuse a request from the government? They are basically telling you,“Don’t do it.”’

One day, a fax came from North Korea, telling Lee that his contract was null and void. Three years on, when we visited the place, the most up-to-date labels we found on bottles in the plant were for 2010. Our guides neglected to tell us it had been a ghost factory for some time. Then again, how could they? We moved on from the bottling plant to the water source itself, housed in a large shed. Alocal guide explained the various systems they used by means of a large coloured diagram on the wall. It might have
looked technically very impressive, had the power not been off. As it was, the entire technical briefing took place in the gloom. But no one said anything. It was like being there when the Emperor walked past in his ‘New Clothes’, naked to all and sundry. You had top inch yourself and remember: no, this isn’t a story, this is real.

Not far away was the Chongsan-ri Farm, which boasted ananti-aircraft battery on a hill but no animals and no crops. It was weird. In farms around the world, chickens cluck and ducks quack, pigs snort, dogs give you a rheumy eye, cows munch grass and sheep bleat. There were no animalsof any kind.

From a nearby apartment block, propaganda loudspeakers spouted out their boring pedantic cry, but this being North Korea the tape was fucked and what you heard was aweird inhuman screeching, like pterodactyls in
Scooby Doo.
I asked Mr Hyun, was the announcement tellingus that thermo-nuclear war had started? He said no. The cold was bitter. No one stirred, no one cheered. It was hard toimagine anything more hateful than having no choice but to listen to the squawking that never stops at No Animal Farm.

Outside the ‘farm’ was a large concrete slab, on it a giant statue-shrine in bronze to Kim Il Sung giving ‘on-the-spot guidance’ -OTSG – to grateful, square-jawed, heroic farm workers and their Soviet-bosomed womenfolk. At every meeting between ordinaryfolk and Kim Il Sung, OTSG is handed out. As Myers writes: ‘Stories of Kim’s“on-the-spot-guidance” are alike not only in their depiction of the hero, but in their story lines and secondary characters as well... Both problem and solution are thus described in terms a child can grasp. Indeed, the Leader’s published remarks are
always
trite: “Rainbow trout is a good fish, tasty and nutritious.’”
¹⁸

We were asked to line up and bow in front of the Kimstatue. Miss Jun stood at the edge of the front row, to lead that row’s bow; Mr Hyun stood at the side ofthe second row to ensure the same-same. It was a Stalinist stage show, circa 1953, frozen in time, more than half a century out of date. I bowed, crossing my fingers behind my back, but that subtle gesture was not captured by the North Korean cameraman. He just filmed the moment of obeisance. Perhaps it was just an accident of timing or perhaps our guides had been sly in making us all bow seven times to the Kim dynasty – six times in the Mausoleum, and once again – on our first proper day in North Korea. After that first day, the more we saw, the less likely any of us would be to bow to the regimes gods in bronze or stone. But at the beginning of the trip we were still anxious to please, and unaware that the strange hierarchical nature of the country meant that we, as Westerners, were treated effectively as members of the elite core group – and that meant as well as being served as luxuri-ously as possible we were also given some allowance for, if not dissent, then at leastmock-compliance.

Our tour of the farm continued. We were taken to a‘typical farm worker’s house’, where we posed for photographs with two tiny sweet little North Korean toddlers, and their grandma. This may have been a natural event, but it felt like something that waspre-arranged and well choreographed, the lisping tots on cue for smiles at our cameras. Two pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had pride of place in the house. In North Korea, I can’t remember seeing pictures of anyone else. A North Korean defector, ‘Mary Lou’, later told me about the care that people have to take with theportraits. She said that the wall they are hung on must be bare and clear of any other objects. Only the portraits are allowed on that wall. They have to be cleaned every morning, wiping away
any dust, because you never know when the inspectors might come. And you can never put them on the floor. The inspectors test how clean the portraits are by wiping the top of the frame with a piece of white paper, looking for any dust or dirt. If they are deemed not clean enough, people are fined or punished in some way.

But even here, in this propaganda showpiece, the truth had a way of seeping out from behind the film-set. Through the window, you could clearly see someone’s washing hanging higgledy-piggledy on the naked branches of a tree in the freezing sun.

Our last stop was the Ryonggang Hot Spa hotel, an oldparty hotel set in spacious grounds, dotted with pine trees, with a Kalashnikov-toting guard at the gate. Itturned out to be an architectural tribute to 1970s Bond-villain kitsch, complete with hot tubs spouting pongy waterfrom an off-bronze tap into an immense, badly tiled Jacuzzi-thing, as inviting as the low-tide Thames atWapping.