Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (141 page)

Well, I see that my vehicle is waiting in the tunnel to take me back. Goodbye, Mr. Chairman. May the future bring great things for you and your people.

This book has been thirteen years in the making. I received major help and encouragement over those years from Hideko Takayama. She spotted and translated pertinent materials, conducted some interviews for me, shared her own articles done for
Newsweek
and other publications—even sent a telegram to my mountain hideout, which was unequipped with phone or TV, to alert me when Kim Il-sung died. I am deeply grateful for all her many contributions.

I began with the notion of writing about Koreans in the South as well as the North. Richard Halloran, who invited me to the East-West Center in Honolulu as journalist in residence for the 1991–1992 academic year, fortuitously suggested as an interim project a comparison of my findings during visits to North Korea in 1979, 1989 and 1992. In the process of sorting out what had changed in the country over that span of years (-which was precious little, as I reported in a 1993 EWC publication,
Intruding on the Hermit: Glimpses of North Korea,
I concluded that simply getting North Korea right would be a sufficient challenge. Others who were helpful in Honolulu included Muthiah Alagappa, Lee-Jay Cho, Admiral Ronald Hays, Robert Hewett, James Kelly, Charles Morrison, Michel Oksenberg, Professor Glenn Page, John Schidlovsky Professor Dae-sook Suh, William Wise, Mark Valencia and Caroline Yang. For terrific staff support I am grateful to June Sakaba, Laura Miho and Lear Budinger.

In 1992 I received a Fulbright grant for research in Seoul. Professors Auh Taik-sup at Korea University and Lee Man-woo at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies generously provided affiliation and facilities. Korea Fulbright staff members, especially then–Executive Director Frederick Carriere and Deputy Executive Director Shim Jai-ok, were enormously helpful.

Although I studied Korean intensively under the excellent teachers at Seoul’s Language Training Research Center, a working level of fluency was
but a distant dream. Rhee Soo-mi (whom my old friend Professor Kim Young-seok of Yonsei University recommended for the assignment) served brilliantly for several years as my principal Korean interpreter and translator. Others who ably undertook such work for me included Meehee Park Burton, Jungeun Kim and my former
Newsweek
colleague Lee Young-ho. Sydney A. Seiler generously shared with me his translations of Korean-language materials and a manuscript version of his book.

Kim Il-sung in his memoirs recalled a bit of family lore from his father’s childhood. A village schoolteacher, often in his cups, repeatedly sent pupils to buy wine for him. The boy who was to become the future Great Leader’s father obeyed meekly for a while, but lost his respect for the teacher one day when he saw him fall facedown in a ditch on his way home. The next time the teacher sent him off-with a bottle to get a refill, the boy intentionally smashed the bottle on a rock outside the school. Then he told the teacher he had tripped while being chased by a tiger. The pupil’s father, Kim’s paternal grandfather, heard of the incident and observed: “If pupils peep into their teacher’s private life frequently, they lose their awe of him. The teacher must give his pupils the firm belief that their teacher neither eats nor urinates; only then can he maintain his authority at school.” A teacher, Kim’s grandfather added, “should set up a screen and live behind it.”

The rule is all the more important for a dictator. After his rise to power, Kim adopted with a vengeance the notion that an authority figure must live behind a screen. His son, Kim Jong-il, did the same. Indeed, the two men placed the entire country behind a screen. My task has been to try to see through, or around, those screens. Since the use of such standard reporting methods as on-scene observation was severely restricted, I turned to propaganda analysis—-which often meant reading between the lines of officially disseminated stories like the one just quoted. But I needed more, and I found the third leg of a methodological tripod in defector interviews. I spoke at length with fifty former Northerners, mainly during the mid- to late 1990s.

The use of defector testimony is controversial. This is particularly the case among American scholars of a certain group. The fact literally came home to me one summer evening in 1994 when some Dinner Guests from Hell ganged up to mount a vicious verbal assault on my bona fides (even as they ate my barbecue). Evidently I had set them off when I innocently started to hold forth on what interesting and important things I was learning in defector interviews. The evening fell apart completely when I spoke approvingly of another American scholar, not present, who had used defector testimony extensively in his work. “That puts you completely beyond the pale,” snapped the man who had assembled the war party on my veranda. Perhaps I should thank those people. That experience of being blindsided sent me reeling to the library. I read for years to catch up and keep up on the
scholarly and ideological disputes that swirl around the Korea question. The book probably is better for it, although at the time I would have preferred friendly constructive criticism.

Anyhow, I offer here full disclosure of the circumstances of my defector interviews and leave it to the reader to judge the information thus obtained and the ways I have used it. First, I acknowledge with thanks the help of the South Korean Ministry of Information and its Korean Overseas Information Service in arranging many of those meetings. I needed the help of KOIS staff members because, until defectors completed their official debriefings, South Korean security authorities had charge of them and required that they be accompanied on any outings by government minders. (I was told that this was partly for the benefit of the defectors, who were new to the country—but then, that was how my Pyongyang minders had justified accompanying me everywhere during my visits to North Korea.) Some of those police personnel waited in anterooms; others sat in on the interviews while displaying varying degrees of interest or boredom. I remember only one case when a handler’s presence became intrusive and I had to ask him to let the defector speak for himself.

It would seem natural if some defectors tried to please South Korean officials by emphasizing aspects of their knowledge that most interested their hosts. Thus I wondered what to make of it when, in several of my interviews, defectors volunteered negative information about Kim Jong-il before I asked. I inquired of another, elite defector, Oh Young-nam (-whose minder was off getting a haircut at the time), whether intelligence authorities were encouraging such remarks. “No,” he replied. “They don’t urge you to say anything. I heard they did it in the past to some extent, but I didn’t get that kind of impression.” (When a defector exaggerated, it was on that defector’s own initiative, in the hope of becoming “a star in South Korea,” Oh also told me—insisting that he himself did not do such a thing.) There were a few other cases when interviewees wondered aloud whether they should give straight answers to my questions (answers that, as it turned out, would tend to show aspects of North Korea or its leaders in a positive light). I can report that their minders in every such case promptly assured them that they should.

I make no claim that the former Northerners I spoke with constituted a scientific sample. For a while, though, I probably was speaking with the majority of the recent arrivals. My KOIS contacts knew that I was interested in meeting former political prisoners, officials, military people and broad-gauged people in general—but also anyone who could shed light on the lives of ordinary people. They knew, as well, that I was engaged in a book project that would take some time, and that I did not place top priority on angling for news scoops concerning, say, the status of North Korean programs for developing weapons of mass destruction.

KOIS staff members did some culling. They advised me on occasion, for example, that so-and-so, who had just defected, reportedly had proven in official debriefings to be not very talkative or interesting—and thus I might be wasting my time if I met that person. In no case did I discover later that a defector whom KOIS officials had flagged as probably less worthwhile as an interviewee had gone on to say important things to other interviewers, whether Korean or foreign.

Of course, I was cognizant at all times that spin of one sort or another could be involved in the help I was receiving. Without dictating to a defector what he should say, for example, the South Korean authorities could try to determine the most opportune time to present him to the public. After all, while finding the truth was my goal (and again, it’s up to the reader to judge the extent to which I found it or failed to find it), polishing the image of South Korea and promoting the policies of its government constituted the main work of KOIS. What I can point out, though, is that it was a time when democratically elected governments sought especially to show that the bad old days, when many official fabrications and manipulations of information had been justified on grounds of anti-communism, were past. Any spin that furthered that goal of theirs, I calculated, might also further mine.

Eventually, I heard that the pendulum had swung so far that the Kim Dae-jung administration had taken to discouraging defectors from giving interviews for fear they would antagonize Pyongyang and cloud the “sunshine” policy. The Roh Moo-hyun administration reportedly continued such a policy. I had pretty much completed the defector-interviewing phase of my research by then, fortunately.

There were, in fact, a couple of high-level defectors whom I was not able to interview because they were under wraps for whatever reasons at the times I tried to meet them. One was Hwang Jang-yop. (I had met and spoken with Hwang briefly at a Tokyo reception just days
before
his 1997 defection. He had not, alas, revealed his defection plans to me and the other two foreign correspondents questioning him that evening. But in hindsight I thought he had seemed to be under some strain—perhaps on account of the swarm of minders surrounding him, who quickly spirited him away before he could say much of anything to us. That line of thinking occurred to me after it came out that Hwang had hoped to defect while in Japan, but had not been able to shake the people watching him—and so had waited and made his escape after arriving in Beijing, en route home to Pyongyang.) Following his defection, fortunately, Hwang wrote prolifically for publication.

One further note: I learned that the practice of KOIS, when arranging for foreign reporters to meet defectors, was to provide each interviewee a per diem “transportation fee” of 100,000
won,
the equivalent of something under $100. Although such modest compensation of interviewees for their trouble was accepted as normal in the East Asian context, to put money
and interviewing together always raises a caution flag in American journalistic ethics. I was not in a position to change the system, but I did undertake payment of the fees out of my pocket (in envelopes that I personally handed to the defectors when the interviews were over) in order to avoid having the South Korean government subsidize my research.

Speaking of subsidies, the financing of my project hit a dry spell after my Fulbright grant expired in 1993. I hereby offer thanks to my lucky stars, and to the gods of Wall Street, for the fact that timely bets—first on Southeast Asian and later on Russian stock funds—produced returns sufficient to permit continued work on the book until I returned to full-time newspaper work for
Asia Times
in 1995, and to resume work on it after the newspaper ceased print publication in 1997.

I am grateful for the opportunity to work on the book at Dartmouth College in 2002 as “distinguished journalist in residence” at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Thanks to Prof. Michael Mastanduno of Dartmouth, Prof. Joseph Massey of the Tuck School of Business and Margot E. de l’Etoile, who keeps the center humming, for making possible a very productive period. Special thanks go to Dartmouth professor David C. Kang, an old colleague from my Seoul Fulbright days, who put me forward for the Dickey fellowship. Dave also read and commented on huge chunks of the manuscript and was otherwise endlessly helpful and encouraging.

At Ohio University’s E. W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2002–2003, and since then at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, I have spent practically every waking, non-teaching moment working on the book. I acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Scripps-Howard Foundation and (through the LSU Foundation) of the Manship family and the State of Louisiana’s Board of Regents. I am grateful also for the help and patience of my colleagues and students at both universities.

Among friends offering valuable encouragement when I decided to try my hand at producing a book, William Chapman, former
Washington Post
Tokyo bureau chief, was the author of a volume about Japan that I greatly admired. Daunted by the prospect of undertaking such a huge effort, I asked Bill how I might come up with an overall theme. (I had not yet learned Kim Jong-il’s term, “seed.”) “Just report,” he told me, “and then go back and try to figure out what it all adds up to.” In our journalistic trade, as Bill did not need to remind me, the worst thing we could say about another reporter was that he or she never let the facts get in the way of a good story.