Escape from North Korea

Our friend complimented Mr. Jung on his new look and then, remembering his manners, performed the introductions. “No names, please,” said Mr. Jung, shaking my hand. I agreed to keep his real name confidential, and his new name—“Mr. Jung”—is born. Given the line of work he is in, it can be safely assumed that “Mr. Jung” is only the latest in a long line of aliases he has used in his years on the job.

Mr. Jung is a rescuer. His area of professional expertise is bringing home South Korean prisoners of war who have been held against their will in North Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953. He was part of a clandestine network of South Korean civilians who operated in the Sino-Korean border area during the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Their mission: Find the POWs in North Korea, facilitate their escape to China, and return them to South Korea. His rescue operations were authorized and funded by senior officials in the administration of President Kim Young-sam.

In 2010, the South Korean government estimated that there were at least five hundred South Korean POWs from the Korean War still alive and being detained illegally in North Korea.² Pyongyang said what it has been saying since 1953: It holds no South Korean POWs against their will.

This is a lie. The evidence—collected from, among other sources, the handful of POWs who have escaped to the South in recent years—overwhelmingly supports the South Korean government’s assertion that some of its soldiers are still alive and being forcibly detained by North Korea. Time is running out. The men who fought in the Korean War are now elderly. A soldier who was twenty years old when the war began in 1950 would be older than eighty today.

These old soldiers have been held illegally by North Korea since the conclusion of the Korean War. Their detention is a violation of the Geneva Convention’s requirements on the prompt return of POWs after hostilities end. It also violates the 1953 Armistice Agreement to the Korean War, which required the immediate repatriation of POWs. The terms are set out in Article III of the Armistice Agreement, which reads in part: “Within sixty (60) days after this agreement becomes effective, each side shall, without offering any hindrance, directly repatriate and hand over in groups all those prisoners of war in its custody who insist on repatriation to the side to which they belonged at the time of capture.”³

Tens of thousands of South Korean soldiers went missing at the end of the Korean War. At the time of the armistice, the United Nations Command could not account for the whereabouts of nearly eighty-two thousand South Korean servicemen. Only one-tenth of this number—8,343—were repatriated during the three POW exchanges that the United Nations Command and North Korea conducted shortly after the cease-fire.⁴

Over the years, successive South Korean governments have devoted Herculean efforts to tracking down the status of each missing soldier. South Korea has checked names of the missing against the original war-time military rosters. It has taken testimony from military defectors and others who escaped from North Korea. As the years passed, 22,562 South Korean soldiers whose names appeared on the original list of the missing were identified as having been killed in action. The change in status to “killed” from “missing” was important to the soldiers’ families. It gave them emotional closure, allowed them to perform funeral rites, and permitted them to benefit from government grants available to relatives of deceased soldiers. Korean names can be very similar, and some names on the original lists of the missing were found to be duplicates. By 2011, the South Korean government had reduced the official number of soldiers deemed to be missing in action to 19,409. Where are they? The Ministry of Unification answered the question in a bland statement: “It is reasonable to assume that a significant number of South Korean POWs have not been repatriated but are being held by the North Korean side.”

It might have been out of some perverse sense of competition with the South that Pyongyang made the decision not to return thousands of South Korean POWs after the war. The Geneva Convention of 1949 mandated the immediate return of POWs after hostilities ended, but the United States insisted that the POWs who had been captured by U.N. forces have a choice: They could decide whether to stay in South Korea or return to North Korea. After months of negotiation, North Korea reluctantly agreed to the American demand. To Pyongyang’s embarrassment, some forty-nine thousand North Korean POWs held in the South chose not to return. They were released into South Korean society.

Then, as now, Pyongyang maintained that the South Korean POWs who stayed in North Korea after the war did so by choice. The record, as compiled by American and South Korean experts, proves otherwise. A few South Korean POWs may have decided to stay, but the overwhelming majority had no choice. In many cases, they did not even know that the war had ended.

Exhibit A is a classified study the United States Department of Defense compiled in 1993.⁵ According to the Pentagon report, which is now declassified, thousands of South Korean POWs died in the Soviet gulag along with many American POWs. The Pentagon researchers found that after the end of the war, American and South Korean POWs were transferred from North Korea to prison camps in the Soviet Union. The transfers took place under a secret program approved by Stalin.

The Pentagon study was conducted with the cooperation of the new Russian government, which facilitated interviews with former Soviet military officers and others who had firsthand knowledge of what happened to the South Korean POWs. The report cited many eyewitness accounts. These accounts were so broad, so numerous, and so convincing, the report’s authors argued, that it was impossible to dismiss them.

Among the interviewees was a former Soviet general officer, Khan San-kho,⁶ who provided information on South Korean POWs. Lieutenant-General Khan, a Soviet citizen who was ethnically Korean, had been seconded to the North Korean People’s Army during the Korean War. General Khan told the American investigators that he had assisted in the transfer of thousands of South Korean POWs to prison camps in the Soviet Union after the war.⁷

The South Korean POWs were distributed among three to four hundred Soviet prison camps, the general said. Most of the POWs were sent to camps in Siberia or the Soviet Far East, but some were shipped off to Central Asia. The South Korean POWs were put to work in mines or built roads and airfields. Most did not survive long, he said.

Another source of information for the Pentagon researchers was Zygmunt Nagorski, a Polish-born American journalist. Nagorski reported the transport of thousands of South Korean POWs to Soviet prison camps in a 1953 article for Esquire magazine.⁸ His sources were two agents of the Soviet Interior Ministry and an employee of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Like General Khan, Nagorski said that the mortality rate among the POWs was high.

Other South Korean POWs were detained in North Korea. There is a larger body of evidence about what happened to them, thanks to North Korean defectors who have provided information about their fate. Information has also come from the small number of former POWs and their North Korean family members who have escaped to South Korea since the mid-1990s. According to these sources, the South Korean POWs detained in North Korea were interned in prison camps until the late 1950s or even into the 1960s. The POWs did not know the war had ended or that there had been an exchange of POWs between North and South. No one ever asked them whether they wanted to go home.

Many South Korean POWs died in the North Korean prison camps. Those who survived were eventually released, but the conditions of their new lives were hardly better than the conditions they’d known in prison. Most were assigned to one of the groups sent to labor in coal or copper mines in desolate areas of the northeastern provinces, the region sometimes called Korea’s Siberia. It was undesirable work, difficult and dangerous. The mines were so remote that escape was impossible even if the former POWs had the physical stamina and local knowledge to try.

The former POWs were given citizen ID cards, and one could say that, in some ways, they blended in with ordinary North Korean society. Many were forced into marriages with war widows or war orphans—women tainted by family associations with South Koreans and who were otherwise unmarriageable. Lee Yeon-soon, the daughter of a former POW, said her father had been assigned a wife and was married in a mass wedding. The authorities simply matched up names and told people they were husband and wife,⁹ said Lee, who is now living in Seoul. As former POWs, the South Koreans remained under close surveillance by the government.

The establishment of diplomatic ties between Seoul and Beijing in 1992 made it easier for South Koreans to travel to China. It opened up the Chinese side of the Sino-North Korean border to South Korean visitors, including those seeking intelligence on North Korea. By the mid-1990s, the flow of refugees from North Korea to China was accelerating. The refugees were a deep well of information about North Korea’s closed society, including South Korea’s missing POWs.

A small group of senior officials in the government of South Korean President Kim Young-sam saw an opportunity to rescue POWs and decided to act. They authorized and funded a secret network dedicated to gathering information about the POWs captive in North Korea; the goal was to bring them home. The network was composed of about twenty South Korean civilians, including Mr. Jung, and fifty Chinese associates. At least one member of Kim Young-sam’s cabinet was aware of the program. It’s unclear whether the president himself knew of its existence.

Mr. Jung and the other South Koreans on the rescue team posed as Chinese-Korean traders. They moved back and forth across the border, looking for goods to buy in North Korea and resell in China. The business deals were real, but they were a smokescreen for the most important commodity the agents were seeking: information on the whereabouts of the POWs. They also gathered information in northeast China, where they sought out North Koreans who had come across the border as well as Chinese citizens who had visited North Korea. They carefully pumped them for information about POWs.

If the South Korean agents heard a rumor about a POW who was said to be living in a certain part of the country, they would concoct a reason to go there on business. When the right moment presented itself, they would approach the POW and, if he was receptive, offer to help him escape to China and then South Korea. They would develop an extraction plan. They might ask the POW to figure out on his own how to get to a designated meeting place in China—then they would supply him with enough cash to do so. POWs sometimes refused to leave without their North Korean families. If so, Mr. Jung and his team would also help relatives reach South Korea, but their first priority was always the POW himself.

China was the base of operation for Mr. Jung and his colleagues. He wore many guises there. Sometimes he would pose as a Chinese border guard. With his Chinese-language skills and a uniform he had purchased on the black market, he was able to help more than one POW or family member get out of a tight situation. In at least one instance, he hired a counterfeiter to print a fake South Korean passport for a POW, whom he then put on a plane to Seoul. He and his network also developed their own branch of the underground railroad to ferry POWs across China to safety in Southeast Asian countries. From there, the POWs would go on to South Korea.

The South Korean officials who authorized the POW rescue program entrusted oversight of the operations to an intermediary, the man who introduced me to Mr. Jung in the Seoul hotel. This intermediary was a young, energetic South Korean who traveled the world on business. He had no official position, but he was well connected with the South Korean defense and intelligence establishment, and he had done favors for the government in the past. He would go to China on “business” to meet with Mr. Jung, or Mr. Jung would fly out of China and consult with the intermediary in another Asian city.

In Seoul, the intermediary interacted with a handful of government officials. The South Korean government would provide pertinent information, offer operational guidance, and supply funding. If the extraction team in China identified the location in North Korea of a possible POW and wanted to approach him, the intermediary would take that information to his government contacts. The officials would try to verify the man’s identity, using military and other records. This identity-checking was important. No one wanted to aid in the escape of an imposter or, worst of all, a North Korean sleeper agent.

If the information checked out and the man was confirmed to be a former South Korean soldier, the officials would put the intermediary or another trusted source in touch with the POW’s family in South Korea. The family might be asked to supply a family photograph, which would be passed along to Mr. Jung and his associates in China. A member of the extraction team would then take the photo into North Korea and show it to the POW as a way of gaining his confidence. North Korean society is built on deceit and suspicion, and the South Korean agent would need to prove his bona fides; producing a family photo would help demonstrate that an agent really was who he said he was, not an operative of the North Korean regime seeking to entrap the POW.

The intermediary also would coordinate with his government contacts in Seoul to plan the final stage of the rescue. The South Korean government might arrange for the coast guard or a vessel from another government agency to be in the vicinity when the ship on which a POW was traveling was scheduled to enter South Korean waters. If the rescue team had guided the POW out of China to a neighboring Southeast Asian country, the South Korean government might authorize its ambassador to work with that country’s government on obtaining an exit permit for the POW.

The government officials left most of the operational details to the intermediary and the China-based extraction team. The South Korean government could not be caught running illegal people-smuggling operations on Chinese or other foreign soil. It needed plausible deniability in case a member of the rescue team was arrested. Mr. Jung and his colleagues understood that they would be on their own if they were arrested.

The rescue team scored its first success in 1994, when Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho became the first South Korean prisoner of war to return home in forty years. The South Korean government never took public responsibility for Cho Chang-ho’s escape, but it was widely assumed that it had played a hand in his rescue. In 1994, the new underground railroad was not yet up and running. It was highly implausible that Cho Chang-ho could have organized his escape on his own, without help from the South Korean government, especially in the mere sixteen days Cho spent in China.

Cho Chang-ho’s homecoming captured the heart of the South Korean people. He became known as the fallen soldier who returned. It also highlighted the plight of the POWs who by now, after four decades of captivity in the North, were mostly forgotten in South Korea.

When the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Cho Chang-ho was a freshman at what is now known as Yonsei University. Yonsei is one of South Korea’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, and the young Cho Chang-ho had a promising future ahead of him. But the war intervened, and he interrupted his studies to join the army, where he served as a second lieutenant in an artillery battalion. In September 1951, Chinese troops fighting alongside North Korean forces captured Cho. He spent twelve years and six months in prison camps before finally being released in the early 1960s. He was sent to work in a North Korean coal mine.

When the armistice was signed in 1953, Cho Chang-ho’s name did not appear on the list of prisoners held by the North Koreans. In 1977, South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense changed his official status from “missing in action” to “killed in action.” His name was enshrined with the names of other war dead at the National Cemetery. In the minds of his government and family, he had passed away.

On October 3, 1994, Lieutenant Cho, now sixty-four years old, escaped from North Korea to China by paddling across the Yalu River on a wooden raft. Sixteen days later, Mr. Jung and his team arranged for Lieutenant Cho to board a Chinese fishing boat that smuggled black-market goods from South Korea to China. Back in Seoul, the officials who were being kept apprised of Cho’s escape thought that the fishing-boat plan to extract him from China was too risky, so they refused to pay for it. Mr. Jung and the intermediary decided to go through with their plan anyway. They approached the Cho family, who agreed to pay for the boat.

The fishing boat carrying Lieutenant Cho sailed into South Korean waters in the predawn hours of Sunday, October 23, 1994. Mr. Jung had alerted the intermediary that Lieutenant Cho was en route, and the intermediary in turn informed his government contacts, who, despite their earlier skepticism about the fishing-boat plan, agreed to cooperate. The officials arranged for a patrol vessel belonging to the South Korean fisheries service to be in the area, seemingly by chance. When the Chinese fishing boat, by prearrangement, flashed a distress signal, the South Korean patrol boat responded quickly. Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho climbed aboard. The rescue took place in the Yellow Sea off South Korea’s western coast.

In the days that followed, the news of Cho Chang-ho’s miraculous homecoming was on the lips of every South Korean. Television networks broadcast interviews with the pajama-clad former soldier from his hospital bed in Seoul. He was filmed with his older sister and younger brother, who were sitting by his bedside alternately weeping and smiling. He was asked about his new family in North Korea, where he had one daughter and two sons. He was interviewed about what he wanted to do when he got out of the hospital. Visit his childhood church, he said.

But the scene that became an icon was the shot of him with Defense Minister Lee Byung-tae, who visited him at the hospital. From his hospital bed, the former POW saluted the defense chief and announced, “Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho of the artillery unit, military service number 212966, reports his safe return.” In describing that scene, the South Korean daily Dong-A Ilbo later wrote that “the nation shed tears.”¹⁰ President Kim Young-sam also paid the POW a visit.

Upon his release from the hospital, the second lieutenant was promoted to first lieutenant before being honorably discharged from the army in a ceremony at the Korea Military Academy. A parade was held in his honor. He had lunch with the president at the Blue House. In the years that followed, Cho Chang-ho went on to build a new life. He completed his degree at Yonsei University and married a South Korean woman. He became an advocate for South Korean POWs still captive in North Korea. He urged the South Korean government to speak out more aggressively against human rights abuses by the North Korean regime.

In 2006, Cho Chang-ho visited Washington, D.C., where he testified in the House of Representatives about his forty-three years in captivity. “Even as I speak,” he told the American legislators, “there are many, many South Korean prisoners of war still in North Korea awaiting a helping hand from the outside world.”¹¹ He died in Seoul a few months after his return from Washington. His remains were buried in South Korea’s National Cemetery where, years before, his name had been enshrined among those of the war dead.

President Kim Young-sam left office in January 1998. He was succeeded by Kim Dae-jung, who pursued a policy of détente toward North Korea. That approach became known as the Sunshine Policy, and it culminated with Kim Dae-jung’s historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 2000.

The POW rescue team did not fare well during the Kim Dae-jung years. The man who had served as the intermediary between the rescue team in China and the South Korean government still had well-placed contacts who were willing to help quietly, mostly in the form of providing information. But coming up with the money to fund the extraction operations was tough, and the intermediary turned to private sources such as POW families for financial help. Mr. Jung has nothing good to say about those years. “In the Kim Dae-jung era, right before the summit in Pyongyang,” he said, “I had several POWs lined up to go to South Korea, but the government canceled.” The South Korean government presumably didn’t want to risk disrupting the summit. The arrival of former POWs in Seoul would have reminded the South Korean public of the true nature of the dictatorial regime in North Korea.

The unwillingness of the Kim Dae-jung administration to risk confrontation with Beijing or Pyongyang over South Korea’s POWs is apparent in the story of another old soldier, Chang Mu-hwan. In 1998, four years after Cho Chang-ho’s escape and shortly after Kim Dae-jung took office, a popular 60 Minutes–style show on South Korean TV caused a national uproar when it broadcast the story of an elderly POW who had escaped to China from North Korea.¹² The POW was stuck in China, risking arrest and repatriation to North Korea, and unable to get home to South Korea. The South Korean Embassy refused to help.

The TV program recorded the efforts of Chang Mu-hwan, then seventy-two years old, as he sought help from the embassy in Beijing. The camera closed in on Chang’s trembling right hand as he placed a phone call to the embassy. When a woman answered, the old man identified himself as a POW and asked for assistance. A transcript of his conversation with the embassy reads as follows:

In 2002, Mr. Jung was arrested in China and charged with espionage. There was no trial, and the length of his sentence was unspecified. For the first two years of his imprisonment, the Chinese questioned him periodically, he said. After eight years in prison, including three in solitary confinement, he was released in 2010 and deported to South Korea.

Since the return of Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho in 1994, a total of seventy-nine South Korean POWs have made their way home, according to a tally the South Korean government released in 2010.¹⁴ South Korea has also welcomed nearly two hundred family members of POWs. Other POWs have not been so lucky. Several escaped to China but were arrested and repatriated to North Korea, which claimed them as citizens.

The Kim family regime in Pyongyang remains acutely sensitive to the POW issue. It continues to assert that every former South Korean soldier who lives in North Korea is there by choice. To reinforce this point, it occasionally puts a POW before a television camera and uses him for propaganda purposes. The POW dutifully talks about how wonderful his life is in North Korea and how content he is to live in the people’s paradise.

Pyongyang pulled this stunt in 2010 at one of the rare family reunions organized by the Red Cross organizations of both countries for relatives who had been separated during the Korean War. At the reunion, four former POWs were reunited with family members from South Korea. The participation of the four POWs came as a surprise in South Korea. Before Pyongyang put the four men’s names on the reunion list, neither their families in South Korea nor the South Korean government had any idea that these soldiers had survived the war. The event threw doubt on the accuracy of South Korea’s lists of the dead and missing. How many other POWs whom no one knows about are still alive and living in North Korea?

Ask a South Korean today about the POWs detained in North Korea, and a typical response is to speculate that these old soldiers may not want to come home. They have lived in North Korea for more than half a century, the speculation goes; they have new families and are happy where they are. The surprise inclusion of the four POWs in the North-South reunion in 2010 fueled this line of thinking; all the POWs said publicly that they were in North Korea by choice. But of course, Pyongyang never puts the question to the POWs themselves—or if it does, the question is framed in such a way that the POW knows that he puts his life at risk, or that of his family, if he gives a wrong answer.

When President Lee Myung-bak took office in 2008, he pledged to work for the return of the POWs. The government won’t talk publicly about its work to get the POWs back, but some information has emerged. One aspect of that work appears to be exerting pressure on Beijing to release POWs who have crossed the river to China. On a visit to Beijing in the summer of 2011, Lee’s defense minister reportedly pressed China to give exit permits to five POWs who had sought sanctuary in South Korean consular facilities in Beijing and Shenyang.¹⁵ The fate of these five POWs is unknown.

Meanwhile, South Korea has made no progress with North Korea on the POW issue. Relations between South and North worsened in 2010 when the North Korean military attacked South Korea and killed South Korean citizens: In March of that year, forty-six sailors died when a North Korean submarine torpedoed the South Korean naval ship Cheonan, on which they were serving. In November, North Korea shelled the South Korean–held Yeonpyeong Island. Four South Koreans were killed, including two civilians.

In 2011, the Lee administration suggested that South Korea might try to purchase the freedom of the POWs still captive in the North. Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik cited the West German Freikauf program as a model. Freikauf, meaning “buy freedom” in German, was the secret Cold War program through which West Germany paid ransoms to East Germany in order to bring out some 33,755 dissidents and political prisoners held there. A Korean Freikauf program is unlikely to work, however, not least because Pyongyang refuses even to acknowledge that any South Korean POWs are being held against their will.

At the time of his inauguration, President Lee said he wanted to mark 2010, the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, as the occasion to launch a joint effort with Pyongyang for the recovery of the remains of South Korea soldiers who died on the other side of the border. This has not happened. It probably was not a realistic goal in the first place, as the American experience shows.

In 2005, the United States abandoned its program to recover the remains of American soldiers in North Korea, due to concerns about nuclear tensions and the safety of the recovery teams. The United States conducted thirty excavation missions in North Korea from 1996 to 2005, finding the remains of what it believed to be 230 American soldiers. The program was marked with dishonesty and fakery on the part of Pyongyang. North Korea moved the American soldiers’ remains, stole American equipment, and billed the United States at inflated rates for the cost of its assistance. It is a measure of the importance the United States attaches to recovering the remains of its fallen soldiers that it nevertheless decided in late 2011 to restart the program. But the program never got off the ground. The U.S. suspended it again in March 2012 after North Korea announced plans for a missile test that violated a United Nations ban.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jung, his plastic surgeries nearly complete, was preparing to sneak in to China to continue his work. Unlike many of the South Koreans, Americans, and Chinese providing assistance to North Koreans who are trying to escape, Mr. Jung said he is not motivated by his Christian faith. His motivation is patriotism. The American government worked hard over the years to get back the remains of its soldiers from the Korean War, he said, even if it eventually suspended the program. But South Korea is not even trying to get its living soldiers back. Bringing POWs home to South Korea should be Seoul’s first priority, he argued. Because it isn’t, he will do the job.

If Mr. Jung is lucky, he will succeed in repatriating a few more old soldiers. But the task is harder now than it was in the 1990s, when he was first on the job. The POWs are elderly, and many of them are too frail for the rigors of an escape. Eighty-year-old men cannot paddle themselves across the Yalu River on a wooden raft, as Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho did in 1994.

Successive South Korean governments have spent decades trying to negotiate their return, without success. The United Nations, under whose flag they fought, has forgotten them. Somewhere in North Korea, five hundred South Korean prisoners of war have been held for nearly sixty years. They are unlikely ever to see their homeland again.