Escape from North Korea

The joke’s humor, such as it is, requires the listener to grasp the utterly brutal nature of the Kim regime’s control over its citizens. The first thought of each bodyguard is the same: how to protect his wife and children. But unlike Ivan, it does not occur to the North Korean bodyguard to ask for mercy. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, may yet have a heart; Kim Jong Il does not. The North Korean bodyguard knows that the only way to save his family is to show total and immediate obedience, even if it means leaping to his death out the window of a skyscraper.

A top priority of North Koreans who escape is protecting their families back home. When they leave their country illegally, they know they are putting their loved ones in jeopardy. Even after they have permanently resettled in South Korea or elsewhere, many North Koreans refuse to use their real names or have their pictures taken, citing concern for their families still in the North. A survey of refugees in China found that an astonishing 99 percent of respondents feared for the safety or survival of their families in North Korea.²

The range of punishments meted out to the families of escaped North Koreans varies widely. The punishment can depend on the importance of the person who left, the political climate in Pyongyang at the time, and the often capricious attitudes of the local authorities. Some families are left alone or, at worst, called in to their local police station for a reprimand that may include some roughing-up. In other cases, families lose their homes and are banished to remote villages as punishment for their relative’s escape. In still other instances, families simply disappear, taken away in the middle of the night to an unknown, presumably highly unpleasant, location. Families of political defectors have been known to end up in the gulag or suffer fatal “accidents.” In early 2012, reports from news organizations and humanitarian groups with sources in North Korea told of families who were forcibly relocated to rural locations in the interior of the country as punishment for a relative’s escape.

After reaching safety in South Korea or elsewhere, refugees, like immigrants everywhere else in the world, send regular remittances to their relatives back home. The difference is that a North Korean cannot walk into a bank or a Western Union affiliate and arrange to do so. There are no official channels through which to send money to an individual in North Korea. Refugees instead must seek out informal means, usually brokers who specialize in transferring money into the country. The initial point of contact is often a North Korean resident of South Korea who has gone into the business of helping new arrivals reach out to their relatives; such a broker often works with a network of helpers in China. Many of the South Korea–based brokers are refugees from the North who rely on the knowledge and skills they acquired while on the run in China. They typically employ Chinese citizens of Korean heritage. The brokers provide communication and financial services. They set up illegal cellphone calls with refugees’ relatives, and they carry in cash.

Making a phone call to a relative in North Korea isn’t a matter of flipping open a cellphone and punching in a long series of numbers. First, a refugee or his broker must hire a courier in China. The courier will cross the river, go to the relative’s house in North Korea, knock on his door, and deliver a Chinese cellphone with prepaid minutes on it. The North Korean resident will be instructed to travel to a border town at a specified time, turn on the phone, and wait for a call from his relative. The cellphone captures a signal from China, not North Korea. It is illegal to possess such phones, so the owner must bury it or otherwise hide it until he needs to use it.

Mobile phone service was introduced to North Korea in 2008, when the Egyptian telecommunications company Orascom formed a joint venture with a state-run North Korean firm.³ Service was limited to Pyongyang at first, then spread to other cities. By mid-2011, Orascom said that it had more than six hundred thousand subscribers. By early 2012, it was boasting that it had one million subscribers, or more than 4 percent of the North Korean market. Visitors to Pyongyang reported that their guides all seemed to be using mobile phones, and the government reportedly was encouraging cellphone use among officials.

The Orascom phones are useless, however, for communicating with the outside world. In keeping with Pyongyang’s policy of closing off access to the rest of the world, phone service is limited to domestic calls. International calls are blocked. Nor can North Koreans make calls to foreigners inside North Korea. The phone numbers assigned to foreigners living in North Korea are different from the phone numbers assigned to North Koreans; it is impossible to make calls between them. In any case, the authorities can monitor phone calls and do so.⁴ The government confiscates the cellphones of foreign visitors when they enter the country and returns them upon departure.

The process for sending money home to North Korea is labor-intensive. If the refugee is living in China, he will give cash to a broker, who will in turn hire someone to deliver it by hand to the relative in North Korea. If the refugee is living in South Korea or elsewhere in the free world, the refugee will arrange for the money to be transferred electronically to the Chinese broker’s bank account. Next, a middleman, usually a Chinese citizen, will cross the border and deliver the money, in cash, to the designated recipients. If the recipient doesn’t live near the border, the broker might hire a local courier to deliver the money elsewhere in the country. North Koreans who have settled in the South secretly send some $10 million a year to their families in the North, according to at least one estimate. ⁵ The broker’s service fee is usually 30 percent.⁶

A survey conducted by a South Korean nonprofit found that 71 percent of refugees settled in the South have tried to send money to family members in the North.⁷ “Tried” is the operative word. Many of the respondents said they believed the money did not reach their relatives. Sending cash through brokers is a risky business, and gullible North Korean refugees, often desperate to help their families, are easy prey for unscrupulous brokers. There are many stories of brokers who take a refugee’s money and disappear.

If a remittance gets through, the recipients also receive something even more valuable than the money: information. A North Korean refugee identified only as “Kang” explained to a South Korean newspaper how the process works. “When we make remittances to our loved ones in the North, we talk to them over the phone to ensure the money was properly sent,” he told the Korea Herald. “Through such talks, a wave of news about the capitalist society flows in and spreads there.”⁸

Since the early 2000s, as an increasing number of North Koreans reached South Korea, the brokers’ range of services has expanded beyond setting up phone calls and helping refugees transfer money to relatives. A new service has been added: people smuggling. One sub-specialty of brokers specializes in extracting North Koreans from their country and delivering them to China. Another sub-specialty focuses on getting North Koreans out of China on the underground railroad to a third country, from where they go on to South Korea. Many brokers work in tandem with Christians and other humanitarian workers.

Brokers are critical to the smooth operation of the new underground railroad. There are unscrupulous people in this business, to be sure, and nasty stories abound of brokers betraying their clients. But it would be wrong to tar all brokers as such. The best brokers understand that if they want to stay in business, they have to deliver what they promise. As with legitimate service businesses, reputation is the key to success. They are in the business of smuggling people, which means that they take risks. It also means they expect to make a profit. If they fail, the émigré grapevine will ostracize them and their business won’t succeed.

“Brokers are a necessary evil.” That statement is heard over and over again from refugees, humanitarian workers, and, off the record, from South Korean government officials. A Unification Ministry official concedes, “Without brokers, it would be almost impossible for North Koreans to bring their children here.”⁹

The majority of North Koreans who reach the South today are women. If they are mothers, getting their children out of North Korea or China is often their top priority. This was the case with one woman, now settled in the South, who asked me not to use her real name. Ten years after “Ms. Lee” escaped from North Korea, her dearest dream came true. Her daughter joined her in Seoul.¹⁰ The story of how Ms. Lee orchestrated her daughter’s escape—first from North Korea and then from China—is typical of how such rescues work.

Ms. Lee is a businesswoman in her forties. She is well educated and possesses a generous share of street smarts. She approached her daughter’s escape in the same way that she would approach an important business deal, giving it her full attention and checking and double-checking every detail. She was unlikely to be taken advantage of by any of the con men in the underground.

Before giving her daughter the green light to cross the river, Ms. Lee did her homework on the brokers and possible escape routes. The refugee network in Seoul helped her evaluate the reliability of various brokers and make decisions about whom to trust. So did her contacts among Christians who worked on the new underground railroad. An American who rescues trafficked women gave her an introduction to his network of helpers in China.

Ms. Lee had been praying for years to be reunited with her daughter. After her initial escape from North Korea in 1999, she had no contact with her husband and daughter for three years. She spent some of that period in a North Korean prison, where she was incarcerated after having been arrested in China and repatriated. When she was released from prison, she returned immediately to China.

In 2002, while in China for the second time, Ms. Lee saved enough money to hire a Chinese broker to track down her family’s whereabouts and set up a phone call. The broker discovered that Ms. Lee’s husband and daughter had been expelled from Pyongyang, where they had been living at the time of Ms. Lee’s original departure, and assigned to live in a city in the undesirable far north of the country. Only ideologically pure citizens are permitted to live in the capital city, where they have better access to food, good housing, and jobs. That category does not include those who have a relative who left the country illegally. After the broker tracked down Ms. Lee’s husband and daughter, he set up a phone call.

At the time of that first phone call in 2002, Ms. Lee tried to persuade her husband to let their daughter join her in China. But he refused: Crossing the river was too dangerous, and living in China was too full of risks. The girl was only thirteen. In China, she ran the risk of being sold as a bride or pressed into service in the sex industry. If she was captured and repatriated, she might not survive the inevitable stay in a detention center. The husband’s fears were not without basis.

Once Ms. Lee reached South Korea later that year, she tried again to persuade her husband to let their daughter leave. He continued to refuse. So she gave up. “I was living my own life in South Korea, and she was living her life in the North,” she said. She continued to send money to her daughter, and they would talk on the phone once in a while. But she did not again raise the subject of the girl joining her in the South.

One day in early 2009, she was surprised to answer the phone and hear her daughter’s voice. The young woman, now nineteen years old, was calling from the home of the broker Ms. Lee had been using in North Korea to send money and arrange phone calls. Her daughter had traveled to the broker’s house in a border town several times in the past to receive calls from her mother, and she had memorized the address. This time she went to the broker’s house on her own initiative and asked him to place the call for her. She did not tell her father what she was doing.

Ms. Lee sprang into action. She had been working with the broker in North Korea for a decade and believed she could trust him to get her daughter out of North Korea safely. With the help of her Christian contacts, she lined up another broker in Seoul who specialized in extractions from China. She gave the two brokers each other’s phone numbers and instructed them to come up with an exit plan. The North Korean broker agreed to manage the girl’s crossing into China. He would get her as far as Yanji City in China, close to the North Korean border. After that, a Chinese guide hired by the broker in Seoul would take over. The guide would escort the young woman across the country to Southeast Asia.

One of the decisions the broker in South Korea had to make, in consultation with Ms. Lee, was what third country the daughter should use as her springboard to South Korea. Ms. Lee’s broker worked in three countries: Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. They decided on Cambodia, where the broker had a reliable team and where, they believed, the political climate was welcoming at the time and the South Korean Embassy would not turn her away. The Chinese guide would see the girl to the Laotian border. She would walk across that border on her own and then meet up by prearrangement with a local guide. The Laotian guide would escort her to the Mekong River and put her on a boat that would take her to Cambodia. At that point a local Cambodian guide would take over. He would take her to Phnom Penh and drop her off at the South Korean Embassy. The entire operation, from Yanji City in the northeast of China to Phnom Penh in south-central Cambodia, would take a week.

Bringing her daughter to Seoul was not cheap. The portion of the journey from North Korea to China would cost $2,000, Ms. Lee was told. The journey from China to Phnom Penh would require an additional $3,000. Ms. Lee did not blink at the costs. She had done her research and knew that these fees were in the normal range, in line with what others were paying for the same services. “There are set prices for getting people out of North Korea and for getting them out of China,” she explained. “These are separate operations.”

Although Ms. Lee had high confidence in the brokers handling her daughter’s extraction, she knew that the trip was hazardous and that even with the best planning, something could go wrong. For the mother, the scariest part of the journey was the week her daughter stayed in China. “There was nothing to worry about in North Korea,” she said with a dismissive wave of the hand, referring to the planned escape from that country. The corruption that infuses every aspect of life in North Korea provided her some measure of comfort in these circumstances. Just about everything in North Korea can be had for a price, she said. “As long as there is money, any problem can be solved in North Korea.”

China was a different story. Ms. Lee knew from her personal experience that China is an extremely dangerous place for a North Korean refugee. You couldn’t count on the corruptibility of Chinese officials. Many would accept bribes, but not all, and not all officials were corruptible. Money didn’t always get you out of a fix. “My daughter could be caught and repatriated,” she said. “I knew that as soon as she left China, she would be safe.”

Her biggest fear was that her daughter would be arrested in China and repatriated. Springing someone from jail in North Korea was possible, but it cost a lot of money, it took time, and the prisoner might not survive. If her daughter were accused of a political crime—such as planning to go to South Korea—and sent to a political prison, it would be even harder to spring her.

Before the girl departed from North Korea, Ms. Lee gave her some advice. Trust the guides and follow their instructions completely, she told her. Second, get new clothes. The guides would probably give her Chinese-made clothes, but if they didn’t, she instructed the girl to insist on them and to throw away her North Korean ones. She needed to be as inconspicuous as possible.

Ms. Lee had two conversations with her daughter during her week in China and one thereafter. The first call was from a safe house in Beijing—the girl used her guide’s phone to call her mother. She placed the second call when she was about to cross the border into Laos. They had one final phone conversation before their reunion in Seoul—the daughter called right after arriving in Cambodia. She phoned her mother to say that she was safe.

After those three phone conversations, Ms. Lee had no word for seven months. She later learned that her daughter spent four months in Cambodia waiting for an exit visa and three months in Seoul being vetted by the National Intelligence Service. The daughter then was released to Hanawon, where she finally was reunited with her mother.

Ms. Lee’s daughter was nine years old when they parted in 1999; she was twenty when the two met again in 2009. As Ms. Lee entered the large conference room where they were to meet, she looked at the sea of faces and had a sudden flash of anxiety that she would not recognize the young woman who had been a child when she last saw her. Then she spotted her daughter across the room, and her anxiety melted away in an instant. “I could tell from a distance that she was my daughter,” Ms. Lee said. “And my daughter also recognized me.”

Ms. Lee’s daughter represents a new wave of arrivals in the South: North Koreans who arrive straight from the North after only brief stays in China. Their numbers are growing as more North Koreans settle in South Korea and save enough money to buy their relatives out of both countries.

According to Youn Mi-rang, director general of Hanawon, almost 30 percent of the North Koreans who reached the South in 2009 arrived within a year of leaving North Korea. She believes this is a record and predicts that the trend will continue.¹¹

Many of these new-wave arrivals were the teenage or adult children of refugees who previously had escaped to South Korea. Their escapes were organized and paid for by relatives, usually their mothers. Women who set the goal for themselves of bringing their children to the South “have a purpose in life,” Director Youn said. They often work harder than other refugees, with the objective of saving enough money to free their relatives.

In Youn’s view, refugees who come straight from North Korea tend to exhibit fewer psychological problems than refugees who have spent time in China. About 25 percent of the refugees who reach South Korea suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. Women who were sold as brides or into the sex industry in China are especially vulnerable to lingering psychological disorders. Many refugees also have to cope with the guilt they feel about deserting their families in China or North Korea, especially if they left behind children. Hanawon has a psychiatrist on staff and also provides guidance in how to handle stress.

North Koreans who come directly to the South from North Korea, with only short stays in China, are less likely to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Youn. Of course, some do suffer from lasting stress. “Some of them witnessed executions, or some might have experienced imprisonment or torture,” and they have a hard time dealing with those memories, she said. But as a general matter, according to Youn, the shorter the period of escape, the less the disorder. Refugees in the new wave have another advantage if they have a family member to show them the ropes and provide emotional support in South Korea

Not everyone who works with displaced North Koreans shares Youn’s view. Others observe that refugees who experience the relative freedoms of China before settling in free countries often fare better than those coming directly from the North. The North Koreans get used to making decisions for themselves in China, they say. This gives them an edge when they reach their final destination.

North Koreans who have made it to safety in South Korea or elsewhere do not always have an easy time persuading their family members to join them. Relatives can be reluctant to leave, said Lee Keum-soon, of the Korean Institute for National Unification, a government-sponsored think tank in Seoul.¹² In addition to fears of being shot, captured, arrested, or repatriated, they also are sometimes afraid of moving to South Korea or the United States. These countries are portrayed in venomous ways by the North’s propaganda machine. Even though their relatives assure them otherwise, it’s hard for some North Koreans to believe that the American “jackals” or their South Korean “lackeys” won’t execute them after they arrive in South Korea. Making the decision to leave North Korea is not easy, even when a family member encourages the relative to depart, makes all the arrangements, and pays the bill.

The story of two sisters—call them “Sun-mi” and “Bo-mi”—is a case in point. I met the sisters in a safe house in Southeast Asia run by LiNK. They had escaped from North Korea three months earlier.¹³

The sisters, ages seventeen and nineteen, lived in a city in a northern province of North Korea. One day in the summer of 2010, they heard a knock on the front door. Sun-mi opened it to find a stranger who said she was an emissary from the girls’ father, who had disappeared from home three years earlier. The girls assumed their dad had gone to China, but they had not been able to confirm this. They had heard no word from him since he left, and they didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. He could be in China, or he could have been caught or killed while attempting to cross the river. Now, three years after his disappearance, the woman at their front door said their father was safe and wanted to talk to Sun-mi on the phone. The courier wanted to take Sun-mi to a location nearer the border so they could capture a Chinese phone signal and Sun-mi could place a call to her father.

Five days later the woman returned, and this time Sun-mi’s curiosity got the better of her. Maybe her father really did want to get in touch with them. The woman knew the sisters’ names and seemed to know all about them. So perhaps she really was a messenger from their father. She decided to take the risk and go with the woman.

The woman turned out to be legitimate. She took Sun-mi to a town near the border and placed the call to her father. It was the first time Sun-mi had heard her father’s voice in more than three years. He was as gruff and as blunt as she remembered. “Get off the phone and go to China,” he ordered.

It took two more phone calls before Sun-mi was convinced. She finally agreed to go to China, and she promised her father that she would take her sister with her. Sun-mi knew that persuading Bo-mi to accompany her would take some doing. Bo-mi had a special terror of crossing the river, fearing she would be shot in the back by North Korean border guards. But Sun-mi calculated that the prospect of staying home alone without her older sister would be more terrifying to Bo-mi than crossing the river. She was right. Bo-mi reluctantly agreed to go.

Sun-mi had one more phone call with her father before leaving North Korea. In the final conversation just before the girls’ departure, their father gave Sun-mi some last-minute instructions: The broker will handle everything, he told her. Just do whatever you’re told. And by the way, he had something to tell her that he hadn’t mentioned before. He was in America. In a place called Florida. The sisters were going to join him there.

Sun-mi couldn’t believe her ears. America was the evil country she had learned about at school. Americans wanted to kill North Koreans. She remembered a poster on the wall of her classroom that depicted an American soldier bayoneting a North Korean baby during the Korean War. When she told Bo-mi that they were going to join their father in America, her little sister freaked out. There was no way she was going to America. Sun-mi had to resort to a lie before she could get Bo-mi to go along. We’ll stay in China for just a few months, she promised, and then we’ll return home.

South Korea accepted a total of 2,927 North Koreans in 2009, according to the annual tally by the Ministry of Unification. Using Youn Mi-rang’s estimate that 30 percent of that year’s arrivals came directly to the South from North Korea, we can estimate that nearly nine hundred of the arrivals were new-wave refugees. Of those, most were North Koreans reuniting with family members.

The recent reunions of North Korean family members hold special poignancy when set in the context of the postwar history of the two Koreas, when about ten million Koreans were separated from relatives. Today, newly arrived North Korean refugees, working through unofficial channels, are able to reunite with their families, a goal that mostly has eluded an older generation of refugees for more than half a century. Most of the Korean War generation of refugees from the North do not even know whether the relatives they left behind in the North are alive or dead. The South Korean government estimated in 2011 that between four and five thousand elderly South Koreans with family members in the North are dying every year without having received news from their loved ones.

Over the years, the governments in Seoul and Pyongyang have permitted a limited number of brief reunions of families divided by the Korean War to take place under tightly controlled conditions. The first reunions were held in 1985, after thirteen years of negotiations. In that year, the governments of the two Koreas arranged highly publicized family meetings in each other’s capitals under the auspices of the Red Cross organization of each county. Fifty family members participated from each side. North Korea canceled the family reunions in 1986 in protest over joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises.

Fifteen years passed before the next reunions took place in 2000. These reunions were a by-product of the historic summit meeting in Pyongyang that June between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. This time, one hundred family members participated from each side. In Seoul, seventy thousand family members applied for the one hundred slots, which were decided by lottery. In the words of one disappointed man, “This was like giving steak to only one hundred selected people, while a million others can’t even eat porridge.”¹⁴ In Pyongyang, the selection process was not left to chance. The regime selected the one hundred participants.

Between 2000 and early 2011, seventeen rounds of family reunions took place along with seven rounds of video reunions. A total of 28,848 Koreans from 4,130 families met with relatives on “the other side.” In 2008, the South Korean government completed construction of an expensive family reunion center at Mount Kumgang, a tourist site in North Korea developed with South Korean money for the use of South Korean tourists.

There is a special kind of cruelty in these family reunions, which are limited to a few days. South Koreans arrive with food and expensive gifts for their relatives, who may or may not be permitted to keep them. Watchers are always nearby and privacy is limited. The joy of seeing one’s brother or sister or mother or father again is mitigated by the knowledge that the meeting is temporary and that this is probably the last time the family will be together. Lifetimes have to be recounted in hours, and at the end of the appointed time, the families must part again, with no assurance that Pyongyang will permit even an exchange of letters.

North Korea “fattened up” citizens selected for these reunions, according to a classified cable filed by the American Embassy in Seoul in 2009 and disclosed by Wikileaks.¹⁵ North Koreans are chosen to participate in the reunions based on their loyalty to the state, the cable said. They are “transported to Pyongyang and then fattened up with regular meals and vitamins to mask the extent of the food shortages and chronic malnutrition in the North.” The North Korean participants receive new clothing—suits for men, the traditional high-waisted Korean hanbok dresses for women—that they must return to the government after the reunions along with any cash they have received from their relatives.

For Pyongyang, separated family members are useful hostages in its dealings with Seoul. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the administration of President Kim Dae-jung reportedly gave large donations of food and fertilizer to facilitate the reunions. The Mount Kumgang family-reunion center sits on twelve acres of land and consists of three buildings paid for by the South Korean government.

Pyongyang has also used separated family members to extract ransoms from wealthy South Koreans desperate to obtain information about their relatives. In 2000, South Korea’s Unification Ministry reported that 525 South Koreans had succeeded in meeting their families in China after working with private agencies in that country. The middlemen for these private reunions were North Korean agents working in China or Japanese-Koreans with ties to Pyongyang. Family-reunion fees ranged from several thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars; a hefty chunk of these sums went to the North Korean government.

In 1998, a South Korean television network aired a documentary about a celebrity singer from the South, Hyon Mi, who was reunited with her sister from North Korea in the Chinese city of Changchung thanks to the services of one such private agency. The documentary was hugely popular, but it provoked bitter feelings from some viewers, such as a seventy-eight-year-old man quoted by the Korea Herald. His wife and children were lost in North Korea, he told the reporter. “Is is fair that only famous and well-to-do people are allowed to meet lost relatives?” he asked. “For many years, I have tried to find my family in the North. But now I wonder if a poor person like me can meet his family while still alive.”¹⁶

Over coffee in Seoul one afternoon, Kim Duk-hong, a prominent defector from North Korea, described to me how he had operated a profitable family-reunification business in China in the 1990s. Kim Duk-hong arrived in South Korea in 1997 along with his boss Hwang Jong-yap, the highest ranking defector ever to leave the North. Family reunification was a side business for Kim Duk-hong, whose real job in China was running an institute dedicated to spreading North Korea’s juche ideology. Pyongyang had ordered him to raise money to fund his institute, and as he cast around for ideas to carry out the orders, he saw a market opportunity in the family-reunification racket. South Korea and China had established diplomatic ties in 1992, making it easier for South Koreans to visit China. South Koreans would pay handsomely for the opportunity to meet long-lost relatives from North Korea, he reasoned.

Kim Duk-hong was a member of the powerful Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. As such, as he delicately put it, “I could easily search the national registry” that contains information about every North Korean. “I would check the social security numbers and then find them,” he said.¹⁷

At the request of a South Korean family, Kim Duk-hong’s business would track down a missing relative in North Korea, arrange for him to receive an exit permit to visit China, and set up a meeting with his relatives from the South. The relatives would spend a week together before returning to their separate homes in North Korea and South Korea. “At the end they would be separated,” Kim Duk-hong said, “but if the South Korean family wanted to send money, that could be arranged with my security office.”

For North Korea, enforcing family separation has been an essential tactic in its strategy of isolating its citizens and forcing its will on them. In 2000, on the eve of Kim Dae-jung’s summit in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il, the Far Eastern Economic Review published an emotional essay by Don’o Kim, a Korean-Australian novelist who had been born in North Korea.

In 1950, when war broke out between North and South Korea, Don’o Kim was visiting his uncle in Seoul. He was ten years old. Kim never saw or heard from his mother again. At the time of the publication of his essay, he still did not know whether she was alive or dead. It would be a miracle, he wrote, if the summit paved the way for family reunifications. No group will welcome this more jubilantly than what he called the “38 People,” Koreans like him who fled from North to South during the Korean War, crossing the 38th parallel.

The author criticized successive governments of South Korea for giving low priority to the issue of divided families, but he reserved his greatest scorn for the regime in Pyongyang. He wrote, “No government anywhere can claim to have incarcerated its people for so long and so successfully.”¹⁸

Don’o Kim’s words still hold true. North Korea remains a prison for most of its people. But not for all. The North Koreans who escape are helping to liberate their countrymen by means of the most lethal weapon their jailers have encountered: information.