EARLY IN 1976, DANISH POLICE BEGAN to monitor a jewelry shop in Copenhagen. Its owner, they suspected, was involved in some illegal dealings. They soon noticed that a black Mercedes with diplomatic license tags often appeared near the shop, and that the car’s passengers handed bags to the shop owner. The Mercedes was identified as belonging to the North Korean Embassy.
The suspicious meetings focused police attention on the diplomats’ activity, and on October 13, 1976, the North Korean diplomats were caught handing 147 kg of hashish to local drug dealers. The entire Embassy staff of four diplomats was promptly expelled. This was the beginning of the “Scandinavian smuggling crisis” which is still well remembered by many—not least due to its bizarre nature.
This was not the first time North Korean diplomats had been caught moving illegal drugs. In May 1976, a group of North Korean diplomats, once again smuggling hashish, were intercepted by Egyptian customs. The loyal soldiers of the Great Leader even drew knives, but they were overwhelmed and of course, their diplomatic passports saved them from prosecution.
But it was in Scandinavia in the mid–1970s that the North Korean embassies became involved in illegal activities on a massive scale. And this was not just good old espionage, long tacitly recognized as an integral component of the diplomatic trade. No, the North Koreans were engaged in something far more intriguing: the large-scale vending of smuggled merchandise!
Soon after the Copenhagen debacle, in late October 1976, the Norwegian police caught North Korean diplomats selling 4,000 bottles of smuggled liquor and a large quantity of smuggled cigarettes.
Liquor was to feature prominently in the Nordic crisis. In order to control the drinking habits of the population, and also to increase tax revenues, the northern governments imposed exorbitant taxes on alcohol. I still remember one by-product of this policy—the wild Finnish drinking parties of the 1980s which were often held in my native St. Petersburg, where they could enjoy the cheap booze. This system made the importation of tax-free liquor an extremely profitable business. Pyongyang officials soon discovered that this was a way to make easy money, and began to transport tax-free liquor and cigarettes in their diplomatic luggage.
In Norway, for example, it was estimated that the DPRK Embassy sold liquor and cigarettes with a black market value of some one million dollars (at present day prices, this would be at least three times this amount).
After Norway and Denmark, a similar network was discovered in two other Nordic countries—Finland and Sweden. The scale of operations in Sweden was probably the largest, and the affair was widely discussed in the local press. One night, some mischievous Swedish students put a sign reading “Wine and Spirits Co-op” on the entrance to the DPRK Embassy—to the great annoyance of its inhabitants.
However, Sweden did not follow Denmark and Norway’s lead and break diplomatic relations with the North. As a Swedish official explained at the time, “There were other considerations involved.” His nebulous remark was easy to interpret: of the Scandinavian countries, Sweden was the only one that had real interests in North Korea. In the early 1970s, when Pyongyang widely borrowed on the international market, Swedish businessmen shipped a large amount of equipment to Pyongyang.
Obviously they acted on the then-common assumption that Communist countries made good borrowers. It was only when, around 1980, North Korea became the first Communist country to default on its loans, that the Swedes belatedly learned to their chagrin that the pickings were not as good as they had assumed. However, the vain hope of recovering some money prevented Stockholm from officially breaking off relations. The fact that Sweden also had a representative in the Armistice commission might also have had some bearing on the decision.
Thus, the rather inept attempt to use diplomatic privilege for smuggling backfired. This does not mean that these activities ceased. From the mid-1970s, the North Korean missions overseas were under permanent pressure to earn money to pay for their expenses and, ideally, send some currency back to the home coffers. All legal and illegal methods were permitted: after all, foreigners were outsiders and hence fair game for Juche warriors. Nor were Pyongyang’s allies and sponsors exempted—all were fair game.
All these activities probably created far more problems than the amount of money earned warranted. In essence, it was a mistake. But the occasional erratic behavior or miscalculation by North Korean diplomats should not lead us to underestimate their skills. They might be inept tacticians, but they are good strategists who have managed to outsmart many a powerful adversary.
*****
EARLY IN 1996 A RICH JAPANESE VISITOR attracted the attention of the Thai police. The attention was probably unwanted but certainly well-deserved: during his visits to Thailand, this man paid for his expenses with counterfeit U.S. $100 bills. The suspect was intercepted when he was trying to cross from Cambodia to Vietnam in a North Korean Embassy car. Inside the car police found a bag of counterfeit U.S. $100 bills. The man’s identity was discovered as well: the rich Japanese was none other than Yoshimi Tanaka, one of the Japanese extremists who in 1970 had hijacked a Japanese plane and forced it to land in North Korea. He had resided in the North ever since.
A long trial ensued. Tanaka denied that he had anything to do with the 1,238 counterfeit bills found in the car. Since it was impossible to prove otherwise or, for that matter, arrest the North Korean diplomats who accompanied Tanaka, Tanaka was acquitted of the counterfeit charge in 1999 on the grounds of insufficient evidence. He was extradited to Japan to stand trial for hijacking, however....
The Tanaka affair was just another reminder of the scale of the “unconventional economy” practiced by the North. Indeed, North Korea has acquired a notoriety as a country which uses quite unusual methods to fill the coffers of its treasury. The first incidents of this kind took place in Scandinavia in the mid–1970s and have been described above. But smuggling liquor and cigarettes in the diplomatic luggage was only the beginning of an enduring and well-established enterprise supervised by a special agency in the North Korean bureaucracy.
It was recently reported that over the years 1976–2003 there have been 50 documented cases of North Korean diplomats involved in drug trafficking. The actual figure is much higher, since the North Koreans targeted not only the “hostile” West, but the “friendly” Communist bloc as well. The North Korean embassy in Moscow was engaged in smuggling from the early 1980s, with North Korean students in the then USSR used as sales agents. Due to “national interest considerations,” these incidents were never reported by the Soviet and later Russian presses, but they were always a thorn in the relations between Moscow and Pyongyang.
Over the recent decade this activity has increased. In a number of countries North Korean officials have been caught trying to sell counterfeit U.S. dollars, illegal drugs (largely methamphetamines), or ivory. Of course, similar things have happened with officials from a number of other states, but in these cases it is normally the result of the penetration of the state bureaucracy by some criminal rings. In North Korea, the opposite is the case: it is the state itself that has decided to use criminal methods to increase its revenues.
And why do they need to do this? Because North Korea badly needs money and cannot get enough revenue through the normal channels. They have no currency to pay for imports, and their industry is largely unable to manufacture products that are marketable overseas.
Most of the illicit trade is coordinated by an agency called Room 39, a special department in the KWP Central Committee bureaucracy (in English it is usually rendered as “Division 39,” but I choose to stick to the more literal translation). Room 39’s main goal is to acquire hard currency through any legal or illegal means.
Room 39 is especially active in Macau, the former Portuguese colony which has become a major base for North Korean illicit operations. In 1994 the Macau authorities arrested the head of a North Korean trade company and four other North Koreans for making a deposit of a large amount of counterfeit $100 bills. Of course, they were loyal to the Great Leader (or rather to their own families who were hostages back home), and did not say anything. The investigation came to a standstill, but similar activities certainly did not. In 1998 a North Korean official was caught while trying to pass U.S. $30,000 in counterfeit bills in Moscow. In 1999 another incident took place in Macau. A number of similar incidents have taken place in Thailand over the past decade as well.
Coincidentally, U.S. experts believe that the Pyongyang-produced U.S. dollars are of exceptional quality, which is assuring—at least we know that some North Korean products are of international standard....
Another Room 39 favorite is ivory. Diplomatic immunity provides Room 39 with wonderful opportunities to move ivory around the globe, from the African poachers to the rich consumers in South Asia. A North Korean diplomat was once intercepted in Moscow smuggling 600 kg of ivory! And they do not care how many elephants die in the process. Endangered species? Bah, humbug!
North Korea also appears to be a major producer and exporter of drugs, with Japan being its major target. Pyongyang’s logic is simple: international politics is a struggle for survival, and no holds are barred!
*****
NEAR THE KIM IL SUNG UNIVERSITY, in the Moranbong district of Pyongyang, stands an intriguing group of official buildings. They do not bear any signs, but there is nothing special about that: even the most innocuous North Korean agencies do not advertise their whereabouts. However, in this particular case there are good reasons to be discreet. The Moranbong complex houses a powerful part of the North Korean intelligence community.
Communist countries typically followed the Soviet example of having two distinct, and sometimes competing, intelligence services. One was responsible for political intelligence and for industrial espionage in non-military areas (in the USSR it was the foreign branch of the KGB; in later decades of Soviet history it was known as the First Directorate), while another was gathering military intelligence (in the USSR this was the Armed forces’ Main Intelligence Administration, better known as GRU).
The North Koreans augmented this duo with another service which can be described as the party’s own intelligence. Nothing like it existed in most other Communist countries.
This peculiarity is a result of North Korea’s history. The ruling Korean Workers’ Party or KWP is not, technically, a North Korean party. It was created in 1949 when the North Korean Workers’ Party merged with the (then illegal) South Korean Workers’ Party. The united party was supposed to operate across the entire Peninsula.
The 1949 merger meant than the KWP inherited a large underground network in South Korea. It included numerous party cells, groups of agents, guerrilla detachments, and clandestine presses. In those days, the Communist underground still hoped to overthrow the South Korean government by means of domestic rebellion, and was engaged in large-scale guerrilla warfare in the South (as newly discovered Soviet documents testify, this was done with the full support and encouragement of Moscow).
Running this secret network required a special agency which would be responsible for subversive activity in the South. Such a department had to be created within the Korean Workers’ Party structure, since the clandestine operations in the South were run by the KWP.
Thus, the KWP Central Committee acquired what was known as a “Liaison Department.” This Department was principally set up to liaise with the South Korean underground, and keep it provided with weapons, instructors, radio stations, and what not.
By the mid–1950s, after the end of the Korean War, the South Korean Communist underground ceased to exist. Most of its activists had been killed or imprisoned, while others had moved to the North where, more often than not, they eventually felt victim to Kim Il Sung’s purges.
However, the Liaison Department outlived the structures which it was initially supposed to run. For a while, it was deemed necessary to preserve it since the North Korean leaders hoped to restore the Communist underground in the South. Even when this dream died sometime in the 1970s, the Department survived. Now the Department coordinates operations aimed at undermining the Seoul government and bringing a Juche-style revolution to the South. It is also responsible for “revolutionizing” the overseas Koreans, and using them as a channel of influence in the South. For example, the powerful pro–Pyongyang “Association of Korean Residents in Japan” (better known under its Korean name of Ch’ongryŏn) is controlled by the Central Committee’s United Front Department, a part of the “Third Building” bureaucracy.
Of course, not much is known about this structure, not least because the South Korean intelligence services, which presumably have a wealth of data, are not eager to leak it to the press.
The “Third Building” bureaucracy is presided over by a KWP secretary who is responsible for dealing with the South. The “Third Building” also houses three or four interconnected, specialized departments of the Central Committee.
The former Liaison Department is still the center of bureaucracy. It is now known as the “Department of Society and Culture” (a nice name for a spy agency, is it not?). It trains the people who are to be dispatched to the South, and runs a network of underground agents there. Its efforts are augmented by the “United Front Department” which manipulates a number of seemingly innocuous front organizations, operating both in North Korea and among ethnic Koreans overseas. The Operational Department deals with technical questions relating to the dispatch of agents.
The Foreign Intelligence Analysis Department, often known as “Room 35” (or “Bureau 35”) used to be a part of the “Third Building,” but according to some reports it has become independent from the “Third Building” even though it remains a part of the KWP Central Committee bureaucracy. This department is responsible for acquiring and processing foreign intelligence not necessarily related to South Korea.
In addition to the “Third Building,” North Korea has two other intelligence services: the Military Intelligence and the Ministry for the Protection of State Security.
*****
NORTH KOREAN SPY AGENCIES LOVE KIDNAPPINGS. Of course, many of their colleagues worldwide would also love to abduct a person or two, but in most cases there are perceived urgent reasons for such dramatic actions: the victims are prominent opposition leaders, or wanted criminals who cannot be extradited through normal channels, or people who are unlucky enough to know something far too important to be allowed freedom of movement or speech.
However, some of the North Korean abductions are different: they are often surprisingly random and target people of no apparent significance. The very randomness of most abductions was once cited by skeptics who used to rebut these accusations as “Seoul-inspired falsities.” Indeed, why should the secret services of a Stalinist state spend time and money to kidnap a Japanese noodle chef or a tennis-loving teenager? Nonetheless, in 2002 none other than Kim Jong-il himself, the Dear Leader and son of the founder, confirmed that these seemingly meaningless abductions of average Japanese men and women did take place. This led to a major scandal which put additional strain on the already tense relations between North Korea and Japan.
Of course, North Korean spies did not limit themselves to the Japanese. The North Koreans began to snatch their own dissenters, abducting them from the Soviet Union and other communist countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Then they applied their new experience and skills to a wider choice of targets, including, of course, South Koreans.
It is known that since the end of the Korean War in 1953, at least 486 South Koreans have been forcibly taken to the North and never returned. These statistics do not include a large number of North Korean refugees who were abducted from China over the past decade. Nor does it include a far larger number of South Koreans who were taken to the North during the Korean War, either as prisoners or draftees for the North Korean armed forces.
There are four major groups of South Korean abductees: fishermen, navy personnel, and the passengers and crews of hijacked planes. The abductees also include a number of known victims of covert operations. Currently the latter are said to number seventeen, but there is little doubt that the actual number is much higher. If the abduction is planned and conducted well, the victim simply disappears and is sooner or later presumed dead.
A good example is the case of five South Korean high-school students who disappeared from island beaches in 1977-78. They were all believed dead (presumably drowned) for two decades, but in the late 1990s it was discovered that the youngsters were working in North Korea as instructors, introducing would-be undercover North Korean operatives to the basics of South Korean culture and lifestyle.
It is remarkable that the kidnappings of these South Korean students roughly coincided with similar abductions in Japan. In both cases the abductors obviously targeted randomly selected teenagers who were unlucky enough to be on a lonely beach at the wrong time, and in both cases abductees were later used to train espionage agents. Perhaps teenagers were seen as ideal would-be instructors for the spies: still susceptible to indoctrination but with enough knowledge of local realities to be useful. But one cannot help but wonder how many teenagers who are still presumed to be drowned or lost in the Korean Peninsula’s mountains were actually taken to North Korea. And how many of them have survived to this day?
Quite a few of the kidnappings took place overseas. In April 1979, a young South Korean walked into the North Korean Embassy in Oslo. His name was Ko Sang-mun and he was a schoolteacher back home. Why and how he did this is not clear. As was usually the case, the North Korean side insisted that Ko had defected, while the South Koreans alleged that the young teacher was the victim of a taxi driver’s mistake: he took a taxi to the “Korean embassy” and the driver delivered him to the embassy of the wrong Korea.
At that stage, it is impossible to say whether this highly publicized case was abduction, a defection or something in between. However, in 1994 it was revealed that Ko was in a labor camp. A small propaganda war ensued. Ko was made to appear in North Korean broadcasts assuring everybody that he was free, happily married and full of righteous hatred for the U.S. imperialists and their Seoul puppets (most of his broadcast speech consisted of standard anti–American and anti–South rhetoric). We do not know where he disappeared to after delivering this speech—to an apartment in Pyongyang or to a dugout in a prison camp, but the latter option appears more likely. Meanwhile, Ko’s widow in the South committed suicide, unable to cope with the stress of the situation.
There were also more convenient cases of abduction: the North Koreans kidnapped people who possessed important intelligence. In 1971 Yu Song-gun, a South Korean diplomat stationed in West Germany, was kidnapped in West Berlin together with his wife and their two children. Perhaps a few other South Korean officials who went missing in Europe in the 1970s were also abducted by North Korean agents, but at this stage only Yu’s case is certain.
In the 1990s most abductions of this sort took place in China, and the victims were political activists, missionaries and real or suspected South Korean spies. All these abductions occurred in China’s northeast, near the North Korean border. In early 2005, the South Korean government finally admitted that pastor Kim Tong-sik, involved in aiding North Korean refugees in China, was kidnapped by North Korean agents in January 2000. He was transported to North Korea, where the intelligence officers tried to extract information from him—presumably by applying good old Stalinist interrogation techniques on him. The pastor died.
A vast majority—90% of the confirmed cases or 435 out of 486 abductees—are fishermen who were taken to the North with their vessels after they were intercepted at sea by the North Korean navy. After such incidents, the North Koreans usually insisted that the vessel had deliberately crossed the demarcation line between the two Koreas, while the South Korean side either denied this or asserted that the trespassing had been an innocent navigational mistake. It is not possible to say who was responsible for a particular skirmish, especially since the navigational techniques available to Korean fishermen back in the 1960s and 1970s left much to be desired.
In some cases the captured crews were eventually repatriated, but often Pyongyang alleged that at least a few crew members had “chosen to stay in the socialist paradise and not to return to the living hell of the capitalist South.” In some cases this may have been true, while in many others it was a blatant lie. This is a common problem with abductions or defections. When an incident happens, South Korean authorities and the family members of an abductee have an incentive to present the incident as a kidnapping while the North Korean side insists that the person in question has defected voluntarily. One suspects that even in the future it will be impossible to discover the truth with absolute certainty: human motivations can be mixed. There will be new pressures as well: in post–Kim Jong Il Korea, few people will be ready to admit that they or their close friends once voluntarily defected to the Stalinist regime.
The first known interception of a fishing boat took place in May 1955 and the most recent incident occurred in 1987, when 12 South Koreans became the prisoners of the North. During subsequent interceptions the crews were always repatriated.
Some people were kidnapped in the air, not at sea. The first such incident took place in 1958 when a group of hijackers flew a South Korean plane to the North. Most of the passengers and crew were returned, but Pyongyang in its usual manner stated that two passengers (and six hijackers, of course) chose to stay in the socialist paradise. In 1969 another plane was hijacked. Most of the South Koreans were repatriated, but twelve crew members and passengers were held in the North. Eventually, two stewardesses became announcers in the North Korean propaganda broadcasts which target South Korean audiences.
Generally North Korean authorities wanted to utilize the knowledge and skills of their abductees. Of course, the fishermen hardly had access to valuable intelligence, but they could still be trained as spies and sent back to the South. They were also used for schooling would-be North Korean intelligence operatives. The better-educated abductees could be employed by institutions responsible for waging propaganda campaigns against the South in, say, their broadcast facilities.
Most of the abductees were dispatched to work somewhere in the countryside. Some led lives which could be described as normal or even successful, at least by North Korean standards. For example, Kim Pyŏng-do, whose boat was intercepted in November 1974, was forced to stay in the North, where he became a factory worker. Eventually he became a foreman, was decorated for exceptional work, and otherwise enjoyed a life not so very different from that of the average North Korean worker. In 2003 he crossed the border into China and returned home. Others were much less lucky. There have been reports about abductees being sent to prison camps as “unmasked spies” or “reactionaries” (the above-mentioned story of Ko Sang-mu being one of many examples).
But one cannot help but wonder why there is not much said about the abduction issue in Seoul. After all, there have been fewer than 60 Japanese abductees—even if one were to believe the highest available estimate. Nonetheless, the issue is central to Japanese politics and stirs high emotions in Tokyo. Meanwhile, only family members and some right-wing groups seem to care about South Koreans who have vanished in the direction of Pyongyang. So what is the matter?
This reflects the general approach to the North in present-day South Korea. The abduction issue used to be much cited by the official propaganda of the military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, but middle-aged Koreans are seriously (and, one suspects, incurably) allergic to anything that reminds them of this propaganda. The political Left, which increasingly dominates South Korean internal discourse, is remarkably positive towards the North. The logic is simple: if one raises uncomfortable issues with the North, it is unlikely to help, and will doubtless make things more complicated instead.
The left-wing journalists love to say, “Development needs come first, and human rights second.” This might well be true, but these same ideologues are incensed when a similar logic is applied to the authoritarian regimes of South Korea’s own past, even if South Korean strongmen, unlike the North Korean dynastic rulers, delivered truly exceptional economic growth, and even if the human-rights violations in the military-ruled South were on an infinitely smaller scale. This can probably be described as a betrayal of political freedom committed by the South Korean Left—but admittedly, throughout the world’s history, freedom has been sacrificed to political expediency both by the Left and the Right a countless number of times.
It is important to note, however, that isolated attempts to raise the issue are largely ignored by the general South Korean public, or at least by the majority. They long to nurture their newly acquired illusions about the North. According to the currently prevailing mood, North Korea should be seen as a tragically misunderstood brother in need of help, not as a cruel kidnapper of teenagers or torturer of priests on humanitarian missions.
Sometimes, the present-day South Korean public opinion (or rather the now dominant sections of it) conveniently forgets the most outrageous examples of North Korean action. Few people remember, for example, the attempted abduction of two South Korean artists which took place in Zagreb—even if the documents recently found in the archives of the former Yugoslavia shed new light on this story. Which brings us to our next topic....
*****
IN EARLY JULY 1977, PAEK KǑN-U, a young but famous Korean pianist residing in Paris, received a rather unusual proposal. He was told that a Swiss multi-millionaire would like a private concert to be given in his home, and Paek Kŏn-u had been selected as the artist to play this concert. He was invited to go to Switzerland together with his wife, the famous beauty Yun Chŏng-hǔi, who was one of the leading stars of the South Korean movie industry of the 1970s.
The proposal arrived via Mrs. Pak In-gyŏng, the wife of a prominent Korean painter who also lived in Paris. Mrs. Pak did not make a great secret of her leftist views, and her husband was soon to become one of the very few overseas Korean painters who was permitted to hold an exhibition in Pyongyang. However, in this case Pak In-gyŏng said that she was driven by a purely material interest: the mysterious millionaire was allegedly a buyer of her husband’s paintings. Initially Paek was not enthusiastic about the idea, but besieged by Pak In-gyŏng’s unrelenting persuasion, he finally gave his agreement.
On July 29, 1977, the couple, accompanied by Pak In-gyŏng, arrived in Zurich where the concerts were to take place. Then things began to take a strange turn. At the airport, the group was greeted by a woman who introduced herself as the millionaire’s secretary. She explained that the venue had been changed, and that the private concert would take place in Zagreb, in Yugoslavia. While technically a Communist country, Yugoslavia always was a dissenting member of the Communist bloc and was on relatively good terms with its capitalist neighbors. Nonetheless, it had strict visa regulations. The “secretary” assured them, however, that everything would be taken care of.
When the trio arrived in Zagreb, Paek Kŏn-u and his wife noticed an unusual sight: a North Korean passenger plane standing on the tarmac. Zagreb had a small airport, and had no regular service to Pyongyang (no East European country had such a service in 1977). At the airport Paek and Yun also noticed an Asian woman who appeared to be a North Korean. As promised there were no visa problems: the group was met by a Yugoslav official who let them skip the usual immigration procedures. However, no one greeted them at the airport. Following the instructions they had received in Zurich, they took a taxi and went to a villa located on the city’s outskirts.
By this time Paek Kŏn-u was quite suspicious, and he asked the taxi driver to wait for a moment. He also had his wife remain in the taxi. The villa was empty and did not appear to be the house of a leisurely businessman. However, after a few minutes Paek encountered a man. Judging by his dress and manners, the man was North Korean, so Paek took flight, hotly pursued by the stranger.
Near the gates, the pianist jumped into the car and locked the door before the North Korean could grab the handle. The taxi then drove off. Being the holder of U.S. permanent residency rights, Paek Kŏn-u went straight to the U.S. consulate. The American consular official put them up in a local hotel, next to his own room, and arranged air tickets for the first available flight to Zurich. At dawn, a group of Asian people tried to break into their room, but Paek and Yun did not open the door, and the following morning they flew out. The North Korean plane still stood on the tarmac.
Obviously, Paek’s vigilance, courage and good luck (as well as the decisive actions of the American consular official) prevented Yun Chŏng-hǔi and Paek Kŏn-u from becoming the first prominent South Korean artists to be kidnapped by the North Korean secret service.
The late 1970s were the heyday for North Korean kidnappings, and strangely enough, South Korean movie stars appeared to be one of their favored targets. Perhaps this was the personal imprint of a well-known North Korean movie buff who was supervising the secret operations while being groomed to become the new Dear Leader. In 1978, Ch’oe ǔn-hǔi, one of Seoul’s major movie stars, was abducted in Hong Kong, soon to be followed by her husband, a movie producer. It appears that the same fate was to befall Yun Chŏng-hǔi and Paek Kŏn-u.
In the 1990s more details emerged. It is known that some Yugoslav officials were bribed by the North Korean operatives to facilitate the abduction. But a lot of things remain unclear—like, say, the role of Pak In-gyŏng. Seoul conservatives accuse her of being a Pyongyang agent who tried to lure her “friends” into captivity and perhaps death, while the Left lauds her “progressive pro-democratic activities.” We are unlikely to learn the truth anytime soon. But in South Korea, being a “progressive” and even a “human rights activist” does not necessarily preclude an enthusiasm for one of the world’s most repressive and murderous regimes. Such are the vagaries of Korean history.
*****
ONE NOVEMBER DAY IN 1957, those who happened to be in the courtyard of the old North Korean embassy in Moscow, witnessed a remarkable episode. All of a sudden, a window on the second story was broken from the inside, and a man in his late 20s jumped from the window onto the roof that covered the entrance to the basement of the building. The next jump put him on the ground, and then the man rushed to the embassy entrance. “Stop him!” “Close the gates!” “The bastard is getting away!” “Start the car!” But it took several minutes to start the embassy cars, and by the time they began the pursuit it was clearly too late: the runaway had disappeared into the Moscow streets. One of the first abductions undertaken by the North Korean secret services had gone awry.
The “Japanese abductee” issue recently once again attracted attention to a bizarre feature of the North Korean spy agencies: their penchant for kidnapping. Among their victims number Japanese and South Korean citizens, but the least known part of the North Korean operations is the kidnapping of North Korean citizens who begin to show traces of dissent while overseas. To avoid the political problems caused by an open defection, these persons are either lured back, abducted, or killed.
Most of these operations took place in the Soviet Union. The Communist superpower had always had a number of North Korean sojourners—students, officials, technical experts, and loggers. The experiences of these people in the USSR often made them skeptical about the omniscience of the Great Leader, or the wisdom of his policies. Such unbelievers had to be dealt with.
We are unlikely to ever learn the precise details of all these operations. The relevant documents are now buried in the Pyongyang archives, and I am not sure whether these papers will survive the turbulent future events of Korean history. After all, paper is highly inflammable, as every keeper of secrets knows only too well. At any rate, in the early 1990s, several hundred Koreans (largely loggers from timber camps in Siberia) were officially considered “missing” in the USSR. Some of them were indeed victims of crime or miscellaneous incidents, but the Soviet security services believed that many had been kidnapped or assassinated by Pyongyang agents.
The first incident of this kind occurred in 1957, soon after a major scandal rocked relations between Moscow and Pyongyang. Influenced by the Soviet ideas of non–Stalinist socialism, a dozen North Korean students from the prestigious State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow refused to go back to Korea and asked for Soviet asylum. The asylum was granted. This decision of the Soviet authorities was both a humanitarian step, and a clear warning sign to Pyongyang indicating Soviet disapproval of Kim Il Sung’s policies.
The VGIK students were led by Hŏ Chin (Hô Un-bae). In spite of his young age (he was 30 years old in 1958), Hŏ Chin was a Korean War hero and also a grandson of Hŏ Wi, a famous Confucian scholar and independence fighter. In Moscow Hŏ Chin became a vocal critic of Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship, and the decision was made to kidnap him. The North Korean agents managed to get him into the embassy, but there Hǒ Chin, a man of great fitness and courage, jumped out of the toilet window and disappeared into the city.
Another incident took place in the autumn of 1959, and once again it was the abduction of a dissenting artist. Yi Sang-gu, a North Korean postgraduate student at the Moscow School of Music, applied for Soviet asylum and even sent a letter critical of Kim’s regime to Korea’s rubber-stamping parliament. Retribution was swift. On 24 November, Yi Sang-gu was abducted by North Korean agents. This incident happened in the center of Moscow in broad daylight, virtually at the feet of the Tchaikovsky monument (a suitable place to kidnap a promising musician). Yi was forced into a car and flown to Pyongyang the next day, visibly drugged and unconscious.
This incident triggered the personal intervention of Nikita Khrushchev, the then Soviet leader. The North Korean ambassador was recalled to Pyongyang and the DPRK government was required to make a formal explanation. As one might guess, the entire affair was blamed on over-zealous officials, but this did not help Yi Sang-gu: the hapless musician disappeared into the Pyongyang prisons forever.
And what happened to Hǒ Chin? He stayed in the USSR where he became a journalist and writer. In the 1970s he undertook a daring project: braving the threats of the North Korean spying agencies, he conducted interviews with numerous North Korean exiles in Russia. These interviews were used in a book which he published in 1982 in Japan—one of the first serious studies of North Korean history.
*****
ON JANUARY 16, 1968, A BUS LEFT a top-secret North Korean military base in Hwanghae Province. The passengers were officers of the elite “unit 124,” young and fit soldiers in their mid-20s. That evening they departed for a special mission in Seoul.
Their morale was high: the soldiers believed that their operation would hasten the collapse of the “puppet regime” in the South. They were given the password for passing through the DMZ on their way back, but they understood that the chance of their ever using the password was close to zero. Theirs was a mission of no return. The 31 North Korean commandos were tasked with attacking the Blue House, the official residence of the South Korean president.
At some point in 1966 the North Korean leaders (in all probability, Kim Il Sung himself) decided that the South was ripe for a Vietnamese-style revolution. This was a gross misjudgment, but for a few years Pyongyang acted in accordance with this assumption. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Koreans on both sides of the DMZ paid with their lives for this miscalculation.
“Unit 124” was trained for guerrilla and terrorist activities in the South. The unit included a number of Southerners who had moved to the North with their parents prior to or during the Korean War. This is yet another reminder that the entire Korean conflict was essentially a civil war where Koreans fought Koreans.
It took almost two years to train the would-be assassins. In early January, the participants in the raid were trained in a specially constructed model of the Blue House. Everything was well rehearsed.
Initially the operation went smoothly. The commandos crossed the DMZ unnoticed, changed into South Korean army uniforms and began their advance on Seoul. They slept during the day and moved at night. And then the unexpected happened. On January 19 they came across a group of woodcutters. The logic of this operation required any unlucky civilians whom they met to be killed on the spot. But “unit 124” were an idealistic bunch. They fought to liberate the South, not to kill innocent people! Thus, the woodcutters were set free after a crash course in Communist ideology. Once released, they rushed to the police. The lesson was learned, and in later decades North Korean commandos treated unwanted witnesses in a more conventional manner....
However, even though they had been tipped off by the woodcutters, the South Korean police did not manage to intercept the group. Of course, the scale of the problem was underestimated also. In the years 1966–1968, North Korean raids were a common part of border life; security was, however, tightened up.
By early Sunday morning, January 21, the group approached its destination. Everything now was going to plan. After a daytime break, they marched toward the Blue House.
At 10:10 P.M. the North Koreans were a mere three hundred meters from the Blue House gates. Suddenly they were stopped by a police patrol and asked for identification. They insisted that they were soldiers of a special counterintelligence unit returning to their barracks. However, Ch’oe Kyu-sik, the commander of the Chongno police station, found the group suspicious. In the midst of the argument, one of the North Koreans lost his nerve and opened fire; a gunfight ensued.
Ch’oe Kyu-sik was killed on the spot but he had raised the alarm, so the Southerners were not caught unprepared. The Northerners began to withdraw under heavy fire. About a dozen commandos were killed on the spot. During the fighting, a North Korean soldier threw a hand grenade into a city bus, killing and wounding its passengers.
Eventually, 27 of the 31 North Koreans were either killed or committed suicide to avoid capture. Some 40 South Koreans died in the fighting as well. The fate of the remaining three commandos remained unknown. Much later it was learned that at least one of them managed to return safely to the North, where he later became an army general. There was only one prisoner—Kim Sin-jo, the son of South Korean migrants. He was the commander of a squad responsible for killing everybody of the ground floor of the Blue House. Nowadays, he is a popular Christian minister in Seoul.
The Blue House raid was one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the two Korean states, but more attempts to assassinate the South Korean top executive followed. The most prominent of them took place in Rangoon in 1983, 15 years after the Blue House raid. But that is our next story....
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ONCE UPON A TIME, THE NORTH KOREAN spy agencies loved to hunt South Korean presidents. Indeed, over the 15-year period between 1968 and 1983, there were at least three assassination attempts against South Korean leaders by the North Korean secret service. All three attempts were a close shave—and we can surmise that there have been a number of plans which remained unknown because they were canceled or went completely wrong.
The last known attempt to kill the chief executive took place in late 1983, in Burma. In the early 1980s South Korea was in turmoil. After the death of President Pak, power was grabbed by another military strongman, Chun Doo-hwan.
In early October 1983 a large South Korean delegation was scheduled to visit Burma, one of the few countries which at that time had diplomatic relations with both Koreas. This opportunity for the North was not to be missed; the North Korean embassy would be an ideal base for an operation.
On September 22, 1983, a North Korean cargo ship docked in Rangoon harbor. Apart from the crew members, it had three very special passengers: Major Chin Mo and Captains Kang Min-ch’ǒl and Sin Ki-ch’ǒl were officers of the North Korean elite special operations squad. They left the ship unnoticed and were met by a guide, a North Korean woman who worked for the embassy. The woman escorted the trio to their safe house, the apartment of a North Korean diplomat.
In the six-story apartment block the officers spent the next few days waiting for an explosive device to be delivered to them. On October 5 they left the relative security of the safe house and moved to the scene of the intended assassination.
Standard Burmese protocol required visiting foreign dignitaries to pay their respects at the mausoleum of Aung San, the founder of the modern Burmese state. Despite an ongoing civil war, in 1983 Rangoon itself was a relatively safe place. Thus, the mausoleum was poorly guarded, and at dawn on October 7 the North Korean agents easily installed the bomb under the roof. They then prepared an observation post a few hundred meters away. From their hideout they could activate the device at the right moment. They then spent the night in a park, and took up their positions at dawn on October 9.
Around ten in the morning, the South Korean dignitaries began to gather near the mausoleum. They were waiting for the president, who was on his way. And then the unexpected happened. A Mercedes 280 belonging to the South Korean ambassador stopped near the mausoleum. It was the last opportunity to rehearse the ceremony, and the Burmese officials decided to make sure that everything would go according to established protocol. A bugler blew his trumpet....
When the agents saw these movements, heard the trumpets and saw a large car carrying the South Korean flag, they assumed that the president had arrived. Chin Mo, who was the head of the assassination squad, pressed the button. It was 10:28 A.M. on October 9, 1983.
The huge explosion instantly killed 20 people—3 Burmese and 17 Koreans. The list of victims included a number of Cabinet ministers. The Vice-Premier, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Trade and Commerce, as well as a number of other officials were killed in the blast. But, contrary to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s expectations, Chun Doo-hwan survived—actually, he was well away from the spot when Chin Mo detonated the charge.
The assassins tried to run away. However, they were soon hunted down by the Burmese police and taken following a fight. Sin Ki-ch’ǒl was killed in the shootout while Chin Mo suffered serious injuries.
Pyongyang denied any involvement, but after the capture of the team, it all became glaringly obvious. Burma broke diplomatic relations with the DPRK, and even official newspapers in China, North Korea’s major ally, published the official Burmese reports without any comments, indicating that in Chinese eyes the North Koreans had gone beyond what was acceptable.
Chin Mo, who refused to cooperate with the investigation, was sentenced to death and eventually executed. Kang Min-ch’ǒl had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He is still an inmate at Insein Prison. Kang became a devout Buddhist, mastered Burmese, and is studying English.
The Rangoon incident was the last known North Korean attempt to assassinate a South Korean leader. Soon the changes in the political situation made such attempts both impossible and meaningless. After all, over the last decade the survival of the Kim regime was made possible largely by the generous amount of aid provided by South Korea, a country which is technically still at war with the North.
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FOR THE 50-ODD YEARS THAT FOLLOWED the armistice of 1953, both Korean states have been locked in an intense rivalry. It was a local cold war, a minor version of the global Cold War, but much more emotional, since it was a war between one people. On some occasions this cold war became very hot. Indeed, those decades were an era of daring raids, complicated intrigue, botched and successful assassinations and, of course, of covert naval warfare.
The major role in this quiet warfare was played by North Korean infiltration craft, used to land agents on the South Korean coast. There are three major types of vessels used by the North Korean navy for this purpose. Throughout the history of the quiet naval warfare, two ships of each type were lost due to enemy action.
The most unusual and imaginative contraptions are the semi-submersible boats. These can be described as a poor navy’s submarines. They are small boats, with a displacement of some 5–10 tons and a top surface speed of 40–50 knots. They have ballast tanks, and when these tanks are filled with water the craft submerges almost completely, with only the small conning tower visible above the water. In this semi-submerged state the craft is much slower, but it is also almost invisible both to human eyes and to radar. Perhaps they are not as good as a real midget submarine, but they are much cheaper and easier to maintain, and can carry up to six people.
The first battle with such a craft took place in December 1983 when one was discovered not far away from Pusan, and after a chase was sunk by the South Korean navy. Later it was recovered and now can be seen on display in a military museum in Seoul.
Another semi-submersible was lost in action, in 1998. The South Korean signal intelligence discovered the semi-submersible near Yŏsu in the early hours of the morning of December 18. The South Korean navy mobilized a number of planes and ships, which approached the boat, demanding the crew surrender. But North Korean special forces are famous for their unwillingness to give themselves up alive, so they opened fire using small arms. There was no possible doubt about the outcome: the boat was hit by artillery shells and sank, only to be salvaged the following year.
A semi-submersible infiltration boat cannot operate at a great distance from its base, and in most cases it is carried close to the target destination aboard a specially designed mother ship. Such ships are disguised as fishing boats, but they have powerful engines and a built-in dock for a semi-submersible or a more conventional speedboat. The dock is equipped with outward-opening double doors on the stern, allowing the boat to be safely hidden inside the hull.
There have been two cases in which such a ship has been discovered and sunk by hostile forces. The first incident of this kind happened in August 1983 when a South Korean patrol boat discovered just such a ship operating near Ullung-do Island. The ship was sunk after a short shoot-out.
Another incident took place in December 2001, and this time the ship was discovered by the Japanese navy near the Japanese coast. This was not the first discovery of its kind, but on previous occasions the North Koreans ships always managed to flee, taking advantage of their superior speed. This time, however, the ship could not move fast enough—perhaps the disintegration of the economy has influenced the navy as well. As could be expected, the ship’s crew refused to surrender and opened fire, injuring two Japanese sailors. The Japanese returned fire and in less than four minutes the ship sank, along with its entire crew.
The North Korean navy also possesses a number of submarines, including the Yugo class vessels. These are specially designed midget submarines whose major task is infiltration. The Yugo boats are small, with a displacement of just 70 tons when submerged.
One such submarine was caught in a fishing net near Sokcho on the east coast on 24 June, 1998. Its propeller and periscope had been fouled. The vessel was captured by the South Korean navy but sank while being towed. The submarine was soon salvaged but all crew and commandos (nine of them—more than usual for a submarine of this type) were found dead. They had committed group suicide.
Larger Sango class submarines are also sometimes used for infiltration. It was just such a submarine that was involved in the most high-profile case of military confrontation between the two Koreas in the 1990s. In mid–September 1996, a North Korean Sango submarine was on a routine infiltration mission: a group of commandos from the so-called Reconnaissance Bureau, the major military intelligence agency, were to conduct a surveillance of the military installations on the east coast. However, in the early hours of 18 September, the submarine ran ashore and was discovered by a taxi driver. The crew and commandos attempted to break through to the DMZ. A long spy hunt ensued, with heavy losses of life on both sides (among the victims there were local farmers whom the commandos killed as dangerous witnesses) as well as with the usual group suicide of the North Korean soldiers.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of this quiet war is the unwillingness of the North Korean soldiers to surrender. Few sailors and commandos have ever been taken alive. Does this reflect the exceptional valor of the North Korean warriors? To some extent it may, but there are also other reasons behind such behavior. But that is our next story....
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ON THE 22ND OF DECEMBER, 2001, a North Korean spy ship was being chased by Japanese patrol boats. The North Korean crew knew that they were in serious trouble: the engines did not work well, and soon it became clear that they would not be able to escape to the security of their own waters.
When the Japanese boats approached, the North Koreans opened fire with automatic rifles and grenade launchers. Two Japanese sailors were wounded, but the return fire sank the ship in a matter of minutes. Some survivors managed to stay afloat for a while. But they refused any help and even reportedly tried to shoot at their would-be rescuers. They did not last long: in December the seawater is a swift executioner.
In June 1998, the South Korean navy captured a North Korean midget submarine which had been caught in fishing nets. They towed it to a navy base and broke into the hull. They found nine dead bodies: the North Korean crew and commandos destroyed all classified material and committed group suicide.
In September 1996, a North Korean submarine ran ashore near Kangnung on the eastern coast while trying to recover a reconnaissance team which had completed its covert mission. It was less than a hundred kilometers from the DMZ, so the crew attempted a breakthrough. However, their chances were slim. Thus, the commanders ordered the suicide of those who were not fit enough. On September 18, 11 bodies of North Korean sailors and marines were discovered in a forest.
In November 1987, two North Korean agents were apprehended after they had bombed a South Korean passenger jet, killing all 115 people aboard. Both agents took poison: the younger one was saved while her older partner died on spot.
The list of such incidents goes on and on. The North Korean commandos and espionage agents are seldom captured alive—in most cases they die fighting or commit suicide when capture appears imminent. Even during large-scale operations very few prisoners have been taken. Of the 31 commandos who raided the Blue House in 1968, for example, only one was captured. Of the 26 sailors and commandos aboard a submarine which ran ashore in 1996, only one was captured alive.
What are the reasons for such behavior? Of course, one should realize that North Korean warriors are often ready to die for their country—like the warriors of any country should. It does not matter that their country is a repressive and impoverished dictatorship. After all, throughout history, millions of people have voluntarily sacrificed their lives for far more dubious causes. But apart from patriotism, a sense of duty and honor, there are material factors which make the North Korean soldiers remarkably unwilling to surrender—and these factors are probably more important.
How can a dead man be pressured by “material factors,” I hear you ask? Very simple: dead people have families—and their responsibility to their loved ones is often far stronger than their responsibility to the imagined community of a nation.
There was a wonderful Soviet joke of the 1970s which nicely captures the essence of the problem:
U.S. President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, while visiting Niagara Falls, started to argue about whose bodyguards were better. Brezhnev said: “Let’s have a check. Let’s order them to jump over the Niagara!” They gave the order. The American Secret Service guy said: “No way! I have a wife and kids!” The Soviet bodyguard rushed to jump but was stopped at the last moment. An American colleague asked: “Why didn’t you refuse to jump?” He replied: “No way! I have a wife and kids!”
This story captures the spirit of the system very wryly yet succinctly, even if in the USSR after Stalin’s death it softened up considerably.
Indeed, if a North Korean commando or spy surrenders, it means that he or she will be branded a traitor, and thus places his or her family back home in serious trouble. Most of these people are recruited from mildly privileged families. The real upper crust do not want their children to risk their lives in the tiny compartments of midget submarines or under the hail of South Korean bullets. On the other hand, the common people are not trusted enough, so the operatives are overwhelmingly the children of the mid-level elite: army colonels, mid-ranking party officials or university professors. In other words, their families have something to lose. A “betrayal” by a captured spy or commando would probably lead to the loss of all privilege and to exile, perhaps even to imprisonment of his or her immediate family: parents, spouse, children, and maybe siblings as well.
In contrast, a heroic death means that the family back in the North will improve its status. Children of a “dead patriot” are admitted to the best schools, perhaps even to Kim Il Sung University, his wife receives generous rations for the rest of her life, and his parents will also be seen as members of a “heroic family” with all the requisite perks.
The North even has a special bureaucracy which is charged with taking care of people whose providers died for the Dear Leader—the so-called 11th department. The heroic dead also have their own hierarchy, so a commando who committed suicide to avoid capture is well above, say, a soldier who was killed in a traffic incident while on military duty. Their families are treated according to this difference in status.
The family responsibility system works wonders, keeping people in line. The collective responsibility system might be seen as immoral, but it certainly gets results.