Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Q. Did you have any rough confrontations?

  A. “Although the guards were armed they couldn’t keep the military out. We were trained. Normally guards are beaten by military robbers. When theft occurs, 70 percent of the stock goes. Once the manager of a farm told the miliitary commander, ‘Please just hit one section of the farm. I’ll calculate the number of dogs stolen, report it to the commander and get compensation.’ Many guards were knifed to death.”

  Q. Did you fight people?

  A. “I used stones to frighten the guards. Normally they’d get frightened and back off. I didn’t kill anybody. One out of ten times there’d be a fight, but nobody ever fights with the military and wins.”

  Q. Did you ever see donated food?

  A. “Not international aid, but in 1995 South Korea donated food. I saw it. I got three or four kilograms. We were told the rice was from the Chongryon—that they had bought it from the South Koreans and sent it. That was the official North Korean story. After several months I found a leaflet from a South Korean balloon and heard South Korean radio reports so I realized the truth.”

  Q. How long did you listen to radio and read leaflets?

  A. “Leaflets I could see even when I was a kid. Radio I could receive when I was in the military. I could even watch KBS2 when I was in the military, but I had to be very careful.”

  Q. Were you an early doubter?

  A. When I was young I didn’t believe what the South Koreans said. And there was government-subsidized food in North Korea then. When I grew up, the economy was in worse shape and there was no more subsidized food. Kim Jong-il only visited military camps. He didn’t show interest in ordinary people. So I came to believe what the leaflets said. I decided in 1993, one year after I quit the army that I would defect eventually. My first idea was to escape to China, but I didn’t know the Chinese border area well so I decided to go to South Korea.”

  Q. What are you doing now?

  A. “I work with the farmers’ cooperative.”

  Yoo Song-il, a supply colonel until he retired to civilian life in 1992, noted when I met him in 1998 that military service was not mandatory in North Korea. “But we’re taught all our lives that joining the military is the greatest honor. You can’t be a party member or hold a high position without military experience. So every young man’s dream is to join the military. I reached the rank of colonel in logistics and supply. I was based in the same place in Kangwon province, right across from the DMZ, for twenty-four years, supplying eastern DMZ posts.”

  Q. What was the military supplies situation as of 1992?

  A. “Until 1992 we did have the basic rations needed, and supplies for war. In the military everybody had enough food for three days in reserve, plus two days’ worth of other necessities. Also, in a warehouse, we had some more. In total, we had nine days of food in reserve. There are set amounts of daily food and other necessities for soldiers: 560 grams of rice, 240 grams of other grain, 100 grams of meat, 1 kilogram of vegetables, 20 grams of soy sauce and 10 grams of cigarettes. They’re supposed to get that even if they’re not fighting. But while we got rice, cigarettes and salt, Kim Jong-il said to produce our own meat and vegetables. As a practical matter, soldiers didn’t get what they were supposed to get.”

  Q. Had the soldiers missed rations by 1992?

  A. “No. One reason they didn’t get all they were supposed to get was that whenever such and such quantity of meat was supposed to come to my base officials on the way down would take some. By the time it arrived, there wasn’t enough. In reality, some soldiers were malnourished. We put malnourished people together and fed them separately. If they improved, they were sent back to their units. Otherwise they were hospitalized or discharged.”

  Q. What proportion were malnourished?

  A. “About 2 percent.”

  Q. Did the army reduce war reserve stores?

  A. “Yes, there were times when that happened, because of the economic crisis. The nine-day supply included food, fuel, ammunition, explosives and uniforms, kept in a war-staging area on each base.”

  Q. Did you examine those stores?

  A. “Yes, once a week we checked and replaced old rice with new.”

  Q. How would you compare the army-with your civilian life in Chongjin, regarding food supply?

  A. “It’s like the difference between heaven and earth. When I was in the military I never had to worry about food or clothing. When I got out, rations were scarce. We were supposed to get them every fifteen days but it didn’t always happen, so we had to worry about food. Officials always took what they needed, but most people relied on their rations.”

  Q. What if-war comes?

  A. “There’s always a possibility of war. The soldiers have been raised all their lives to think if Kim Jong-il is in charge they’ll win. The civilians are starving. They’ve been taught that the only way to live well is through reunification. Now they’re starving. What can they lose? They all think once there’s a war they’ll win.”

  Q. What do you think?

  A. “War is possible if Kim Jong-il is threatened enough. North Korea is a place where people can’t protest. The country for fifty years has been preparing for war. But the people are starving. If the situation gets worse and Kim Jong-il’s power structure is threatened, he might start a war as a last resort. Although I don’t think it would happen easily, it’s definitely a possibility.

  “After the July 14, 1973, statement for unification, in the military-we had hope, we started thinking about unification. But the party used that to reinforce the military and put everything into defense. The party used this propaganda to say, ‘When unification comes, we’ll have to liberate the South. We must reinforce and invest in the military’”

  Q. I calculate that you would have joined the army around the time of the Pueblo’s capture, 1968.

  A. “Yes. Lots of people joined the military then, because we thought there’d be a-war.”

  Q. How did you become an officer?

  A. “Through effort. Kim Jong-il was backing the military. It was the most popular occupation. I didn’t go to the academy. Rather I was picked for three months of officer candidate school and promoted.”

  Q. What did your fellow field grade and senior officers think of the chances of victory?

  A. “When they think of war they think offighting the United States and Japan, rather than South Korea. They used to say, ‘China and the Soviet Union shouldn’t be involved. This is our own war, against the U.S. and Japan.’ They think we’ll win. They’re brain-washed to think so.”

  Q. You thought so?

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. Now what do you think?

  A. “In terms of will, indoctrination, the South is at a disadvantage. North Koreans are single-minded. In the South they’re talking of peaceful unification. That’s not how the North thinks. In the North, everyone is ready mentally for war. But in the South most citizens don’t think of it, and they don’t have that resolve to win. Technically, North Korea lags behind. But they say a fight goes to the single-minded. That’s what North Korea has. Unless South Koreans prepare themselves mentally for the possiblity, who knows what will happen?”

  Q. Some say North Korean soldiers’ morale will crumble when they see the riches of the South—they’ll just start looting instead of fighting.

  A. “I don’t think so. Yes, they’ll be shocked, but they’re disciplined.”

  Q. What are you doing now?

  A. “It hasn’t been a year since I got here. I was in an education camp, started living as a civilian last July. Now I’m checking job possibilities, lecturing on the North Korean situation. I want to get my South Korean driver’s license, so I’ll be taking classes for that.”

  Q. Are you helping the South Korean army?

  A. “Yes, a little. After all, I was in for twenty-four years.”

  Ahn Myung-jin had served in a special spy force with military ranks whose mission was to infiltrate into South Korea. With
his thick forearms, Ahn looked strong. And after I had heard his story late in June of 1994, just a few days before Kim Il-sung’s death, I reflected that he could represent both the wildest dreams and the deepest fears harbored by Kim Jong-il.

  From 1979 to 1987, Ahn told me, he had studied at Wonsan Foreign Language Institution. When I noted that I had visited Wonsan, an east coast port, during my 1979 visit, he replied curtly, “That was in better times.” At the school, he said, “I specialized in English but the course wasn’t very good. There is one of those foreign language institutions in each province. You go to language school right after four years of elementary school and spend eight years of middle and high school there. Future spies are selected from among the graduates.

  “From 1987 to May 1993 I attended the university-level Kim Jong-il Political-Military Academy in Pyongyang. The term of study there is five years and six months. They basically teach espionage, terror and other undercover tactics there, including how to kidnap important government officials and lure potential defectors from South Korea and, in the event of war, how to get into South Korea ahead of the People’s Army and destroy the important institutions.”

  The junior member of the team that bombed the South Korean airliner in 1987, Kim Hyon-hui, who had posed as a Japanese traveler, had survived a suicide attempt with a poison capsule after capture (her senior colleague died) and ultimately told her South Korean captors the details of the mission. “Kim Hyon-hui had gone earlier to the same school, when it was called Kumsong Political-Military University,” Ahn said. “There are two tracks. She went through the one-year espionage course. The six-year program is for people who will be involved in the war effort.” Ahn boasted that she “didn’t do a tenth of-what I did. Compared with what we had to do, her work was very light.”

  He was passionate as he elaborated on the superiority of his training: “Because Kim Hyon-hui had only one year of training, she would not have been the one in charge of an order given by Kim Jong-il. She wouldn’t pull the trigger, or kidnap someone. Kim Hyon-hui was in the Department of External Information, concerned with Japan. She wasn’t being trained to infiltrate but just to become Japanese. I was in the Strategic Division of the Party Central Committee’s Espionage Department, of which the academy was a part and where we needed military training. She only got input and didn’t learn how to output information. I would inspect important sites that might be ordered blown up and study the interiors to see where the explosives could be placed. As for swimming, I had to swim 10 kilometers; she only had to make four kilometers. I practiced scuba diving and all kinds of shooting—long distance, short-range, moving objects.

  “We studied the geography ofSouth Korea. I knew it by heart. And I knew how to act like a normal South Korean. [My interpreter, Rhee Soo-mi, noted that Ahn indeed did not speak with so obvious a Northern accent as other Northerners she had helped me interview.] I could use the local currency and so on. I wasn’t surprised by South Korea when I came here.”

  Q. Had you studied the “Orange Tribe” (as a species of trendy young Seoulites was dubbed in the mid-’90s)?

  A. “We learned all about the people who live here, from the Orange Tribe to beggars. [In spy training] people are classified demographically by occupation and age group. We used audiovisual aids and studied dialects.”

  Q. Were you trusted to know anything whatsoever about South Korea?

  A. “I read all the dailies published in South Korea. We also knew that South Korea was a much freer country with much higher living standards.”

  Q. If they let you know that, how did they keep you loyal?

  A. “Actually they changed the system after the Kim Hyon-hui case. She hadn’t been taught what I was taught about South Korea. She was taught about Western capabilities but she thought South Koreans didn’t live as well as North Koreans. When she was taken to Seoul and saw the South Korean living standards, she betrayed the regime. So they decided it was better to teach the reality to avoid such surprises.”

  Q. But how did they keep you loyal?

  A. “First you should not imagine that we were ordinary North Koreans. Our living standards were up to those of the higher class in South Korea. We would do our best to conduct espionage in South Korea. In the past, though, if spies failed they would commit suicide. What the regime doesn’t know is that the current crop would not commit suicide in case of failure but surrender, since we had learned that defectors live pretty well here.”

  Q. Tell me about your family background and your attitudes toward the regime as you grew up.

  A. “My family was part of the elite. All who attended the academy were selected for good family background, meaning no history of association with South Korea.

  “I was a fanatical believer in the ideology. Every true rejection of ideology has a practical reason. In my case, I had wanted since my childhood to be a diplomat, and I was supposed to go to the External Information Department, the one that Kim Hyon-hui was in. But in my senior year at the foreign language school, I got into a fight with a soldier and that ruined my chances to go to the External Information Department and become a diplomat. Diplomats from my background are in fact spies who spy on other countries, not on other North Korean diplomats. Instead I had to go to the Central Party Espionage Department’s Strategic Division.

  “At the Kim Jong-il Political-Military Academy my ideology began to change. Ideological change combined with the damage to my career made me turn against the regime. I always knew about the discrepancies in the North Korean regime and felt dissatisfaction, but the main point that made me defect was this: If you’re in the Strategic Department you can no longer meet your parents or other family members. You live like the upper class but you’re isolated all your life.”

  Q. Why isolated?

  A. “Three reasons. First, we had been exposed to the realities of capitalist countries and the regime was afraid we might influence others who had not. Second, they also feared that ordinary people would see our much more opulent lifestyle and resent it. Finally, many trainees were killed in training, which could cause problems with parents—it was thought best they not know what we were doing.”

  Q. But wouldn’t the first reason have applied also to ordinary diplomats, who weren’t isolated?

  A. “Diplomats know, but they don’t have the detailed knowledge of South Korean society that I was taught. Anyhow, diplomats who graduate from the academy are also isolated.”

  Q. So you had expected isolation anyhow?

  A. “Yes. But if I had become a diplomat the isolation wouldn’t have been so extreme—I would have had occasional chances to meeet my family. Also, the work-wouldn’t have been so strenuous.”

  Q. You were isolated from women?

  A. “When I was at the language school I had friends who were girls, but the instant I entered the academy I was isolated from them. Once I reached twenty-eight or twenty-nine I would be given ten to fifteen days to get a woman. I would write to request my parents to propose a bride for me, then I’d go marry her and bring her back. In the agency there are a couple of women, but they are in great demand.”

  Q. Any other reasons for your disappointment besides the isolated life?

  A. “In the Strategic Division, there was lots of strenuous training. And I would have to kill people even though I didn’t want to.”

  Q. You disliked your assignment in Strategic? (I waited for him to mention any moral repugnance or sense of injustice.)

  A. “Yes. While I was growing up my parents always taught me to be good. In the Strategic Department they teach you to hurt or kill others to protect yourself. It bothered me.”

  Q. Did you have a moral objection or was it more a matter ofconvenience?

  A. “It cannot be only a matter of convenience. I just couldn’t stand doing over and over all my life things I didn’t want to do.”

  Q. What was your opinion of your unit’s basic mission of destroying South Korea?

  A. “That it was possible and
necessary in order for there to be reunification on Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s terms.”

  Q. The end justifies the means?

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. (I told him about the chemical warfare colonel who wanted to wipe out the whole South Korean population.) Is there a lot of such thinking in North Korea, that the end justifies the means?

  A. “No one ought to say we should kill all the 40 million civilians in South Korea. I was taught we should not kill all the South Koreans, but if they opposed our regime then we would kill them.”

  Q. Have you met Lee Chong-guk (the man who had issued the chemical warfare warning), the only defector I’ve met who didn’t describe any personal problem as part of his motivation for defecting?

  A. “Most of those who escaped from North Korea are people who couldn’t stand their low living standards. I also am surprised by Lee Chong-guk. Could it be possible to defect with no reason?

  “In my case, if you asked for the one big reason I defected I would answer: Being exposed to unlimiited outside information I realized that if reunification came it would be by North Korean collapse or absorption into South Korea. I would become unemployed and because of my status as a spy my parents would be in danger.” Q. Do you think any of the defectors is an agent provocateur? A. “I don’t think so. That’s not the way they infiltrate spies into South Korea.”

  Q. Tell me more about the spy trainee lifestyle.

  A. “Rations for us were different. I got high-quality rice, 900 grams a day eggs, chocolate, butter, drinks. At the academy I lived in a dorm, four people to a room equipped with air conditioning, television, video, refrigerator. After graduation and before I defected I was in an accommodation of that same standard.

  “I graduated May 20, 1993, then defected on September 4. In the interim I spent one month practicing infiltration by water—swimming, scuba practice. The second month I studied taekwondo; the third month, wireless telecommunications plus reality training in a facility resembling South Korea.

  “A big tunnel, 12 meters high, 30 meters wide and 8 kilometers long, in the same area as the KJIPMA contains a 100 by 50 meter scale model of Seoul and, separately, approximately one-fourth-scale mockups of some of the more important institutions. I remember seeing the Blue House, the police department, the Agency for National Security Planning, the Kyobo Building, the Shilla Hotel, Lotte and Shinsegye department stores, as well as small cafes. When you walked through the streets you felt you were there: discos, South Korean–made cars, South Korean products inside the buildings. The scale model of all of Seoul has all the important buildings in Seoul, and the sub-way entrances. Next to each building is a brochure showing its whole interior.