Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Thus, despite wide grins on the North Koreans’ faces and a few points for Pyongyang in its propaganda contest with Seoul, the preliminary talks at Panmunjom in the DMZ fizzled out in mutual distrust, recrimination and nitpicking. So did parallel meetings to consider forming a joint North-and-South Korean table tennis team to compete in the tournament.14

  Working as a newspaper correspondent covering Korea, I was eager to be included in the press delegation accompanying the American team to Pyongyang. The view among Tokyo-based correspondents was that the only way one could hope to get into North Korea was through a persistent campaign of cables to Pyongyang, to a quasi-diplomatic body that specialized in dealing with the West. Those cables to the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, I was advised, should be supplemented by appeals to influential members of the pro-Pyongyang Korean community in Japan. I followed this program, emphasizing my open-mindedness. The North Koreans at the time were trying to persuade Washington that they had moderated their approach to South Korea, and I made note of my awareness of that effort.

  The regional paper I worked for, The Baltimore Sun, at great expense maintained eight foreign news bureaus as well as a large Washington bureau. Circulating in Maryland and adjacent Washington, it enjoyed a fine reputation among diplomats and other internationalists. As a sales pitch, one of my predecessors as Tokyo bureau chief had taught reporter/news assistant Hideko Takayama that whenever she telephoned someone unfamiliar with the paper to ask for an appointment she should explain that The Sun was “read daily by the President of the United States.” That claim had been more or less true at the time the former bureau chief taught Takayama her line, and she had continued to use it up to my time when she called North Korean and other prospective news sources who might lack detailed knowledge of the U.S. media. No one had thought to reexamine the procedure, even though other presidents had taken their turns in the Oval Office and it was possible the incumbent might have failed somehow to develop the same reading habit.

  I myself was not above boasting to Pyongyang’s representatives in Japan that the paper was to political coverage what The Wall Street Journal was to economics.

  Anyhow, the campaign worked. Along with correspondents for the Journal and a few other news organizations, I received my invitation to appear at the North Korean embassy in Beijing for a visa and thence to travel to Pyongyang.

  Not the first American journalist to reach North Korea, but close enough that I felt a little bit like Neil Armstrong arriving on the moon, I stepped off a Soviet-built plane at Pyongyang’s airport. Peering intently at everything I saw, I was determined to miss nothing. Pyongyang re-warded me by providing much that was unfamiliar, starting with the crowds of schoolchildren who stood in ranks along the road from the airport to cheer the latest arrivals for the table tennis tournament.

  Although at that time I knew very little of what I have written in this volume—and was indeed, I believe, pretty open-minded regarding what I would see—I had of course come armed-with some general impressions based on background interviews and reading. And I was set to filter whatever I might hear through the skepticism that American journalists of my generation had learned to apply to official claims made by any government anywhere in the world—especially our own. The North Koreans, for their part, were intent on turning skeptics into believers.

  North Korean papers and broadcasts were full of stories about the sporting events that I had theoretically come to cover, and my hosts made no secret of their opinion that I should show at least some interest in them myself. One day I did go to the matches and saw a pair of North Korean women competing against Korean-Americans who were playing for the U.S. team. Thirteen other matches were in progress at the same time, with North Korean competitors involved in some of them, but the North Korean spectators glued their eyes to this one match. Prosperous-looking Pyongyang people, mostly men in business suits and neckties, crowded the grandstand, cheering thunderously for the home team against the Korean-Americans, especially when the referee ruled for North Korea on a disputed point.

  Pyongyang’s heroine of the moment was Li Song-suk, who won the women’s singles world championship. The Great Leader, the papers said, had given his personal attention to her training, and that had been the secret of her success. However, the buzz among the other teams in Pyongyang was that the Chinese—-who had long dominated world table tennis—-were not above taking a dive as a re-ward to their hosts. Perpetually seeking political autonomy by playing its two giant communist neighbors off against each other, North Korea since the mid-’70s had been leaning toward the Chinese. Pyongyang had supported Chinese charges of Vietnamese aggression in Cambodia (but had conspicuously avoided comment on China’s war with Vietnam) while urging nonaligned nations to keep their distance from the Soviet Union.

  Reunification—to be preceded by American troop withdrawal, of course— was a constant theme wherever I went in North Korea. “Whenever the Great Leader visited us, he told us we should produce more tractors so that we could supply tractors to the southern part of the country when we reunify” said an official of a tractor plant that was on our sightseeing itinerary.

  One day I accompanied some other visiting reporters to scenic Mount Kumgang in the southeastern part of North Korea, near the South Korean border. When we got there, we learned that the authorities had arranged for a group of Koreans to talk to us as we viewed the scenery. They were there to tell us of their families, divided since the Korean War, and their dream of reunifying the country. They were so poised and prosperous looking that I thought they might be actors, but I had no reason to doubt that national division was a matter of great anguish to the families actually affected, on both sides.15

  I talked with Ko Young-il, a Korean-American who had signed on to travel to Pyongyang as interpreter for the American team in hopes of meeting his mother, five sisters and brother, whom he had not seen since the Korean War. Late in 1950, Chinese and UN troops fought over the North Korean county where they lived. In the confusion of battle Ko, then nine years old, found himself separated from his family and started to follow the UN troops south. About five miles from the county seat he met his father, and the two headed for their small town to search for the others in the family. When they got close they saw that the town was already burning, so they climbed up into some hills and looked for American troops. No one could tell them where his mother and siblings were. “Since then,” Ko said, “we never met them, we never heard anything from them. That’s it.”

  Ko lived in Seoul until 1972, when he took his family to the United States to seek “a better future for ourselves and our children.” He had become the owner of an auto-body repair shop and a billiard hall in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C He still held South Korean citizenship, and had needed the approval of the Seoul government to travel to Pyongyang. Ko was preparing to reunite with his family, figuring he must have a lot of nephews and nieces he had never met. He was eager. “Since I left America I can’t sleep,” he said. But at the same time he was nervous. For one thing, he worried about how his family members would receive him. Perhaps they would see him and ask, “Why are you here?” With greater cause, perhaps, he worried that the Northern regime might put pressure on his family because of him—might “blackmail” them, as he put it—and use the reunion for propaganda.

  I had no trouble imagining this as the sort of situation that official propagandists would play for all it was worth. Sure enough, when Ko did meet his family, the Pyongyang newspaper account quoted him as saying he would really like to stay in North Korea except that his father would not be able to join the rest of them. “Someday when we reunify the country we can live together,” he was quoted as saying. As presented, the quoted remark implied that North Korea was a highly appealing place to live—the usual formula.

  Two days later Pak Kyong-sik, a team leader in a hothouse on the outskirts of Pyongyang, told me that his family had seen a newspaper account of the reunion and “we sat an
d talked until late at night.” Pak said his brother had been separated from the rest of the family in the Korean War, going to South Korea. “Many years have passed, but I still haven’t had any opportunity to see my brother. I live with my parents, who worry a lot about whether my brother is alive or dead.” Pak told me that although he was leading “this happy life”—the requisite note lauding Kim Il-sung’s paradise—“I’m always eager to meet my brother.”

  On my first full day in Pyongyang, April 24, my guide told me I would be having lunch with someone. I asked with whom, and he replied, “We’ll see.” We went to a large private dining room in my hotel, where I was introduced to a man named Pak, a council member of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. This society, rather than the Foreign Ministry dealt with countries that had not recognized Pyongyang diplomatically and vice versa. Over a lavish meal consisting of Chinese, Korean and Western courses, Mr. Pak and I talked for an hour and a half. We began with a lengthy chat about the weather and went on to a discussion of U.S.-Korean relations. My guide interpreted well, although he was stumped at one point by the English word “pragmatism.” In this conversation a couple of things struck me. One was that Pak did not know much about the United States. He said he understood that Americans eat turkey on our independence day.

  Another thing that struck me was that Pak bluntly contradicted me only once. That was when I was speaking about the pros and cons of South Korea in the eyes of Americans. I told him that, despite what was then a lack of democracy as we understood democracy, South Korea offered its citizens a certain kind of freedom that Americans could identify with: freedom to make nonpolitical choices, to be upwardly mobile economically and socially. Pak snapped: “That’s not true!” And he said it with a fervid conviction that contrasted with the man-of-the-world demeanor he otherwise displayed that day. In the remainder of the conversation, while he could be ironic and a bit playful about American words and deeds, he never acknowledged anything positive about South Korea. My telling him that Americans could identify to an extent with South Korea seemed only to have reinforced his evident belief that the South was playing the flunkey role, trying to become a Western-style society—a contemptible trend, in his view of Korean cultural legitimacy.

  Pak said he hoped I would learn from my visit about the Korean people’s craving for independence. This got us to specifics, and it was troop withdrawal that he emphasized. I gave Pak my assessment that the Carter administration had drawn back from its troop withdrawal commitment at least partly because it would have amounted to a unilateral giveaway of bargaining chips, with nothing demanded in return. I spoke of the skepticism of U.S. allies, especially Japan. I mentioned the new intelligence estimates of North Korea’s military strength—agreeing with Pak that the timing of the revelation, in the heat of the troop-withdrawal debate, did seem a bit strange. Pak made a few perfunctory attempts to arouse my outrage that Carter would go back on his campaign promise. I steered the conversation back to the real world by emphasizing that the United States had to look at such matters in the light of its role as a world power.

  Pak finally rephrased what I had been saying: “So it’s a bargain that the United States wants now?” I agreed that this was the assessment I would make, as a mere newspaper reporter. As the meal ended, Pak delivered a flowery fare-well speech in which he said we would talk again.

  I made a reply speech (at lunch in North Korea one often made speeches instead of conversation) in which I attempted to state my understanding of American opinion regarding Korea. By the 1970s, I told Pak, many Americans including myself had come to wonder if Washington had been mistaken to get the country involved in Korea’s affairs in the first place. (I had never fully bought into the argument that the United States should have stayed home in the post–World War II period. But my personal views—I didn’t tell Pak this part—had been influenced by the arguments of revisionist historians, starting with college exposure to William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.) And maybe, I told Pak, the United States had learned in Vietnam a hard lesson about the consequences of injecting ourselves into Asian civil wars. But, wisely or unwisely, we had gotten involved in Korea, and a society had been building in the South for more than thirty years. We had to consider carefully how to phase out our intrusion honorably—doing violence to neither our idealism nor our loyalty.

  Pak was visibly displeased by this—as displeased, apparently, as he had been when I said that South Korea’s human rights record was better than Iran’s. But he said we would have further talks. I assumed Pak’s report to his colleagues and higher-ups would determine whether I would get more access to foreign-affairs officials.

  Some fellow journalists and I had been speculating whether Washington might have empowered any member of the U.S. table tennis delegation to deal with the Northerners on political issues. Pyongyang, eager to talk, clearly hoped that was the case. Looking over the group, however, we came up with no obvious CIA types or others who seemed like they might fill the role. I had the impression the North Koreans, like-wise coming up empty-handed, might have decided to feel out the journalists accompanying the delegation to see if any of us might have pipelines to the White House more direct than mere presidential readership. I certainly was not reporting to the U.S. government or, indeed, to anyone except my editors back in Baltimore, and did not pretend otherwise. I was not sure whether the North Koreans knew of the American law that forbade intelligence agencies from recruiting journalists on the staffs of American news organizations. Whatever my hosts might imagine, however, I hoped they would decide that sending a message through me and my newspaper would be an efficient way to reach people in high places in Washington.

  When I visited So Tong-bong, an editor of the Workers’ Party newspa-per Nodong Shinmun (Workers’ Daily), he told me that North Koreans “want the United States not to put obstacles in the way of reunification. So we hope the U.S. will withdraw American troops from the South and give a good atmosphere to create favorable conditions for reunification.” Improved U.S. relations with communist China had blunted the old justification that American troops were in the South to contain communist expansion, he observed—but still the troops remained, with the excuse of deterring North Korean aggression. “As you know, so many times we have clarified our position that we have no aggressive designs on South Korea,” the editor said. “War will not break out even if U.S. troops withdraw from South Korea.” (Seoul and Washington, of course, had plenty of doubts on that point. “They’ve got an awfully big military force for a country of peaceful intentions,” as one American official observed.)

  So Tong-bong told me that Americans should understand Koreans’ desire for unification. After all, our own Civil War had been fought over the question of unity. Nice try. But North Korea and the capitalist South, during the thirty-four years since the division of the country, had grown into societies differing from each other far more profoundly than the Union differed from the Confederacy. North and South Korea both talked a lot about unification, but it seemed that each wanted it only if its own system would rule on the united peninsula. Pyongyang wanted to reunify quickly while it still held the stronger hand—but Seoul wanted to obtain world recognition of two Koreas for the time being, and delay reunification for long enough to build the South into a position of potential dominance.

  The editor insisted that North Korea would not force South Koreans to live under the North’s system, and he added that Northerners had no thought of living under the South’s bourgeois system. In that case, I asked, how could the mere presence of U.S. troops in the South be blamed for preventing reunification—the sort of reunification he claimed he wanted, with the two Korean systems remaining mutually exclusive? “I think you know the answer,” he replied, in what I found to be a typical North Korean rhetorical device. He added, “We are insisting that reunification should be done by the Korean people themselves. If foreign interference exists, independent reunification is impossibl
e.”

  That was a reference to the longstanding North Korean position that the Seoul government was not a true representative of the South Korean people but merely a puppet of the United States, cruelly repressing the people, keeping power and maintaining national division with the backing of American troops. I had spent enough time in South Korea to know that this was a crude caricature. The South Koreans in general very much liked the wealth and opportunities their system was bringing them. Their complaints arose from uneven distribution of those gains, the dizzying pace of social and economic change and Park Chung-hee’s determination to stay in power without holding democratic elections.

  The sentimental appeal of the idea of reunification remained potent—and the Seoul regime was finding it difficult to reconcile that with its de facto policy of “two Koreas.” Nevertheless, having experienced North Korean rule briefly in wartime 1950 and 1951, South Koreans hardly wished to replace their lot under a merely authoritarian regime with the North Koreans’ fate under the totalitarian Kim Il-sung regime. Thus, I was not convinced that removal of U.S. troops from the South would aid the cause of reunification— except, perhaps, by enabling Kim Il-sung to impose his will upon the South.

  As the time for my departure drew near, I got word that I was to be granted a major interview. I would meet Kim Yong-nam, secretary of the Workers’ Party in charge of foreign affairs, who ranked in the top ten in the party hierarchy. I was to submit some questions in advance.

  Kim Yong-nam smilingly greeted me in a Workers’ Party guest house on the outskirts of Pyongyang. A slender, strong-jawed man of fifty with a mobile mouth and straight, bushy Groucho Marx eyebrows, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a well-tailored gray plaid suit, with the requisite gold-framed portrait of the Great Leader pinned to his lapel. After some pleasantries, he proposed first to tell me about North Korea’s reunification policy. What would I think of that? “I think that would be an excellent procedure,” I replied, deferring to my host. Despite his superficial resemblance to Groucho, he offered no one-liners (and no cigar). Instead, he launched into a monologue, which dragged on, long enough to make me regret my politeness.