Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  At first I didn’t know who they were. Neighbors said they were from Public Security. They just chatted about how our life in North Korea was turning out. After I told them about my disappointments, they would say ‘But look, Kim Il-sung has done this, this and this for the people. It would be ungrateful of you to feel disappointed.’ The whole community all the neighbors, watched each other. Even I watched the people next to me.”

  Chong used to travel from his rural county to Pyongyang, where he could use his Japanese money to buy delicacies such as ham or sausage in the hotels. There he met some other returnees from Japan. Seven returnees took to meeting for casual discussion of the problems they encountered living in the North. They agreed that they did not want to stay there forever but would like to return to Japan. In 1965 Chong was arrested and jailed for four months. It turned out that one member of his group had been a police spy. The spy had given the authorities a record of all of Chong’s meetings and contacts. While he was in jail the authorities asked Chong to spy on his neighbors. “They figured I would be pliable, since they had me on charges,” he said. Although he could not reject the request, “in fact I just decided not to talk to other people so I wouldn’t be in a position to get them into trouble.” From the 1965 incident, “I realized I should trust no one, talk to no one. I only concentrated on my studies.”

  In 1982, Kim Il-sung turned seventy and the authorities used the occasion for a crackdown. “From March 15, for one month, people who were politically incorrect were supposed to confess or be reported,” Chong told me. “I was reported again by Public Security for my 1965 crime and was classified as a ‘traitor to the people.’ I decided to volunteer to move to a more rural area. At that time I was very sick. The place I suggested going to is very mountainous and no one who went there ever returned. So they thought there was no problem sending me where I asked to go.”

  Partial rehabilitation was at hand. From the mid-1980s, Chong said, North Koreans were exposed to visiting Chinese merchants and people from Japan. Seeing that visitors from abroad had money, “people began to realize that North Korea-was not so great compared-with the rest of the world. People got lazy. Compared with others, I was considered a diligent worker. So in 1987 they made me a party worker and in 1988 a deputy to the People’s Assembly of Unhong County, Yanggang Province, where I lived.”

  Probably the regime “wanted to set an example,” Chong said. “About half the population were families of political offenders and others with bad backgrounds, like me. The idea was to show that if we worked diligently, we could succeed despite such backgrounds. They gave some very important jobs to us to provide incentives. This was one of Kim Il-sung’s methods: forgive and show off.”2

  Chong, unlike many other returnees, had no relatives left in Japan. All had repatriated to North Korea. That meant there was no one to send money after what he and his family had brought with them ran out. He started getting hungry in the 1980s. “I don’t have an enormous appetite,” he told me, “so it wasn’t a huge problem to me, but it was very hard for my kids—two sons and three daughters. In Yanggang Province I secretly cultivated and harvested food—so probably we were better off than we would have been in the city. But real starvation started around 1990. Farmers had gotten lazy. They had no motivation. The return was always the same regardless of how hard they worked. Only between 2.5 million and 2.8 million tons of rice were produced in North Korea. The question for me was whether I would live or starve to death. In March 1993 I had no prospects for the future so decided on suicide. I had some pills that needed to be dissolved in water, and I hid those in a closet. My daughter found them. She said maybe the whole family should commit suicide. I thought about sending the whole family to China but couldn’t because I was a deputy. We would be noticed and caught. So I went by myself, as if I had simply disappeared.”

  In North Korea, Chong said, “they won’t allow you to hope for a better lifestyle. I just wanted a normal life with my family: food, the basic necessities. In socialism, they won’t accept the whole idea of a person.” He made his way to South Korea. “I can’t forget about Japan, but there was no one waiting for me there.”

  The police spying had continued “the whole time, right up to the day I defected.”

  George Orwell’s 1984 is no mere literary fantasy. If you were North Korean, Big Brother would watch you. Pyongyang’s internal spies and thought police were everywhere.

  Lee Woong-pyong used to be one of them, although all he wanted to do was fly airplanes. “My cousin was a pilot, and from the time I entered middle school it was my dream to become one, too,” Lee told me decades later.3 “Pilots are among the highest-status members of society. While the South Koreans might think lawyers and doctors have the best jobs, in North Korea those are no better than ordinary-workers.”

  Born in 1954, the year following the armistice in the Korean War, Lee grew up in Pyongyang. His father taught at a police academy and served as a city assemblyman. Although those positions and the father’s party membership placed the family in a social stratum that ordinary North Koreans would have envied, times were almost as hard for the Lees as for most others in the country. “I can recall from around the early ’60s,” Lee told me. “Pyongyang was underdeveloped, with cows wandering around, cow dung everywhere. There were no railroads. There wasn’t much plastic; it was only after entering elementary school that I got a plastic school bag.” Clothing tended to be hand-me-downs. Lee’s father was issued a new uniform every two years.

  “When he got a new one we would dye the old one a different color and someone else in the family would wear it.” The grain ration came mainly in the form of flour, which went into dumplings and flat noodles. Many people ate food donated by the Soviet Army. Food “was never enough,” Lee told me. “I dug into rat holes to get the rice the rats had accumulated. We led a very thrifty life.” But “happiness doesn’t mean the absolute value of wealth,” he added. “It’s comparative. Everybody was poor at that time. That was considered happiness. I was just an ordinary kid leading a very ordinary life. People’s expectations weren’t advanced.”

  The ten members of the family including a grandmother, shared a standard two-room, sixty-square-meter unit in one of the apartment buildings built out of the ashes and rubble of wartime Pyongyang. “We all slept together. Even when I was in higher middle school I slept with my parents. The mentality was different. We didn’t imagine that each person should have a separate room. It seemed normal for all of us to be in together.”

  Getting to know one’s neighbors was assured; residents of the building bathed communally and two or three apartments shared each coal-fired furnace. (“There were many disputes about stealing coal,” Lee remembered.) In one of the downstairs units lived the Workers’ Party commissar of Lee’s school. When Lee was sixteen and finishing higher middle school, the commissar selected him to become a pilot trainee. Donning an air force uniform, Lee went off to Chongjin on the east coast to enroll in a five-year program that started with theory and moved through flight training. He trained in YAK 18 trainers, then MIG 15, MIG 17 and finally MIG 19 fighters.

  Lee had grown up idolizing Kim Il-sung from his nursery school days. Toward the end of his pilot training, around 1974, teachers started talking about Kim Jong-il, as well. Rationalizing the succession plans, they pointed out that Stalin had died without an assured successor. The Soviet Union, they complained, had then veered away from the ideals of socialist revolution. (Within a year or two Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong had died and their negative examples in the succession department could be used as well.) Lee, mean-while, was becoming part of a group that was elite not only on account of its occupation but in many cases thanks to the young pilots’ own family backgrounds. Among the pilots he knew were sons and nephews of some of the country’s top leaders.

  Payback time came at graduation in 1976. Lee found that he was expected to become an informant to State Security. The elite secret police organization, which handled the most sen
sitive political cases, reported directly to Kim Il-sung. It was then a department, not yet a full ministry, having split off from the Ministry of Public Security in 1973.

  “Most of my family members had some relations with State Security,”

  Lee told me. With such a family background, he was an obvious pick. As a practical matter he had no real choice of-whether to accept or not. “To be selected to inform means State Security trusts you. To reject the job would have worked as a disadvantage to me.” After listening to two or three lectures, Lee wrote out and affixed a fingerprint to an oath whose wording he recalled as something like, “As an informant for State Security I’ll be loyal to the party and do my best. I’ll keep the secrets.” He was instructed to “report anyone saying or doing anything against party rules, anyone who exposed military secrets, national secrets, party secrets, anyone going against the authority of Kim Il-sung, any power struggles in the organization.”

  With that, Lee went off to an air force base to lead a double life, both flying with and spying on his colleagues. He knew he was far from alone. Although in the regular army one in perhaps a hundred soldiers was a snoop, he thought, the ratio was considerably higher among pilots—maybe one out of eighteen or twenty. Pilots, after all, were trained to fight in the skies over South Korea, learning about the terrain and other conditions in the South. If a pilot should decide to defect, he would have his transportation at hand and know exactly where to go, so he could escape more readily than a foot soldier—and at far greater cost to the northern regime. A key mission of the pilot-informants was to pick out and report any colleague who showed signs that he might contemplate defection. The predictable punishment was so harsh, Lee said, that he would have thought more than twice before making such a report. Indeed, “I didn’t do any reporting on that kind of situation because, if I had, that person would have been sent somewhere. I’d have to be really sure before I’d report it.”

  Lee reported seldom—maybe once a month instead of weekly which was the standard. He stuck to routine reports about pilots who received visitors (Who? What time?), played cards and committed other such minor infractions. It wasn’t that he was a saint. “If I didn’t like someone, I reported on that person,” he admitted to me. But he said he had never gotten anyone into serious trouble with his reports—“no fatal cases and none sent to prison camps. I only did the basics, what was necessary.”

  Nevertheless he found his life “very stressful, because I had to do two things at once—my regular job plus working for State Security. I came to detest the mechanism of the regime,” which was using informants to sustain its power. “I realized that this variety of communism could not go on. That’s the first thing I said when I defected to South Korea. I defected because I thought it was unjust.” On February 25, 1983, when he was a major, he flew a M.IG 19 across the Demilitarized Zone and down to a South Korean air base at Suwon, tipping his wings to signal that he was defecting.

  Although I was impressed by the forceful speech of the crewcut and balding, strong-featured Lee, I felt that something was missing in the story he’d told up to that point. My experience from interviewing many defectors was that, in the usual case, systemic injustice in the abstract was not enough to spur such a drastic act. A defector would know all too well that his family members remaining behind quite likely would be sent off to political prison camps, perhaps for the rest of their lives, to pay for his act. In view of that heavy responsibility, I had found, a North Korean normally would not defect unless he had fallen afoul of the system in some life-shattering fashion. But I also knew that the authorities in South Korea considered Lee a sincere defector. They had shown that by letting him join their air force (in a nonflying job, teaching about North Korea) and eventually, as he approached his fortieth birthday, by promoting him to lieutenant colonel.

  I pressed Lee to tell me more of his story. And there was more, enough to persuade me that he had experienced conflicts with the system sufficient to motivate a self-loathing character in a Graham Greene novel. His epiphany it turned out, had involved the woman he loved. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  Back at the time of his defection, Lee told me, “lots of people doubted me because it seemed I didn’t have such a decisive reason—that I just defected for political reasons.” That was his reason, though, he insisted. “At bottom the regime just put too much pressure on people’s basic rights.” I asked him for an example. “For example,” he replied, “because of the concept of class struggle you’re not allowed to marry whomever you want.” Now I could see that his story was about to get more personal.

  I drew him out on the rest and learned that, when he was twenty-seven, someone had arranged for him to meet a prospective bride. “I won’t mention the full name, but Miss Chang’s parents were from Seoul and came north in 1949.” The couple got along well, corresponding by mail for about a year. “I wanted to marry her, but pilots weren’t supposed to marry people with Seoul backgrounds.” The mere fact that Miss Chang’s parents had lived in South Korea—before she was born—made her loyalty suspect, along with that of her whole family. “I guess that was the turning point, the point where I started having conflicts,” Lee told me. “What right has the regime to invade social relations?”

  Lee was expected to consult with a senior State Security officer if he wanted to marry. “They didn’t specifically say, ‘Don’t marry’ They said, ‘Do as you wish.’ But the unstated message was that there would be lots of disadvantages for my family and me. After a background check on the woman, I knew it wasn’t what we were supposed to do. I slowly distanced myself from her, trying to persuade her that marriage to a pilot would mean a hard life.” He reminded her that North Korean military units were expected to grow much of their own food. “I told her, ‘You’d have to do farming, raise pigs.’ The last letter I got from her, she told me she was marrying another man. She quoted a Korean saying to the effect that ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ She understood the real reason. She was, I guess, outraged, upset.”

  Mean-while, Lee didn’t have to be an Einstein to figure that there was a spy out there somewhere who was just waiting for him to say or do the wrong thing. That was the way the regime operated, after all. While Lee himself was with State Security there was always Public Security among other spying organizations. The various agencies watched each other, even had units officially stationed inside one another’s organizations to facilitate their mutual spying. Lee felt his frustration bottled up for as long as he remained in North Korea. Lacking trust in those around him, “I couldn’t talk about my dissatisfaction with anyone,” he told me.

  Among scores of defectors and refugees I interviewed, I found Lee particularly tough-minded. North Koreans, soon after their arrival in China or South Korea, tended to accept religion, Buddhism in some cases but more often evangelical Christianity—a new set of top-down, revealed, all-encompassing beliefs to replace the faith that had failed them in the North. Lee was different in that regard. “I’m not much of an organization man, more of an individualist,” he told me. “That’s why I haven’t taken up religion yet. It’s difficult to accept it. I still have doubts. I think religion was made to maintain the social order.”

  Then he looked hard at me and said, “I want the North Korean regime to know that when the regime changes, they’ll have to take responsibility for punishing the families of defectors. Put that in your book.”

  FIFTEEN

  From Generation to Generation

  In February 1974, Pyongyang-watchers abroad read in Nodong Shinmun, the North Korean party newspaper, an editorial entitled, “Let the Whole Party Nation and People Respond to the Call of the Great Leader and the Appeal of the Party Center for Grand Construction Programs of Socialism.”

  It eventually turned out that the editorial had coincided with the Central Committee’s unannounced endorsement of Kim Jong-il’s selection as successor to his father, who was party general secretary. Shortly before, in September 1973, the Cent
ral Committee had elected the junior Kim to membership in the party’s elite politburo and named him party secretary for organization and guidance—the very powerful post that his uncle, Kim Yong-ju, had held.

  Thenceforth Kim Jong-il “was not merely number two in the power hierarchy,” high-ranking defector Hwang Jang-yop recalled later. “This is what sets him apart from his uncle Kim Yong-ju.” The junior Kim’s power was far greater than his uncle had ever wielded. From 1974, said Hwang, “even the most insignificant report could not reach Kim Il-sung without going through Kim Jong-il first, and none of Kim Il-sung’s instructions could reach his subordinates without going through Kim Jong-il first.”1

  Without knowing all that, foreign analysts pondered the question of-who or what might be the mysterious “Party Center,” so prominently singled out in the editorial. Clues began to appear. In February of 1975, Pyongyang television showed Kim Jong-il voting in local elections right behind Kim Il-sung and Kim Il, the next-ranked figure among active members of the guerrilla generation, who was not related by blood to the other two similarly named Kims. Voting order had been for decades a strong hint of rank in any communist country. In 1975, Kim Jong-il’s portrait started to appear alongside that of his father in public places—but still the code term “Party Center” was used and his name was rarely heard in public. In March of 1976, the term was upgraded to “Glorious Party Center.” An official announcement the same year finally made clear the junior Kim’s position in the party secretariat.2

  Although he had received the official nod, Kim Jong-il with his father’s help was still in the midst of what would prove a very long process. On the one hand, the Kims had to win support for the succession plan among key officials suspected of harboring skepticism. On the other, they had to root out any exceptionally bold leading officials who might dare to oppose the scheme overtly—along with cagier officials who could be biding their time, disguising their opposition while awaiting the elder Kim’s death as their cue to move against his son.