Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Still, it took a series of additional shocks before Chae started contemplating defection, he told me. “Even though my ideology had changed, my basic sentiment was that I planned to go back to North Korea. After three years in Siberia I wanted to return. But due to some agreement with the Russians, everybody had to stay another year. My father passed away then. They wouldn’t let me go home for the funeral. That enraged me, and I came up with the idea that I should escape, go to the Russian authorities, obtain a Russian passport and then fly back to North Korea.” Hearing Chae relate his desperate plan, and feeling certain he would have been caught and either executed or sent off to a camp if he had attempted it, I was reminded yet again of my equally screwy 1979 thoughts of fleeing across the DMZ.

  “Even though I hatched that scheme,” Chae continued, “the occasion didn’t arise. And while I was still thinking about it, my roommate got drunk and stabbed a fellow worker. He was going to be sent back to a prison camp, so he escaped. The authorities started questioning me to find out where he was so they could capture him. They threatened that if I didn’t help them they wouldn’t let me return to North Korea. There were three opportunities to return that year. Although I had been on the list for the first group, they took my name off. So I decided to escape. I still had that plan of going back to North Korea, but people demanded too much money for a passport. I decided to go to Moscow with a friend. There I met some South Koreans who were managing a restaurant. I worked as a security guard at night and carved jewelry in the daytime. With the money we asked the Russian mafia in Siberia to make Russian passports. But we realized we would just be sent to prison camps if we did go back to North Korea, so finally we decided to go to South Korea. We thought of going to the United States, but South Korea is, after all, Korean. Arriving at Kimpo Airport as tourists with Russian passports, we turned ourselves in. We had return tickets to Russia in case we should be rejected. We went through immigration and then asked people how to find the intelligence officials. We caused some confusion because North Korean spies might come in the way we did.”

  Chae said he was working at Sempyo Company, a South Korean maker of soy sauce, in the factory. “It’s temporary work,” he said. “Then the government will send us somewhere else.”

  Chae had teamed up with a friend, Kim Tae-pom, for the escape from their logging camp and defection to South Korea. When I went to interview Kim, I met a slender man wearing a light green suit, a floral necktie with a big knot, metal-rimmed glasses and a black plastic watch—unusual, as noted earlier, among defectors, who typically sported expensive timepieces.

  Kim was born in Pyongyang, in 1962. In 1976, when he was in high school, the family was sent to South Pyongan Province because of his sister’s polio. “Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il didn’t want disabled people in Pyongyang,” he told me, echoing what I had heard from other sources about a policy of removing handicapped people, midgets, beggars and anyone else considered unsightly from the showcase capital. The forced move came despite a “good” family background. Kim Tae-pom’s mother was a Korean War orphan. There were siblings in the army and at the Mansudae Art Theater. “My parents were upset,” Kim told me, “but this was a government order. What could they do? My father took a demotion from a high party official’s job in the Department of Administration to become a much lower-ranking member of the local economic committee in Songchon. The clothing we could get there was not as nice, and our house was smaller. But we still had relatives in Pyongyang. With their influence we eventually moved to a bigger house. Because of my father’s demotion, our food rations were smaller. In Pyongyang our grain ration had come in rice, every week, and we had received two kilograms of meat weekly After the move we got mixed grain, which was lower in quality. It was distributed only every ten days, along with one kilogram of meat.”

  I asked Kim to recall for me a time when he had been really happy. He replied: “Do you have a religion? In North Korea the juche ideology is another form of religion. I was very faithful to that. I felt ecstatic when we got presents from Kim Il-sung—clothing, food.” I asked him then about negative feelings. “I never felt any dissatisfaction toward Kim Il-sung himself,” he said. “Maybe I had some criticism of the regime, especially regarding the food situation. But unless you’re a true dissident, there’s no crticism of Kim Il-sung—only of the government.” He added, however, “Before we moved we were part of the elite, but after we moved I felt some discrepancies in the social structure, the gap between the elite and others.”

  After graduating from high school, Kim Tae-pom had gone to a trade school but dropped out on account of eye problems. He went to work in a car factory, then became a member of an elite paramilitary “shock unit” of the Central Committee of the League of Socialist Working Youth. Everyone joined the youth league (around age fourteen), and there were chapters even in the army, but those shock unit members were special. They came from “good” family backgrounds. To be accepted, applicants had to demonstrate ideological stability. They got paid “well and were in line to become cadre. Kim Jong-il had founded the shock units and they were somewhat similar to Three Revolutions teams, which were run by the party itself.

  Kim Tae-pom and his colleagues wore military uniforms and had military ranks. From 1982 to 1984 his unit was responsible for security at an arsenal. The members spent from 8 to 9 A.M. studying the life and works of Kim Il-sung, then worked from 9 A.M. until evening constructing facilities. After supper, from 9 to 10 P.M., they attended indoctrination sessions. Following a full hitch, a member was entitled to party membership and a factory job back home without having to go to work in the mines. Kim’s post-shock unit job, which he held from 1984 to 1989, was as an equipment repairman in a thread factory near his South Pyongan province home. At the factory, 90 percent of the employees were women.

  Eventually Kim Tae-pom wanted to leave the thread factory, and his salary of 80 won per month, for better pay and a better life. He applied to go to Russia. “Pay in Siberia would be 70 times what I’d made before, even after the government had taken its big cut. The men who go there expect to make enough to live on for the rest of their lives. Usually they buy household appliances in Russia that are not available in North Korea. Sometimes they sell those back home; in other cases they use them.”

  Basic requirements for getting sent to Russia included party membership, no criminal record and a good family background with no capitalist forebears. But Kim said that, when he applied, the ratio of largely qualified applicants to those who actually would be employed was fifteen or twenty to one. “To get on the list, you had to give or promise a television set or refrigerator to a higher official involved in the selection process. Some applicants actually wrote contracts promising to send the appliances to their official patrons after a year’s work in Siberia.” I wondered how such an obviously corrupt contract could be enforced. “The worker is bound to come back,” Kim replied, “so they get him one way or another. This official would have enough power over your later career to ensure misery if he so chose.”

  I probed in vain for any sense of revulsion on Kim’s part concerning such arrangements. “I feel it’s justified,” he said. “The official works hard to send the worker to Siberia, so there should be a payoff for him. Above that official there may be higher officials. This lower official has to work hard to get his own candidate to Siberia, has to pay off higher-ups. I just thought that was the way things were. I thought it was understandable. This system is prevalent throughout society. For example, if I couldn’t make it to the factory one day I’d see the manager and give him some gifts and ask him to look the other way In North Korea most bribery involves goods, not money. When my father worked as an official at a county economic committee he received so many ‘presents’ from farmers—potatoes, green onions and so on. In North Korean law, if a person receives a present in the form of goods, that’s a ‘friendly present.’ Money is a bribe.”

  In 1989, Kim Tae-pom went to Russia as a truck driver, hauling foo
d from local markets to a logging camp. For his third year the assignment changed to loading the food onto trains. His story was, I realized, a typical one: He arrived as a young man devoted to the regime of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, but soon started to have his assumptions challenged. “Factors that influenced me included conversations with Russians and being able to find and read South Korean newspapers. Other parts of the world became accessible. I learned that the rest of the world was different from what I’d been taught. There was more freedom to criticize the regime because we were in Siberia. Among friends, people often let out their dissatisfaction. The situation in North Korea had drastically worsened in 1986. And by 1989, when I left, it was far worse still. Letters from our families back home openly described problems with food. But the North Korean official broadcasts always insisted that things were getting better. I was aware of the discrepancies. I listened to Radio Moscow, Yanbian [China] radio and KBS.”

  In 1992, Kim said, “I bribed officials to alter my papers so I could get home leave for five months, see my family and give them some money. In December 1992, I returned to Siberia, realizing that nothing had changed in North Korea and feeling that I could no longer endure North Korean society. Coincidentally I learned I was going to be sent home on account of the bribery. That’s why I escaped.” On February 1, 1993, Kim Taepom fled to Khabarovsk, where he hid until he met some Americans and a Russian reporter who were able to help him get to Moscow and then to South Korea.

  The reader has met Ahn Choong-hak already. In chapter 6 Ahn told us about his childhood pal who had been punished for comparing his frozen pile of feces to the sacred Mount Paektu. In chapter 12, we saw Ahn, enraged at learning that his family background was too flawed to get him into an elite college for spies and infiltrators, flinging his mother’s sewing machine to the ground. After that outburst he returned to his military unit, where he was a model soldier and the driver for the Eighth Division commander, and remained there for four more years until his ten-year hitch ended in 1984.

  Ahn did not leave the military entirely then, but took up a post as an inspector at the army’s Hamhung Military Equipment Plant, which made parts. Later he transferred to the South Hamgyong Mining Rear Equipment Supply Center at Kwangop as a staff member. “It was a good job,” he told me. “This was a distribution center so we had enough to eat. It was one of the hardest organizations to enter. You needed a lot of bribery to get in. Liquor, cigarettes—I got it on the black market using money my mother made tailoring suits. I also knew the younger brother of a high-ranking administrator of South Hamgyong Province.” Ahn stayed in that second post until September 1991, when he went to Russia. Getting there required “even more bribery than before, a lot of goods: a sewing machine, two boxs of liquor, women’s shoes, cigarettes.”

  Since the rejection of his application to attend Kumsong Political University, Ahn told me, “I had been disappointed but still hadn’t blamed Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Until I went to Siberia, I didn’t blame them for my problem. I knew that I was limited in what I could achieve politically because of my family background, so I wanted to become wealthy and, through that route, be somebody. I decided to go to Siberia and make a lot of money. My father’s sixtieth birthday was coming in 1993, and I wanted to do something lavish to celebrate it.”

  Once he got to Siberia, though, Ahn “realized that the Russians made fun of us for our Kim Il-sung badges. They said we were ignorant, stupid people who still worshipped Kim Il-sung even though he did nothing for us. At first I fought with them. I still believed in the system and had aspirations for my children’s future. But the Russian stores were so well stocked that I felt what I guess you could call material shock. I was also frustrated because our lives were restricted. We weren’t allowed to walk around freely. From December 1991, they prohibited us from watching Russian television. South Korea had come into the news. I had thought of South Korea as a poor country but that image started to change. I started asking, ‘Why? Why?’ Once the foreign media, including South Korean reporters, got interested in the logging camps and requested a visit. One morning the authorities took all the loggers by truck to a cucumber field and replaced them with a model platoon of soldiers who pretended to be loggers. Although I was a party member, because of my family background I was sent to the cucumber field. I wasn’t considered fit to meet the reporters. Those who were put there were not allowed to speak with reporters individually but only in twos and threes, and they had answers to eleven questions memorized in advance.

  “I had turned thirty,” Ahn continued, “and I realized that the principles of Kim Il-sung that I had been learning were all lies. I felt a sense of loss, but at the same time I became very curious about the world. I bought a radio and started listening to South Korean broadcasts, which came at certain times only. In the other room they heard something and figured out I must be listening to the broadcasts. An accountant was on the point of deciding to report me to State Security but a friend warned me and told me not to listen to the broadcasts. I stopped, but after three or four days I couldn’t resist and listened again. I realized South Korean broadcasts were very different from North Korean ones. North Korea only criticized South Korea. South Korean radio gave very clear accounts of real news. It was more humanistic. The next day my friend came over and said, ‘You listened, didn’t you? I think the other guy is going to report you.’ At that point I had no further hope, so I ran away. I took the money I’d saved and a knife and walked 35 kilometers [22 miles] in freezing weather to a train station and went to Moscow. I waited in Russia for a year and eight months before stowing away on a Russian ship at Nakhodka and coming to South Korea.”

  When I met Ahn in August of 1996, he had been in South Korea only a year or so. He had made a truly impressive transition from logging camp worker to salesman. Cars were his product—he had been named in advance to become the post-reunification manager of a Kia Motors dealership in his home city back in North Korea, Hamhung. But I felt that his propensity to sales talk included an obvious urge to expound on the differences between South and North Korea. I had to keep telling him to forego the lectures and just give me his personal story. Round-faced, with the usual metal-rimmed glasses and what looked like a gold and platinum watch, Ahn wore on the lapel of his business suit—in place of his old Kim Il-sung button—a pin bearing the Kia Motors logo. He had already sold an automobile to fellow defector Yeo Man-cheol, husband of Lee Ok-keum (chapter 17).

  Ahn had married in the South and was considered well enough adjusted that he was no longer the subject of full-time attention by the South Korean authorities. I inquired whether the Agency for National Security Planning (as the KCIA had been renamed in an attempt at sanitizing it under the democratically elected government) made any efforts to censor his accounts of North Korea. No, he replied. “Now South Korea is stronger and won’t collapse if people know about North Korea.” As we talked I realized that what I took to be Ahn’s sales pitches could represent something more complicated. “I consciously make efforts to forget about North Korea because if I think about it I can’t do my work,” he told me. “When I first had to speak out in a press conference, I couldn’t speak. All images of my childhood, parents, friends were all mixed up. But now I feel at ease in this interview.” A bit ashamed of my earlier feelings of impatience with his preachy pronouncements, I realized that for Ahn our conversation represented a catharsis of sorts.

  * * *

  Shin Myung-chul had been described to me as a logger, but when I met him in August of 1996 he turned out to have been a policeman. Shin, very young looking, came to the interview in jeans and a T-shirt on which were printed a cartoon picture of a shark and the English phrase “Hot Summer.” Wiry of build, he had combed his short hair forward in front, in the style popular in Seoul, and wore the gold-rimmed spectacles that were de rigeur. Shin had joined the air force straight out of high school and served in the Ninety-seventh Radar Battallion, stationed at Chongjin, at the time one of the most milita
rily sensitive port cities. “When I was growing up, socialism seemed superior to capitalist society. Someone like me who learned Russian in high school got preference. From each of the nine provinces, ten like me were chosen to be tested and of those ninety tested, nineteen were finally selected to go to the radar division of the air force. The radar equipment came from Russia. You had to know the language to read the manuals.”

  When his ten-year military hitch ended in 1988, Shin went to work in a county outpost of State Security, in the communications office. “I was selected,” he told me. “They look at family background, how long you’ve been in the party and so on before deciding who goes to State Security and who goes to the mines.” When I asked if he had been a true believer, he flashed an odd smirk. “I was very devoted to the ideology,” he said. “I entered the party at twenty.”

  Shin told me how one’s military assignment affected later job prospects:

  Bodyguards had the best assignment and could go back home after completing their service.

  The air force was the most prestigious of the main services. Radar was a key skill. One could go from there either to State Security or back home. Anyhow, “radar guys like me aren’t robust enough for the coal mines,” Shin said.

  Others, who had recommendations from universities or had been named most outstanding in their units, could go home.

  The rest were relocated en masse.

  Shin quit his job in State Security to go to Russia because he wanted more money. “Usually in North Korea you have to save for thirty years to buy a television set,” he explained. In Russia he had worked for the party in a police role, limiting reception on loggers’ radios and connecting them to propaganda feeds from home. “Of course, I was still loyal then. The loggers have short-wave radios. I opened them up and set the gearing that controls band selection, made a connection with aluminum. Those don’t last forever, so sometimes the loggers could listen to forbidden broadcasts in Korean from KBS, Radio Moscow, China, America. So I had to do it continuously. I was like a cop, restricting loggers’ lives, but not in such a big way. And I didn’t create the propaganda broadcasts. I just connected the loggers’ radios by cable to programming that I got over radio frequencies. I worked there about two and a half years.”