A. “Yes. You cannot live in the military without stealing.”
Q. Did military men find any contradictions in the fact they were supposed to be defending the socialist revolution and at the same time had to steal from the civilian population?
A. “Officially the military banned stealing. Those who were caught were supposed to be punished with demotion. But you cannot live the official “way”
Q. Did the men talk about contradictions?
A. “I could only think about them. I couldn’t speak about them or I’d be reported.”
Q. How did that relate to morale, fighting spirit?
A. “There’s an indoctrination effect. The men thought their hardship was caused by South Korea and the United States. The worse their difficulties, the angrier they became at the U.S. and South Korea. More and more people wanted “war, to escape reality.”
Q. Yourself?
A. “Everyone including myself.”
Q. What can you tell me about the ability of the North Korean military?
A. “While I was in North Korea my colleagues and I thought South Korea ?wasn’t any match for North Korea. The South Korean army was so weak. Even in the Korean War our side had gone all the way to Pusan. Without American intervention we could have conquered the peninsula then. After I moved to South Korea and saw the technology and the status of the military I thought the South Koreans could fight with North Korea. I think North Korean army morale is still high. They’re in a life-or-death situation. If there were a war they would fight to the death. They’re so starved.”
Q. Who would win?
A. “You never know.”
Q. How did you avoid getting sent to the coal mines after the army?
A. “Normally infantrymen go to the mines. Paratroopers—they valued my military contributions and sent me home. At first I worked at the stone quarry where my father worked, in the grinding and cutting department. The work was not too heavy—-we used machinery. But the noise was a problem.”
Q. Did you leave because of the noise?
A. (Becomes relatively heated.) “The work itself was OK. But the rules were too tight. It was a military quarry. There was a meeting every week at which I was subjected to criticism. That was a total pain. So I wanted to move to a civilian job. I moved to a brick factory.”
Q. What can you tell me about the food situation over the years?
A. “From 1987 there were problems with the government-provided rice. They would skip one or two months’ rations. By 1993, it stopped for over six months. I spent seven months of 1996 in North Korea and received no rice ration. In between, in 1994 and ’95, they skipped seven or eight months a year.”
Q. What precisely was your job at the brick factory?
A. “Collecting coal from a state agency in Kaesong. To do that I had to bribe them. We needed the coal to fire the clay into bricks.”
Q. Was a lot of production stopped by that time?
A. “In Kaesong, 20 to 30 percent of factories were still working. In my factory, 20 to 30 percent of the departments were working.”
Q. Why didn’t you report the coal agency’s demands for bribes?
A. “There’s much more demand than supply. So everybody bribed the officials. You had to use special gifts, liquor or meat, to make them happy.”
Q. What did you have to sell to get those presents for them?
A. “I had some private assets: eight goats, one pig and two dogs for eating, plus my bicycle, which I sold. Every year I sold 50 percent of my remaining assets and from those sales used 40 percent as bribe money. I was getting low and I couldn’t see any hope for the future.”
Q. Why didn’t you use all your assets to live on and forget about the factory saving the bribery costs?
A. “The factory gave me free time, which I needed to raise the animals and build my assets. If I couldn’t get the coal I’d be dismissed from the factory and would have no place to go. Public Security would get me. Every day the police check the attendance and if someone’s not there they go to his home and catch him. If I had no job for six months the police would catch me and charge me with theft. The theory is: If you have no income for six months, how else, except by stealing, could you get by?”
Q. Were you raising your animals on brickyard property?
A. “No, on a mountain near my house. I moved my house so I could raise them. If you sell one goat you can get 20 kilos (44 pounds) of rice—just a month’s worth.”
Q. Your animals weren’t breeding fast enough to keep you ahead?
A. “It takes one year for goats.”
Q. Did you think of switching to rabbits?
A. “One out of every three households raises rabbits. The value is too low. They only weigh a kilo or so. It was a relatively good job I had in the brick factory. But I’d sold all my goats by the time I decided to come here. So I thought maybe that was my last chance: ‘Die here or be shot crossing the border.’”
Q. Did you have surviving family?
A. “Brothers and sisters but no wife or children. I came alone.”
Q. How did you cross?
A. “I used the tides. Because I’d been trained as a paratrooper I could have come by land, but I thought the sea route was easier. I first tried in June, one month before my successful attempt, but the water was too cold so I postponed it to July 8, 1996, the second anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s death. At midnight, like in Papillon, I got in at low tide. I swam three days and nights using a small bicycle tube for flotation. It would be only a one-day swim, but I had to hide during daylight beneath fences. I followed the coastline for three days, still in North Korea, before I crossed the border. That’s my military training: I was sure I could make it.”
Q. Tell me about your military life. Ten year hitch, no home leave, no girls?
A. “I had no choice. Just life or death. No visits. No dates. All I could do was follow orders.”
Q. Even in Pyongyang?
A. “It’s just a slight difference. In some ways soldiers in rural areas have a better situation—they can steal more rice. My base was on the outskirts of Pyongyang. We could go to the rice mill or the dog farm.”
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 elab
orated 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.”
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader Page 79
