The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  In 1992, when Grace Park first shared the story of her brother with Ishidaka for his documentary, she claimed she had no idea why her brother had been executed. But she was racked with guilt and in 1996 she confessed the truth. “I lied to you in our interview because I was so ashamed. I do know the reason my brother was arrested and executed,” she said. “It was all my fault. He was killed because I fell in love with a North Korean spy!”

  Grace Park met a North Korean spy named Shin Kwang-soo in 1973. She was separated from her husband and having difficulty supporting herself and her son and two daughters. Shin was handsome, charming, and generous. He swept Grace off her feet and moved in, supporting the family and treating her children as if they were his own. Grace was so happy, she didn’t mind that he was so often away on “business” or that he wouldn’t tell her anything about his work. Soon after he moved in, he gave her four million yen (thirteen thousand dollars), and told her to “take care of it.” She knew better than to ask any questions.

  In the fall of 1976, Shin told Grace he had to go abroad on a long trip and didn’t know when he’d return. A month later, she received a letter from him postmarked Pyongyang. With no pleasantries or explanations for his absence, Shin got right to the point. “Do you remember the four million yen I loaned you? I need it back now. Go to Yokohama and give it to a business associate of mine,” he instructed. With no indication of when, or whether, Shin was returning, Grace was devastated. What’s more, the money was gone. She’d used it to supplement her meager income. She thought it would be rude to deliver the bad news to him by letter, so she wrote to her brother in Pyongyang and asked him to visit Shin and explain the awkward situation she found herself in.

  When Park’s brother visited the Pyongyang address his sister gave him, the man who answered the door was clearly not pleased a stranger was asking after Mr. Shin. He warned the brother never to return, and within days, he noticed he was being followed to and from his job at the radio station. Soon after, he was under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, with one car parked outside his apartment and another outside his office. “What kind of trouble have you got me into!?” he wrote to his sister. And that’s when he disappeared.

  It turns out that Shin was in the “business” of abducting Japanese people to North Korea. An ethnic Korean born in Japan in 1929, Shin immigrated to North Korea at the end of the Second World War and trained to be a spy. He infiltrated Japan in 1973, and in 1980 he was ordered to abduct a Japanese man whose identity he would assume. One of Shin’s contacts, the owner of an Osaka restaurant, had the perfect candidate: Tadaaki Hara, a forty-three-year-old chef. Hara had such a minimal public profile (deceased parents; no wife or children; no passport, criminal record, or bank account) he’d never be missed.

  The North Korean intelligence agency communicates with its spies through coded messages broadcast via shortwave. What to the average listener sounds like a jumble of numbers holds instructions for its spies. In June 1980, Radio Pyongyang broadcast a five-digit number (29627) over and over again. It was the signal for Shin—June 27, 1929, was his birthday—to abduct Hara, to whom Shin had offered a job in a fictitious Beijing-based trading company a few weeks earlier. Hara had already accepted the position when Shin told him the company needed him immediately. The two men celebrated over dinner at an elegant restaurant near Osaka station, and the next day the unsuspecting Hara boarded a ship that took him not to China but to North Korea.

  Shin spared no details in assuming Hara’s identity. He took a cooking course so he could pass as a chef. He used Hara’s name to obtain a driver’s license and passport, with which he traveled through France, Switzerland, and Thailand. His ruse wasn’t good enough to fool South Korean intelligence, however, and he was arrested in April 1985 when he tried to enter the country using Hara’s passport. Back in Pyongyang, North Korean intelligence suspected that Grace Park’s brother had blown Shin’s cover. After all, he had made that odd visit to Shin’s home and was already a dubious character, being a member of the group that had repatriated from Japan. Grace Park’s brother was executed two months after Shin’s arrest. Shin was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death but was granted amnesty by South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in 1999, as part of the conciliatory “Sunshine Policy” designed to coax North Korea to the negotiating table. In September 2000, Shin returned to North Korea, where he received a hero’s welcome and was awarded the National Reunification Prize for his service. He is thought to be living in Pyongyang today.

  The story was so full of skulduggery and intrigue that Ishidaka had trouble believing it was true. It sounded more like the plot of a James Bond movie than anything the news division of Asahi would air. He found a June 1985 newspaper article about Shin’s arrest that mentioned that Shin was wanted in Japan concerning the disappearance of Tadaaki Hara. But Ishidaka was still skeptical. The article’s main source was a South Korean intelligence agent, and Ishidaka knew that South Korea’s national intelligence service often fabricated stories to make the North look bad. Ishidaka needed more proof. He got the transcript of Shin’s trial, but too much had been redacted by the South Korean government to be of use. He asked to interview Shin in jail, but his request was denied. As a consolation prize, a South Korean agent Ishidaka was friendly with gave him a list of Shin’s associates in Japan. It turned out that Shin had been arrested along with a man named Ahn Young Kyu, who had confessed to helping Shin abduct Hara. Ahn Young Kyu had been released from jail in 1990. If Ishidaka could get him to confirm that he and Shin had abducted Hara, he would have enough evidence to run the story.

  In February 1995, Ishidaka got a lucky break. With the aid of one of his sources, Jung Yon, a Chosen Soren member, Ishidaka learned that Ahn Young Kyu was living on Jeju Island, South Korea. Jung Yon had been friends with Ahn and offered to visit him with Ishidaka. The day after Ishidaka and Jung Yon got to Jeju, Jung invited his old friend to meet at their hotel’s coffee shop at seven that evening. Ishidaka prepared for the meeting with military precision, hiding a microphone in a flower vase and positioning a video camera behind some curtains. He even convinced the proprietor to turn the music down to improve the sound quality.

  At 6:50 the proprietor told Jung that there was a call for him. It was Ahn. “You are with someone I don’t know,” he said. “So I’m not going to meet you.” The North Koreans had trained him well. A friend from his past appears out of nowhere, accompanied by a stranger? Too suspicious. That night, Ishidaka went to Ahn’s house and explained that he wanted to know what had happened to Hara. The two spoke through the intercom. “I don’t know, either. I only worked for Shin Kwang-soo. He is the only one who knows what happened to Hara,” he replied. With that statement, Ahn had unwittingly confirmed to Ishidaka the fact that he knew, and had collaborated with, Shin Kwang-soo. One piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  Still, if he wanted to be absolutely certain, Ishidaka had to confront Ahn face-to-face. At 5:00 a.m. the next day, Ishidaka and a camera crew staked out Ahn’s house, hiding in a park across the street. It was Ishidaka’s forty-fifth birthday, and as he waited in the freezing morning air, he wondered if this was the best way to celebrate it. Ahn left his house at 7:00 a.m., checked the street, and, confident the coast was clear, started toward the bus stop. Ishidaka waited until Ahn was past the point where he could easily return to the house, then ambushed him, microphone in hand. The scene was captured on film, and resembles a prolonged mugging more than an act of investigative journalism. For twenty minutes, Ishidaka shouts questions at Ahn, chasing him up and down the block in the early morning light. “I know nothing! I know nothing!” Ahn screams, before collapsing to his knees and weeping. Ahn’s confession tumbles out between sobs. He was used by Shin to trick Hara, but he had never meant to hurt anyone. He confirmed everything. “I did a terrible, terrible thing to Hara,” Ahn moaned. Finally, Ishidaka had proof that the crazy abduction stories were true.

  Between the Dark Waves: North Korea’s Espionage Project w
as broadcast at 8:00 p.m. on May 24, 1995. Ishidaka steeled himself for the criticism he was sure to receive from North Korea sympathizers. What he wasn’t prepared for, however, was the complete silence that followed the broadcast. The story was simply too far-out for the average viewer to believe. The idea of a chef being abducted by North Korean spies was just too bizarre. And the sources for the story—a motley crew of convicted criminals, spies, and intelligence agents—didn’t help. Why would anyone believe them? Ishidaka was devastated.

  It isn’t quite true that the documentary got no response. The next day, Ishidaka received a call from an editor at Asahi’s book publishing division. “That documentary you showed last night was interesting. Did all that stuff really happen?” the editor asked. Ishidaka didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He had produced a documentary whose plot was so bizarre that someone inside his own company was skeptical. Annoyed, he assured the editor that it was journalism, not fiction. “Okay, then how about writing a book about it so that future generations will know what happened?” Ishidaka had always fancied himself a writer, so the idea of a book no one could doubt appealed to him. Finishing the book took two more years of reporting, but he was determined to prove to the world, once and for all, that the abductions had taken place.

  Finances were a problem. Japanese book publishers don’t generally give authors an advance, and the disastrous television show had already aired, so there would be no further funds from his TV company. Japanese wives traditionally handle the family’s finances, so Ishidaka begged his for enough money to continue the reporting. She reluctantly agreed, and put him on an allowance. Ishidaka adopted a strict routine. Every day at 2:00 p.m., after the morning show he produced had wrapped and the next day’s program was set, Ishidaka turned his attention to his abduction research. Every Friday, he caught a 5:00 p.m. flight from Osaka to Seoul to interview North Korean defectors, South Korean intelligence agents, and assorted spies.

  Back in Japan, he met with anyone who suspected that a family member had been abducted. He was flooded with calls and letters from families who had spent years asking the Japanese police and government for help. Other families, who felt they had been mistreated by the media, didn’t respond to Ishidaka. Kaoru Hasuike’s father had posted a sign, “Interview Requests Not Accepted,” on his front door. He told Ishidaka, “No matter how much we ask for help for Kaoru, the government refuses to do anything. I don’t think we can get him back. It’s painful even to think about it.” Ishidaka learned of the 1988 letter that Toru Ishioka had written from Pyongyang about himself and Keiko Arimoto. Ishidaka accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Arimoto to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where an exasperated official warned them that their persistence might endanger their daughter. “If we ask the North Koreans about her, she’ll be in danger. That country is capable of anything. We can’t do anything,” the official said.2

  * * *

  Myeongdong is central Seoul’s busiest shopping district, crowded with boutiques, restaurants, and bars, and where the fragrance of barbecued beef lingers twenty-four hours a day. It is the perfect place for meeting people who don’t want to be noticed. On June 23, 1995, Ishidaka met with a South Korean intelligence agent who had information he was eager to share. He had twice tried to relay it to the Japanese police, but they didn’t seem to be interested. Perhaps Ishidaka would bite? “A child was abducted from Japan. She was thirteen years old and was on her way home from badminton practice at school. It happened in either 1976 or ’77,” the agent said.3 The agent didn’t know the girl’s name or where in Japan she was from. The information had come from a North Korean defector who had met the girl in a Pyongyang hospital, where she was being treated for depression. She was suicidal, and it was her second extended stay there. “I was abducted and told that if I studied hard and mastered Korean within five years, I’d be sent back to my parents,” she told him. She had done as she was told, but when she turned eighteen her handlers refused to release her.

  Ishidaka had already completed his reporting for the book and didn’t know what to do with this information. He had checked every case meticulously, confirming the dates and circumstances for each abduction. Haunted by the humiliation of the documentary, he was determined not to take any chances. The idea that North Korea was abducting Japanese people was bizarre enough. Who would believe they had targeted a thirteen-year-old girl? “It was just too crazy,” Ishidaka tells me. “If I included her story, people might think that the stories I told of the other abduction victims were also unreliable. I couldn’t risk that.”4

  In September 1996, advertisements for Kim Jong-il’s Kidnapping Command appeared in the Asahi Daily. At the offices of Modern Korea magazine, run by Katsumi Sato, the activist who had once worked on the repatriation project, saw the ads and contacted Ishidaka with an idea. Perhaps he would write an article for Modern Korea telling the story behind the book? Ishidaka agreed, and his article “Why I Wrote Kim Jong-il’s Kidnapping Command” appeared in Modern Korea’s October issue. Sato asked whether Ishidaka would include some material that hadn’t made it into the book. Ishidaka immediately thought of the thirteen-year-old girl, and added a brief summary to the piece.

  A few weeks later, Sato was in his hometown of Niigata, lecturing on North Korea to an audience of about eighty people. He described his youthful infatuation with communism and North Korea, his subsequent loss of faith, and the terrible suffering the regime inflicted on its people. He plugged Ishidaka’s book and, as an afterthought, mentioned the story of the thirteen-year-old girl. Afterward, an older gentleman approached Sato. “That girl with the badminton racket. That just has to be Megumi Yokota. She disappeared from Niigata in 1977.”5

  16

  THE GREAT LEADER DIES, A NATION STARVES

  On the morning of July 9, 1994, Kaoru Hasuike was awakened by the announcement that a broadcast of great importance was scheduled for noon that day. With prolonged negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons, tensions were high and there had been several such announcements over the past few months. The United States had accused the regime of diverting plutonium from the Yongbyon nuclear reactor to make warheads and had demanded that the United Nations be allowed to inspect the site. North Korea refused, and threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. By June, the situation had grown so dire that President Clinton approved plans to send cruise missiles and F-117 fighters to destroy the reactor—an act of aggression he knew was likely to lead to all-out war.

  Kaoru had heard a disturbing rumor that was going around Pyongyang. During a meeting about the nuclear crisis, Kim Il-sung allegedly asked his son what he would do if war came and the North lost. The famously hawkish Kim Jong-il replied, “If that happens, I will blow up the earth. Because without the DPRK, the earth need not exist!” As military drills increased and the tone of the North Korean media grew more belligerent, Kaoru feared war was inevitable, and he devised a plan to keep his family together.

  With his children about to return to school, he brought his daughter to a remote graveyard nestled in a pine forest, where he occasionally retreated to think. Ten million Koreans had been displaced during the Korean War, many settling on opposing sides of the divided nation, never to see each other again. What if war broke out and he and Yukiko were separated from their children? “If war comes, Mom and I won’t be able to stay here,” he explained to his daughter. “Before we leave, I’ll put a letter in a bottle and bury it next to that grave,” he said, gesturing at a small plot. The letter would specify a place to meet at five o’clock in the evening on the first and fifteenth of every month. She was to wait thirty minutes and then repeat the process until he showed. “This is a secret between you and me. Don’t tell anyone, not even your brother,” he instructed the twelve-year-old girl.1

  The last five years had been extremely unsettling for North Korea. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the people of Eastern Europe overthrew their oppressive governments. Closer to home, Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square to
demand freedom and an end to state corruption. In 1991 the Soviet Union, the first Communist nation in history, collapsed. China, under Deng Xiaoping, welcomed capitalism into its economy. In just three years, North Korea went from being a member of a global Communist movement to one of the last holdouts. Adding insult to injury, Russia and China normalized relations with South Korea, whose economy had grown too large to ignore. Meanwhile, annual trade between North Korea and the Soviet Union dropped from $2.6 billion to $140 million between 1990 and 1994. The North Korean media blamed the Soviet Union’s demise on its leaders’ lack of revolutionary commitment, and in a stroke of genius it used the failure of Eastern European communism to bolster the case for North Korea’s stark brand of totalitarianism: North Korea alone had stayed true to communism’s ideals! “The collapse of the Soviet Bloc was attributed not to the failure of socialism, but to the degenerative effect of capitalism, and the penetration of imperialist ideology and culture” says Kaoru.2

  Kim Il-sung’s funeral (Associated Press)

  On July 8, at the stroke of noon, Kaoru switched on the radio and heard a trembling, mournful voice announcing news that was literally unimaginable to most North Koreans: Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder and only leader, had died. Although North Korea was officially an atheist state, the regime had never shied away from attributing divine powers to Kim: the messiah who liberated his people from the Japanese in 1945, the benevolent father who lifted them up from poverty, the guardian who protected them from American imperialism. Nobody knew about his heart troubles, and North Koreans had expected his doctors at the Research Center for the Longevity of the Leader to keep him alive indefinitely. For North Koreans, slogans such as “The Great Leader is forever with us!” were taken literally.