Star of the North

by D. B. John

  In addition to the Japanese and South Korean victims, there are believed to be victims from at least twelve countries, including eight from Europe. The most detailed investigation of the abductions is Robert S. Boynton’s excellent account, The Invitation-Only Zone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

  The Seed-Bearing Program

  Perhaps because he could never be sure that his kidnap victims were successfully indoctrinated and loyal, Kim Jong-il apparently scrapped the abductions program in favor of the Seed-Bearing Program, which came to light only in 2014 with the publication of Jang Jin-sung’s extraordinary memoir Dear Leader (Rider, 2014). In an account reminiscent of an episode of The Twilight Zone, Jang, a regime insider who worked as a Party propagandist, describes how North Korea sent attractive female agents abroad to become pregnant by men of other races—men with white, brown, or black skin. At the same time women of other races were kidnapped and brought to Pyongyang to have sex with male North Korean agents. Their half-Korean children were born in Pyongyang and looked foreign. The aim was to create loyal spies who were North Korean born and bred and thoroughly indoctrinated. These children live in strict segregation from the rest of the population. Their needs are attended to by Section 915 of the Organization and Guidance Department, the shadowy body through which the ruling Kim exercises power.

  Gangster Diplomats and Bureau 39

  In the 1970s the North Korean government found it increasingly difficult to fund its embassies abroad and ordered them to become self-financing. Using diplomatic pouches, which are exempt from customs searches, North Korean diplomats began smuggling gold, illegal ivory, counterfeit dollars and pharmaceuticals, and hard drugs manufactured to a high purity in North Korea for sale to local crime organizations. Border guards and sniffer dogs have discovered these diplomats’ contraband many times. Some embassies have also been involved in the abductions of local citizens, others for channeling wealth into Bureau 39, the secretive slush fund for maintaining the Kims’ luxurious lifestyle and for buying their cronies’ loyalty. For the best account of North Korea’s illicit economy, see North Korea Confidential by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson (Tuttle Publishing, 2015). This book also offers the most convincing explanation for why Kim Jong-un had his uncle Jang Song-thaek, the brains behind Bureau 39, executed in 2013.

  Christians

  North Korea has no freedom of religion, except, of course, for Kim worship. A few defectors have testified to the existence of secret Christian “house churches” in the cities. These have tiny congregations that change their meeting places frequently for fear of discovery, rather like the early Christian church. They read from verses of the Bible copied by hand onto scraps of paper. Anyone caught in possession of an actual Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Two large churches in Pyongyang, replete with hymn-singing congregations, are sometimes shown to foreign visitors. Jang Jin-sung’s memoir Dear Leader confirmed what many had suspected about these churches: that they are a cynical sham designed to deceive foreigners and to obtain international aid. They are run by the United Front Department of the Workers’ Party and the congregation members are UFD operatives.

  The Gulag

  Generally, there are two types of labor camp in North Korea. In the first category are camps for those sentenced to “revolutionary reeducation through labor,” from which, if they survive their punishment, prisoners may be released back into society and then monitored closely for the rest of their lives. The second category, operated by the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu, are the extremely harsh “total control zone” camps for political prisoners. Inmates there have little hope of release and are worked to death as slaves in farms, factories, and mines. About 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners are estimated to be held in total control zone camps, according to Daniel Tudor and James Pearson (North Korea Confidential).

  In both types of camp, conditions are life-threatening and unsanitary. Torture, beatings, rape, infanticide, and public and secret executions are common, as is extremely dangerous work without safety equipment or protection. Most prisoners, however, die of illness and malnutrition, as food portions are tiny and many resort to eating rodents, snakes, and insects to survive. Daily life in the camps is attested to in a number of astonishing defector memoirs, most memorably The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-hwan (Basic Books, 2001) and The Eyes of the Tailless Animals by Soon Ok Lee (Living Sacrifice Book Company, 1999), both of whom escaped North Korea after their eventual release. Soon Ok Lee’s account is one of the few to bear witness to the brutal treatment of Christians inside the camps. The descriptions of Cho’s torture in chapter 43 are based on Soon Ok Lee’s account of the torture she endured in prison.

  On rare occasions, a prisoner might be pardoned or granted early release on a special date, such as the Leader’s birthday, but, as with Mrs. Moon’s release at the end of the novel, this is purely arbitrary. Prisoners are also allowed to petition the Leader to plead for clemency. These letters go through the Organization and Guidance Department, and, once in a while, some fortunate individual is miraculously freed. On one occasion, Kim Jong-il apparently sent a gold watch to a prisoner whose plea for mercy had moved him, but did not allow his release.

  Some analysts have wondered about the purpose of the labor camps. Starving, emaciated prisoners are only fractionally as productive as well-fed healthy workers. The camps make no economic sense in terms of their contribution to the wealth of the country. Sadly their main purpose is to serve as instruments of control. Just as a functioning democracy must have free elections, so a totalitarian dictatorship must have concentration camps if it is to maintain control through terror.

  Guilt by Association

  Often, three generations of a convicted prisoner’s family, including children and the elderly, are made to endure the punishment alongside the prisoner. A family will share the same hut inside the camp. Children born in the camps—most famously Shin Dong-hyuk, whose amazing story is told in Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden (Viking, 2012)—bear the guilt of their parents and can expect to grow up, work, and die inside the camps.

  North Koreans also carry the perceived guilt of their ancestors under the songbun system. In her memoir, The Girl With Seven Names (HarperCollins, 2015), Hyeonseo Lee describes how this caste system, unique to North Korea, divides the population into three classes: loyal, wavering, and hostile, depending on what the father’s ancestors were doing just before, during, and after the founding of the state in 1948. If your ancestors included workers and peasants, and fought on the right side during the Korean War, your family is classed as loyal. If, however, your ancestors included landowners, merchants, Christians, prostitutes, anyone who collaborated with the Japanese during the period of colonial rule, or anyone who fled to the South during the Korean War, then your family will be classed as hostile. The hostile class—about forty percent of the population—are assigned to farms, mines, and menial labor. Only the loyal class gets to live in Pyongyang, has the opportunity to join the Workers’ Party, and the freedom to choose a career.

  In the novel, the events that befall Colonel Cho are based loosely on the experiences of Kim Yong, who, as a child, had been adopted from an orphanage by a loyal family in Pyongyang. When his birth records were checked prior to an important promotion, however, he learned that he was the son of an executed traitor who’d spied for the Americans during the Korean War—the worst imaginable class background. The nightmare that then begins for Cho really did happen to Kim Yong. He was deported to a total control zone, Camp 14, where he was put to work in the mines, and later to the less harsh Camp 18, where he joined his family, after his former colleagues appealed on his behalf. His riveting escape, described in Long Road Home (Columbia University Press, 2009) is still one of the best of the defector memoirs.

  Camp 22 and Human Experimentation

  Also known as Hoeryong Concentration Camp, Camp 22 is a vast, isolated total control zone in the northeast of the country where the brutality of the condi
tions defies imagination. There is no prisoner testimony, as far as I know, from Camp 22. The description of the camp given in chapter 14 comes from satellite monitoring and the evidence of former guards.

  Kwon Hyuk, a former head of security at Camp 22 who defected to South Korea, and Ahn Myong Chol, a former guard, have described laboratories containing sealed chambers for chemical weapon experiments on human prisoners, with gas pumped through a tube into the chamber and scientists observing through glass windows. Three to four prisoners would be murdered at a time, often a family unit. At Kaechon Concentration Camp, Soon Ok Lee described an experiment in which fifty healthy women were given poisoned cabbage leaves. All fifty died within twenty minutes of vomiting and internal bleeding. She gave testimony to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in New York in 2013.

  The Dear Leader’s Train

  Kim Jong-il was afraid of flying—possibly because he’d ordered the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, killing 115 people, in a bid to deter visitors to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. After that, there was always the possibility of a reprisal against him. Most of his journeys were undertaken in his private armored train, which had seventeen compartments, including luxury living quarters and a satellite communications center. He preferred to travel at night, when scrolling American spy satellites couldn’t track him. In 2001, he even made the 4,500-mile journey from Pyongyang to St. Petersburg (which he insisted on calling Leningrad) by train. It took twenty-one days. Traveling with a large entourage, Kim the gourmet sampled the local cuisines and had fresh fish and game flown out to him en route, and even wines and cheeses from France. He was in such high spirits that he regaled his courtiers and Russian guests by singing patriotic Soviet songs. It was perhaps fitting, then, that he died on this train on December 17, 2011, according the official North Korean state media, suffering a myocardial infarction (heart attack) while traveling on one of his endless field guidance tours.

  Rockets and Missiles

  Eagle-eyed readers will spot that I’ve taken liberties with the dates for North Korea’s satellite rocket launches. To date, it has launched five, in 1998, 2009, two in 2012, and one in 2016. Only two of these apparently succeeded in putting a satellite into orbit. The rocket program’s real purpose, however, is almost certainly to test the technology needed for long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of striking the United States. Such missiles have to leave the atmosphere and reenter without their payload burning up. After several test missile launches in summer 2017, and the launch of Hwasong-15, a powerful ICBM, in November 2017, it is now clear that North Korea has mastered, or is very close to mastering, this technology.

  Further Reading

  I would not have been able to write this story without reading the histories, journalism, and memoirs of a number of authors. I’ve enjoyed the research as much as the writing, and many of the works in which I’ve found the details for the story have been of an astounding standard. Some I’ve mentioned above. What follows is a further small selection. I should say that any liberties taken with truth, or any historical inaccuracies in the novel are mine alone.

  Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy (Spiegel & Grau, 2009) is a brilliantly readable account of how ordinary people found ways to survive the famine of the 1990s, some of them unlearning decades of ideology in order to become market traders.

  The Real North Korea (Oxford University Press, 2013) and North of the DMZ (McFarland, 2007) by Andrei Lankov, whose wry humor was much appreciated, are both superb general introductions to North Korea, as is The Impossible State by Victor Cha (Bodley Head, 2012), a veteran foreign policy adviser to President George W. Bush. I’m indebted to Dr. Cha for the scenes in which the North Korean diplomats are treated to a night out at the 21 Club in Manhattan, and the American mission arrives in Pyongyang.

  The Hidden People of North Korea by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) has some fascinating descriptions of the imperial lifestyle of Kim Jong-il. At the opposite end of the social scale, Under the Same Sky (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) has first-hand information about lives of the kotchebi, the vagrant street kids of North Korea, written by a defector who used to be one of them, Joseph Kim.

  Finally, Blowing My Cover by Lindsay Moran (Putnam, 2004) and The Art of Intelligence by Henry A. Crumpton (Penguin Press, 2012) both provide extraordinary insights into the day-to-day activities of a CIA operations officer.

  I cannot recommend these books highly enough.

  Glossary of Korean Words Used in the Book

  ajumma

  Sometimes translated as “auntie,” ajumma is a term for an older married woman. In some contexts it is a term of respect, in others, it can be pejorative. It is often used to denote matronly, pushy, hardworking, no-nonsense women.

  appa

  Father (informal).

  banchan

  Small side dishes of food such as fried fish, toasted seaweed, or kimchi, served alongside a main Korean meal.

  bingdu

  Literally, “ice.” A North Korean slang word for crystal methamphetamine.

  Bowibu

  The Ministry of State Security (Gukga Anjeon Bowibu) is North Korea’s much-feared secret police, which also controls the concentration camps.

  bulgogi

  Literally, “fire-meat,” bulgogi is a favorite Korean dish. Thin, marinated strips of beef are sizzled on a griddle, often in the middle of a restaurant table, and eaten rolled up in a leaf of crisp lettuce.

  capsida!

  “Let’s go!”

  chima jeogori

  A traditional Korean dress consisting of a chima (short jacket), worn over a jeogori (long dress wrapped high on the body). It is commonly worn in North Korea, but usually only on special occasions in South Korea.

  Chollima

  A mythological winged horse common to the East Asian Cultures. In North Korea it is the name given to the regime’s equivalent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the Soviet Union’s Stakhanovite Movement, intended to energize the workforce into overfulfilling quotas.

  dobok

  A loose-fitting outfit worn to practice Korean martial arts such as taekwondo. Do means way. Bok means clothing.

  hanbok

  The word for the combined chima jeogori dress.

  kisaeng

  An artist, musician, or courtesan employed by the imperial Korean court to provide entertainment, a tradition that died out at the end of the nineteenth century.

  kotchebi

  Literally, “flowering swallows,” it is the term given to North Korea’s vagrant children, who, like swallows, are constantly in search of food and shelter. The kotchebi became numerous during the famine of the 1990s, when they migrated to the cities after their parents had perished of hunger.

  kwangmyongsong

  “Bright star,” “brilliant star,” or “guiding star,” a name sometimes given to Kim Jong-il, and the name of North Korea’s space satellite program.

  mandu

  A meat-filled dumpling, served hot. Mandu-guk is a soup of mandu served in a beef or anchovy broth.

  man-sae

  “Live long!” Shouted by crowds in North Korea, it is an expression of victory, or to wish long life to the ruling Kim. The phrase originated in China to wish the emperor ten thousand years of life.

  noraebang

  A Korean version of karaoke in which private, soundproof rooms are available to rent to groups of friends.

  -nim

  Or seonsaeng-nim, commonly translated as “teacher.” A respectful, honorific form of address used for a senior person of knowledge and skill.

  omma

  Mother (informal).

  sassayo

  “Come and buy.” Tteok sassayo: “Come and buy rice cakes.”

  soju

  A traditional Korean clear spirit, made from rice, wheat, barley, or potatoes, usually drunk neat.

  soondae

  Blood sausage (cow or pig’s intestines) stuffed with kimchi,
rice, or spicy soybean paste.

  ri

  A Korean unit of distance, equivalent to about 400 meters (a quarter mile).

  -yang

  An honorific form of address used to a female on formal occasions.

  yangnyeomjang

  Soy sauce with garlic, peppers, chili flakes, onion, and sesame seeds.

  yontan

  A circular charcoal cake burned for heating everywhere in North Korea.

  Acknowledgments

  I have been very fortunate in having the support and encouragement of a world-class agent, Antony Topping of Greene & Heaton, whose belief in the novel saw it through from a rough and sketchy draft to a finished story. Kate Rizzo at the same agency and Daniel Lazar of Writers House in New York have also been indefatigable on the book’s behalf. I’m filled with admiration for both of them.

  My editors, Jade Chandler of Harvill Secker in London and Nate Roberson at Crown Publishing in New York, have been amazing. Their forensic reading of the book made me realize I was dealing with some of the brightest people in the industry.

  A major thanks goes to one remarkable family I’ve known for many years: Claudia, who reads, sometimes multiple times, my rewritten chapters; Giles, who demonstrated to me the basics of taekwondo; Barret whose knowledge of deadly neurotoxins I’d never have found anywhere else, and Nadia, who invited me to her home in Menorca, providing a perfect environment for me to think and write.