In the 1990s we saw a noticeable difference in the desperation of people because of hunger. Stealing was always a problem in North Korea. If you didn’t watch your things, someone would always be happy to relieve you of them. But with the food shortages of the 1990s, hunger drove both the people and the army to bolder and more desperate extremes. It became a routine for us as the corn ripened to pull all-night guard watches because otherwise the army would pick us clean. And on the nights before the first, the eleventh, and the twenty-first of every month, we also stood watch all night. Those were the eves of market days, and locals looking to sell anything they could get their hands on would clean us out of everything we were growing if we let them. Begging also became common. People would come to our house asking for food. If our food situation allowed us to help them, we would. If we couldn’t, we couldn’t. One time a soldier came to Siham’s door begging for anything she could spare. That shocked us. It was one thing for the army to steal. But for a soldier to beg? That is something that never would have happened in decades past, when the country could at least feed itself.
In 1995 some cadres came by and told us, “Thanks to the great benevolence of Kim Jong-il, we are sending all of your children to the Foreign Language College in Pyongyang.” That is when I knew that the Organization intended to turn all of our kids into spies. I don’t believe that they had this plan from the very beginning. I don’t believe that we were part of a spy “breeding” program or anything like that. But I do believe that once we all started to have families, someone got to thinking about it and realized what they had in us. It was certainly obvious to me once I started thinking about it. Consider: Few people in the outside world even knew that we Americans were in the country. Fewer still realized that we were married, and even fewer than that knew we had children. Just looking at them, it dawned on me pretty early on that our children would be the perfect raw material for North Korean spies, simply because they looked nothing like how a person would expect a North Korean spy to look. Dona and Dresnok’s kids looked like Europeans. Siham and Parrish’s kids looked like Middle Easterners. And Hitomi and my girls looked like Asian Americans.
Imagine how powerful, because it was so unexpected, a North Korean spy with Asian American features would be? There are so many children of South Koreans and American GIs running around South Korea. My girls could have poked around Seoul and U.S. Army installations throughout South Korea endlessly without arousing any suspicion, certainly less suspicion than young adults who look fully Korean. They could show up at a personnel office, for example, saying they were trying to track down their father who had skipped out on their South Korean mother. Isn’t there anything the U.S. Army could do to help, any procedure for requesting records that might help them find their father? Now imagine how much more potent, because they are even more unexpected, the children of Dresnok and Dona, Parrish and Siham—all of whom do not have an ounce of Asian blood in them—would be doing spy work for North Korea in Europe, the Middle East, or even the United States.
For that reason, I was against them going to the Foreign Language College the second I heard the plan. (The school is sort of misnamed since it also has high school–level classes in addition to being a college.) Now, I should say that my girls had a long way to go—perhaps a decade or more of training—in political indoctrination, language skills, and spy craft—before they could even come close to being competent spies. They hadn’t bought into the ideology enough, for starters. Even that would have taken years more. But it is widely known that enrollment at the Foreign Language College is a well-trod first step toward eventually becoming a spy. Take, for example, Kim Hyon Hui, the North Korean spy who posed as a Japanese tourist when she boarded Korean Airlines Flight 858 in Baghdad on November 29, 1987, and hid a bomb onboard that exploded in midair and killed all 115 people aboard. Her first step in a decade of spy training was to graduate from the Foreign Language College.
And the Organization was certainly not above dropping hints about what they had in mind. A cadre once told Dresnok that as soon as Gabi graduated from the Foreign Language College, Dresnok would probably never see his son again. And to me, one of our chiefs of staff would often say, “If we have learned one thing, it is that girls make the best revolutionaries.” (“Revolutionary” is a standard North Korean word for “spy.”) “That’s what we need,” he would continue. “Female revolutionaries.” He never mentioned my daughters, but he didn’t have to. The hint was too obvious to miss.
So I argued against it the best I could. I wanted them to stay at the farm school. But there was no way to fight this one. When the Organization decided where my children were going to be educated, that was that. Nahi, Ricardo, Mika, Gabi, and Michael enrolled in the fall of 1995. But they only lasted three months. Since the school didn’t have any dorm rooms for our kids at that time, they had to commute. Every morning, I would row them forty minutes down the river in a rowboat to the place where the bus would pick them up. But when it started getting colder and the river was too frozen to row but not frozen enough to walk, we all were screwed. The school and the Organization didn’t have any solution for us, so we had to yank them out of school. For the next two years, Mika and the older kids didn’t do any studying at all. Actually, they did very little of anything during this time (though I did have a little more help with the boiler, the water pump, and the farming). While they were out of school, Brinda and Ricky continued to study at the farm school, which explains why Brinda and Mika are now in the same academic class.
When Brinda and Ricky got to the senior high school age, the Organization must have decided that now that all seven kids were ready, their higher education should really begin. In the fall of 1997, the Organization provided us with a fifteen-passenger Nissan van, whose exclusive use was to ferry our kids back and forth from university.
Before that, however, we had two significant deaths in our families. In mid-1996, Dona was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was so far gone, they said, that there was little to do for her. She came home, and her health declined rapidly. She lingered on for six months, and during the last few she was in tremendous pain. My wife would go down and give her injections of morphine every night. She finally died in January of 1997. Fulfilling her wishes—she always said she did not want to be buried in Korea—Dresnok had her cremated.
In 1999, Dresnok remarried a half-Korean, half-Togolese woman named Dada. Dada was the daughter of a North Korean woman and a high-ranking politician’s son from Togo, a small African country. Her father was, Dada said, a diplomat and the son of a former Togolese vice president. When the Togolese government was overthrown in January 1967, he fled North Korea, leaving his family, including Dada and her mother and sister, behind. Parrish met the sisters at the movie studio in 1995 where they were acting and told Dresnok about them. A couple of years after Dona had died, Dresnok said to the Organization, “Why don’t you send me one of them?” It took a little while to arrange, but sure enough, she showed up after a while and moved into Dresnok’s house. Within a few weeks they were as good as man and wife. They had a son named Tony, who is now six. As far as I know, they all still live at the farm or in Pyongyang.
Later in 1997, Parrish developed kidney trouble. He had a history of kidney stones dating back from when he was a young man before he crossed the DMZ, and his kidneys acted up throughout his life. He was in and out of hospitals all the time. He went into the hospital for treatment in early August. It was getting to be a routine, and he didn’t think much about it. I came to see him on the day of his release. The doctor pulled me aside and said Parrish was much worse than he had ever been. He told me that he was basically a goner and that they were releasing him because there was nothing left they could do. They did not tell Parrish. In North Korean hospitals, they never tell the patient the truth about what is wrong, especially if the patient is going to die. Parrish came home, but true to the doctor’s prediction, he started declining rapidly. Within a week or two, Parrish checked himself i
nto the hospital again, sometime between August 17 and August 20. He died in the hospital on August 25. We buried him two yards away from Abshier.
The Foreign Language College was supposedly a high-class place where the country’s elite were educated. One of Mika’s best friends, for example, was the granddaughter of Kim Yong-nam, who has been both foreign minister and chief of the Korean People’s Assembly, making him one of the longest-serving and highest-ranking officials in the country. But North Korea’s version of high class is not the same as other countries’. The place was a hotbed for thieves. Tales of clothing and possessions getting stolen were common, and Gabi for one would pack up practically everything he owned every time he came home for the weekend.
Likewise, it is hard to think of the school as a land of plenty when the girls were always coming to me saying that school officials had requested a certain amount of supplies from every student’s family. Sometimes they would say their teachers told them they needed to bring in 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of brass each by Monday. Or a kilogram of lead. Or a hundred meters of copper wire. They asked for coal, gasoline, even rabbit skins. And they told the students, “We don’t care how you get it, just get it,” which meant they were telling them to steal if they had to. So rather than turn my daughters into thieves, I became a pack rat. I saved everything that might have scrap value. I saved faucets, ball bearings, shattered glass scraps, rubber tubing, wood chips, you name it. You never knew what they were going to ask for.
By the late 1990s, then, our life had settled into this routine. I was resigned to this: My daughters were going to become spies who, within a few years, we might never see again. Hitomi and I would live out the rest of our days the way we had been for nearly two decades. We would live in Li Suk, we would farm, we would have each other, and we would make the best of what we had. And we would die in North Korea. I was 100 percent certain of that—until September 17, 2002, happened.
8 | Hitomi’s Escape
At first, September 17, 2002, seemed like an ordinary night. Hitomi and I were at home alone together after a quiet day. Our daughters were at school, so we were just watching TV, as we did many evenings, before turning in for bed. When the news came on, the newscaster said that the day’s big event was Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to Pyongyang, which had just ended. His one-day summit with the Dear Leader had, of course, been a great success and brought great glory upon the North Korean nation (every newscast was never-ending propaganda). Among the many topics of discussion, the newscaster continued, the two men discussed the fates of Japanese citizens who were living in North Korea and how to return them to their homeland. The news person was vague, making it sound like they were talking about some of the Japanese who were stranded here after World War II or after the Korean War, but I got a feeling they were talking about the abductees. I said to Hitomi, “This has got something to do with you.” But she said, “No way.” She did not think that Kim would ever discuss such a subject so publicly.
I ran into the closet, where I hid a portable radio that I used to listen to outside news broadcasts. I kept my radio secret from the Organization by storing it under some loose floorboards. Dona had gotten the radio years before from some Syrian exchange students, and I inherited it after she died in 1997. Usually, I tried to get the English-language broadcasts of NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, since it spent the most news time on relations between China, Japan, and the two Koreas. Unfortunately, NHK wasn’t coming in very well that night, but I could pick up Voice of America. Its top story: Koizumi confronts Kim over abductees. I said, “God damn! I knew it!” I called Hitomi over and gave her one side of the earphones. Since her English is not very good, I translated the broadcast for her. The news report said that Kim had admitted for the first time that North Korea had, for decades, stolen Japanese citizens to use in its spy programs. What’s more, Kim Jong-il had even admitted that five of these Japanese abductees were still alive and living in North Korea.
We were speechless. We couldn’t believe it was all coming out so fast and so out of the blue. But those reports that first night were a little depressing for an unexpected reason: It was clear from the Voice of America’s report that the Japanese government and media were surprised Hitomi even existed. The four other Japanese people that North Korea had said were alive were on the roster of suspected abductees that the Japanese government had submitted to North Korea in advance of the summit, the radio report said. But the fifth, this woman named Hitomi Soga, was not on the list. Who is she? Why was she not on the list? Why did the Japanese government not know anything about her? You could hear the reporters scramble for any information on this unknown woman, saying that they would follow up with details as they received them.
To this day, I believe that the very highest levels of the North Korean government were miscommunicating about Hitomi and me. Someone, somewhere, missed the fact that we were married to each other, or she never would have showed up on North Korea’s list of living abductees submitted to Koizumi that day. I think our existence caused, and continues to cause, North Korea so much trouble that if government officials had realized that no one in Japan knew Hitomi was an abductee, and if they had stopped to think twice about the consequences for them that I was her husband, they would have just remained silent about her, and we both would still be rotting in North Korea now.
By the middle of the next day, most of the outside radio networks I could tune in to had pieced the story of Hitomi’s life together. By the time I could get NHK in the evening, they knew not just the details of Hitomi’s abduction in 1978 but also that she was married to me, the mysterious American defector. I was impressed. I had no idea where they had gotten all this new information, but they had most of the story correct. As we finished listening to the news that night, we didn’t know what it all meant or what was going to happen to us, but we did know that some cadres would be coming for us soon. Frankly, we were worried.
The next day some cadres arrived to pick up Hitomi and me to go shopping in Pyongyang. Along the way the cadres said my wife had to make a detour for a meeting at the Foreigners’ Hospital. There, she met with the North Korean Red Cross. They made it sound like the Organization was thinking about sending her to Japan for a visit as a reward for being such a good girl and model citizen. My wife had to just sit there and play along. “Oh, really?” she said. “That’s nice. What a surprise!” and so on. The North Koreans made no mention of Koizumi’s visit or the abductees issue. They just told her to make sure to tell me that she might be going away for a little while soon. “Oh, okay,” she told them.
Less than a week later came the upheaval we had been waiting for. Some cadres showed up and told us that all four of us were going to stay at a guesthouse in Pyongyang for a few days. Mika and Brinda, who were at school at the time, met us at the guesthouse. They had always known that my wife was a Japanese abductee, but they didn’t know that there had been this breakthrough. They knew something strange was going on, though, so as soon as we could get them alone, we told them what had happened. But we warned them not to let on, since we weren’t supposed to know why we were there yet either.
One of the first things the cadres did upon our arrival in Pyongyang was to hand my wife a hundred-dollar bill. The next morning, we went downtown, and I’ll be damned if my wife didn’t spend almost all that money. Things were getting so crazy, her attitude was, “Who knows what will happen tomorrow?” At that time, we were receiving $120 every month, so $100 was a lot of money. She bought me a shirt and Brinda a pair of shoes. Later that afternoon, she had a meeting with a Japanese government delegation at the Koryo Hotel. That’s where she got filled in on enough of the story that we didn’t have to pretend that we didn’t know what was going on anymore. The Japanese interviewed her and took DNA samples to verify her identity. They told her about the summit and what a large controversy the abductees issue had become and that the Japanese government was trying to find a way for the abductees and their famil
ies to come to Japan. It was there she also learned the basics of her family story since she had been away. They told her that her mother had never been heard from again (which surprised her), that her father was alive and still living on Sado (which almost surprised her more), and that her sister was married and living in Niigata.
The next day, the cadres marched us down to the Potong River Hotel to take some photos that the Japanese delegation, who were leaving that evening, could take with them. There was a sign that said “One-Hour Photo Processing,” but it typically took all day to get the photos done. I told the leader, “This is going to make North Korea look like a bunch of asses. The whole country can’t even get some photos made.” The chief of staff had to go down and raise some hell to get the pictures finished before the Japanese plane left.
After three days, we went back home to Li Suk and waited. At that time, there was no doubt in Hitomi’s mind and mine that she was coming back at the end of the visit. Despite all the unthinkable things that had happened in just the past week, the thought that she would stay in Japan, or that Mika, Brinda, and I would one day follow her, was not something that any of us realistically considered. It just wasn’t possible that she could simply not return, so we did not talk about the future beyond the trip very much at all.
Around October 5, some cadres arrived in a tizzy and told us we were moving to Pyongyang—that day. We had to pack up everything we owned, down to the rice bowls and chopsticks, in a few hours. They moved us to an apartment in a regular, twelvestory apartment block in Pyongyang. They wanted any Japanese delegation that might visit to think that we lived just like regular North Koreans. I don’t know why or what purpose that would serve. The place was a dump. No Japanese delegation came to visit anyway. Around this time, we were told that the two governments had agreed to send Hitomi to Japan for what was supposed to be a ten-day to two-week visit.
The Reluctant Communist Page 15
