Seen from above, from one of the American sentry towers, the handover was like watching sand move through an hourglass. On the far side was the dark crowd of the American captives, a mass that was steadily winnowing itself smaller and smaller as a line of dark-clad men poured slowly down through the narrow neck of the bridge and was then re-formed into an ever-enlarging crowd of men on the other side. The two groups may have looked just the same, like the sand in the glass. But the second of the two groups, even though at one halfway moment identical in size, was all of a sudden different from the first group, in that those in it were entirely free, and at last.
American sentries were watching all this from their towers. On the ground on the far side, also gazing impassively at the unfolding drama, were a score or more of green-fatigued men of the Korean People’s Army. They were presiding over a repatriation that was no more dignified than it should have been, and from which no one had drawn much of a victory, or a triumph, or a propaganda score. As the last American limped offstage, the Koreans turned away and got back on the buses to their barracks, to kimchi and cheap shochu and endless propaganda. The Americans went for steaks and showers, orange juice and telephone calls, and flights home, to meetings with wives and girlfriends and the usual celebrations and parades and oompahs that greet returning astronauts and Olympians and such other temporary heroes and survivors that Americans have come to admire and revere so much. In time there would be courts of inquiry and investigations and postmortems, and then memoirs and interviews and reminiscences. But not today: ahead was Christmas, and freedom.
There was one final irony for the men, though it passed unrecognized at the time.
As they stepped off the concrete abutments of the bridge and into a hut decorated with Christmas tinsel and lights, they were each to be greeted in person by the commander in chief of the United Nations Command, the senior Allied soldier sent in to protect South Korea. The C-in-C at the time of this event was none other than U.S. Army general Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III, the same man who, as a mere colonel almost a quarter century before, had so casually defaced a National Geographic map on a Pentagon wall, and whose innocent remark that “the Thirty-Eighth Parallel should do it,” led to the creation of North Korea in the first place.
Had Bonesteel not drawn his grease pencil line late that summer’s night in 1945, the melancholy chain of events surrounding the capture of the USS Pueblo probably would never have taken place.
The seizure of the Pueblo4 may have been one of the most painful episodes in America’s entanglement with North Korea, but it was not to be the last. More than sixty years have elapsed since the signing of the armistice, and almost every year has been peppered with events that have been, by turns, lethal, curious, frightening, or all three. Even a cursory summary of the more serious happenings confirms the idea that North Korea has been an interminable nuisance. In 1958 an airliner on an internal flight in South Korea was hijacked and flown to Pyongyang. In 1965 two MiG fighters attacked an American plane fifty miles off the coast. In 1969 four American soldiers were ambushed and killed on the southern boundary of the DMZ. In February 1974, North Korean patrol boats sank two South Korean trawlers. In August 1974, South Korean president Park Chung Hee’s wife was shot dead by a North Korean agent in Seoul. In 1978 a South Korean actress and her film director husband were kidnapped in Hong Kong and smuggled to Pyongyang. In 1983 three South Korean government ministers and fourteen staff were among twenty-one people killed in Rangoon by bombs smuggled through the DPRK embassy in Burma by North Korean agents.
One of the more notorious events took place inside the Joint Security Area, on August 18, 1976, when a group of American soldiers attempted to trim a poplar tree close to the end of the Bridge of No Return because it obscured their view of the North Korean watchtower at the far side, the same one from which Captain Bucher began his lonely walk to freedom. North Korean soldiers protested, absurdly, that the tree had been planted by their Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and so should be considered inviolable. When the Americans continued to prune its branches, a posse of North Korean soldiers rushed them with axes and crowbars and bludgeoned and hacked two American officers to death. Four other Americans and five South Korean soldiers were also badly injured.
Washington, it turned out, had been pushed just a little too far. Three days later the so-called ax murder incident at Panmunjom triggered an almost unimaginable American response. It was called Operation Paul Bunyan, and it had the full approval of an enraged President Gerald Ford. Its mission, undertaken in the spirit of the legendary lumberjack, was to cut down the entire tree. On the face of it laughably trivial, a simple enough exercise, a robust response, a small opportunity to redress the sad capitulation of the Pueblo.
Except it was very much more than this. The deliberate American plan was to use this single small arboreal incident to demonstrate to the North Koreans that, as Washington liked to put it, “you don’t mess around with Uncle Sam.” The White House let it be known that the disproportionately immense team assembled to cut down the tree—with twenty-three vehicles, two engineering companies, sixty American security men, a sixty-four-man South Korean special forces team, and a howitzer big enough to blow the Bridge of No Return to smithereens—was to be supported by as much power as the Americans needed in the event any North Koreans dared to retaliate. “Take that, President Kim,” the Americans seemed to be saying.
So a backup assemblage of armor and weaponry was put together on a scale seldom seen in peacetime, and only occasionally seen in war. Lurking just outside the DMZ, ready to move at an instant’s notice, was an entire U.S. infantry company and nearly thirty helicopters to ferry them into battle. B-52 bombers had been scrambled from Guam, F-4 Phantom jets were swooping in from bases all around the region, F-111 fighters had come in from their faraway base in Idaho. There were Hawk missiles at the ready, the carrier group of the USS Midway had been moved close to the coast, nuclear-capable bombers were flying overhead, and twelve thousand additional troops and eighteen hundred U.S. Marines had been put on standby to fly to Korea.
In the end, the tree-cutting party took just forty-three peaceful minutes to bring the poplar down and to trim its remains to serve as a memorial to the officers who had died three days before. By the end of that hot summer day, the forces had been stood down, the bombers sent back to routine patrolling, the fighters sent back to their revetments in Japan and the Philippines and faraway Idaho. America, for once, felt it had managed to shock and awe the North Koreans into some semblance of common sense and good order.
Yet it would not last. The regime constructed by North Korea’s doctrinaire soldier founder, Kim Il Sung, evolved into a dynasty of unparalleled and ever-increasing cruelty and hostility, behaving toward its own people and the world in ways quite detached from the norms of even the most bizarre. Perhaps only Pol Pot’s Cambodia can offer a valid comparison. Or maybe Albania, during the most extreme excesses of Enver Hoxha’s time. Or perhaps Idi Amin’s Uganda, at its worst.
The original national philosophy of juche, a form of self-reliance coupled with extreme nationalism, and which, according to state propaganda, was dreamed up by Kim Il Sung at an improbably early age (ten years old, according to some), steadily transmuted itself, as Kim’s son and then his grandson took over the reins of governance. There was a time when some felt that Korean self-reliance was not a bad thing—after all, India, with its own rigid application of a similar idea, swadeshi, which forbade the importing of virtually anything from outside, worked well for a time. Moreover, the early ideas of Kim Il Sung allowed this half of Korea to retain some sense of a uniquely Korean identity, even as it was being demonstrably lost in the very Westernized and commercialized atmosphere of South Korea.
Hypnotic organized performances by thousands of impeccably drilled youngsters—known as “mass games,” with any misstep harshly punished—are one of the few signature achievements of North Korea.* [Roman Harak.]
But juche went slowly insane.
Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Trotsky, in common with such Communist sponsors who still pay lip service to the old Soviet regime, would be hard-pressed to recognize the autarkic impoverishment that guides North Korea today. In the republic’s earliest days, it might have enjoyed some kind of reputation as a failing form of socialism, an experiment that didn’t quite work, but that had a kind of nobility of purpose. Instead, the country has evolved into a snarling, spitting, and ceaselessly hostile monster of a nation, an alien life-form that lurks menacingly in the folds of the East.
There is widespread hunger, grinding poverty of a depth and kind unknown elsewhere in the world for decades past. There is almost no personal freedom, and punishment for the slightest of crimes against the state or the dignity of the guiding ideas or their practitioners is swift and pitiless. One senior soldier was executed for seeming to nod off during a cabinet meeting—pounded into oblivion by antiaircraft cannon, some reports said. Another, reported by the lurid South Korean press to have been torn to shreds inside a cage of wild dogs, was the leader’s uncle—the fact of his kinship bringing him no mercy. Gigantic prison camps are scattered everywhere across the bleak and famine-racked landscape, and inmates are corralled within them in conditions unimaginable by even the darkest, most Orwellian, most Kafkaesque minds. One arrest can lead to the instant imprisonment of three generations of a family, the deliberate extinguishing of any potential for dissent by the preventive detention of the innocent.
I can never forget a visit I made to North Korea in the mid-1990s. If one consequence of my venture was dreadful, it was all my fault. One afternoon I was driven down to see the Panmunjom truce village from the northern side. I had a government minder with me, as always. He was a friendly man who spoke with carefully calibrated candor about the pleasures of living in the North, but liked also to voice at length his fantastic vision of the decadence and corruption of the South.
Our driver on that afternoon spoke not a word of English and smoked incessantly. He listened to his car radio, which like all Korean receivers had had its tuner welded to pick up just a single government station, one that pumped out a torrent of loud political exhortations, or else saccharine musical numbers of great patriotism and fervor. So when the minder stepped away from the car for a moment, I made what I thought was a kind gesture: I showed the driver the tiny Sony transistor radio I had in my pocket, and tuned it for him to pick up an American forces radio station. We were less than a mile from the border, and the transmitter aerials were visible.
It was a revelation. He had never heard anything like it. For the next ten minutes or so the snatches of music, and the announcer’s voice, seemed to give the driver the greatest pleasure, and he drummed his fingers on the dashboard, beamed broadly, and offered me cigarettes. His personality had completely changed. He seemed genuinely happy. Then, without warning, the door was wrenched open and the minder got into the car while my radio was still switched on. He barked angry questions at the driver, who had stopped smiling and who returned answers monosyllabically, sheepishly. The minder glowered as we were driven back to Pyongyang that evening in total silence. I never saw the driver again. No one later claimed to have any idea of his fate. In fact, in spite of much questioning, no one claimed even to know of his existence.
The savagery of this most ruthless police state is all but undeniable.5 Within the country, though, there is a continuing and skillful attempt to mitigate its horrors by the endless presentation of the Kim family’s geniality and benevolence. The Kims are everywhere. The regime’s three founders, the Supreme Leaders, the eternal bestowers of guidance, have become so godlike that their given names, Il Sung, Jong Il, and Jong Un, have been banned from use by any other Koreans, and those already using the names have been ordered to change them. Photographs of the three men must now hang in every dwelling, there are immense marble statues of them in public places, and members of the Korean Workers’ Party must wear tiny brooches sporting the leaders’ enameled faces.
North Korea counts its calendar years from the date of Kim Il Sung’s birth, in April 1912, which was Juche Year 1. The year 2016 is Juche 104. On the Great Leader’s birthday each spring there are wild demonstrations of impeccably choreographed ecstasy, the so-called mass games, involving thousands of identically drilled children. The games are designed to have a hypnotic effect on a public glued to the state-controlled television. Similar demonstrations occur on dozens of other state holidays and anniversaries; and on more momentous occasions, the armed forces take part, with goose-stepping infantrymen and five-mile-long parades of missiles, tanks, and armored cars—all of them turning a show that is merely chilling into something truly alarming.
The North Korean army is immense—at almost a million soldiers, it is probably the biggest or (after China) the second biggest in the world. The country’s 2009 constitution gave the army primacy over all other institutions of state; the new notion of songun, as the army’s unchallengeable authority is now called, has ever since stood alongside juche as the state’s guiding philosophy. At the same time, the term communism, which in comparison seems almost quaint and harmless, was quietly dropped from the description of the DPRK’s central ideological principle.
That North Korea, already a fanatically militarized state, is by now formally ranking its enormous army as the leading instrument of policy worries everyone—this is a matter of ever-growing concern. The country’s attainment of a small number of crude but working nuclear weapons, along with sufficient rocketry to propel these weapons beyond its coasts, combined with its declared intention to punish anyone who has ever disrespected its leadership or its aims, presents a threat of real danger. In global terms, it may still be only a nuisance, but it is a serious, grave, and potentially bloody nuisance, which none in the outside world seems to have the power or ability to check.
The Korean DMZ, the central focus of all these nightmares, is a strange and dangerous place for humans. It is a place of searchlights and fortifications, watchtowers and minefields, howitzers and tanks, and the massing on both sides of countless stone-faced soldiers, heavily armed and ready to deploy at an instant’s notice. It is a place of strange and dangerous happenings—of shootings and stabbings, of the floating of balloons containing propaganda or poison, of the building of giant illuminations (usually of Christian crosses) that are designed to advertise god to the godless. Loudspeakers of incalculable decibellage blare the sayings of one or another of the Kims to listeners in the South.
Once, when I had completed a three-month walk up the entire length of South Korea and had arrived at the end of the Bridge of No Return, the loudspeakers were screeching out in English, welcoming me, inviting me to walk farther, to cross the bridge and savor the delights of the Democratic People’s Republic. It seemed a fine idea, but the U.S. Marines who had escorted me through the Joint Security Area were having none of it. Could I just walk across the bridge? I asked. Definitely not, they replied, and added “sir,” for emphasis. And what if I just set off and walked? They drew themselves up to their full, imposing height. We’d break your fucking legs, they said. Again, they added “sir,” for emphasis.
But there is more to the DMZ than mere menace. Though it may be a strange and hostile place for humans, it is, for example, anything but for flotillas of Siberian cranes and hordes of brown bears, musk deer, and the goatlike Amur gorals, who flourish in what is for them a sanctuary, a gun-free, human-free four-kilometer-wide swath between the two great fences. The creatures can hardly be petted, or visited, or even accurately counted. But they are there, munching and fluttering and preening under the gun sights of thousands, oblivious to all the anger and ideology swirling around them.
And there are some moments in and around the DMZ that have a certain charm to them. One such took place for me late in the 1990s, when an American magazine of some flamboyance wondered if it might be possible to stage a lunch party in Korea—“somewhere interesting” as the publisher put it, “like the middle of the Korean DMZ.”
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p; It seemed at first a quite ludicrously impossible idea. Only wild animals (the aforesaid cranes, bears, and gorals) inhabited the DMZ—or so I thought. On a trip to Seoul to investigate other potential sites—the abbot of one of the loveliest Buddhist monasteries in the world, Haeinsa, said he might know of a nearby hall we could possibly use—I mentioned to a diplomat friend the impossibility of lunching in the DMZ. “Not so fast,” he said. “Have you tried the Swiss?”
I had quite forgotten about the Swiss. At the time of the signing of the 1953 armistice, a group of four supposedly neutral countries agreed to monitor the cease-fire. The North had nominated as its two countries Poland and Czechoslovakia; the South had selected Sweden and Switzerland. I telephoned the Swiss embassy for details, and was given the number of the only major general in the Swiss army, a civilian diplomat deputed for five years at a time to take charge of his Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission camp, up by the JSA at Panmunjom. He was delighted to have someone stop by; he saw few outsiders. “Just American soldiers,” he said. “You know how that can be.”
His camp was in a small spinney right inside the DMZ and just outside the JSA. To get there, I had to drive to the American base camp outside the DMZ and wait for a Swiss guard to come collect me, which he did in a white-painted Mercedes G-wagon. He took me through well-guarded double gates in the fences, along a gravel driveway, and up to a comfortable little headquarters house, a cottage with a mess room and bedrooms for the ten or so Swiss soldiers who had been sent out from Bern to help keep the local peace.
The general was an affable middle-aged officer, clearly weary of his tour between the Koreas, and now readying himself to leave and take up a job as Swiss consul general in San Francisco. He was up for anything, he said; yes, he had a chef, who was, in truth, rather bored cooking for Swiss soldiers; and no, he hadn’t given a party up on the DMZ for many months past. But he’d very much like to.
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