The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

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  One day, before leaving Colombia, Gersony entered the office of the incoming head of the narcotics assistance section, to request that his report on Catatumbo have only a limited circulation for the coming six months in order to protect his sources. The official said that such decisions were none of Gersony’s business; after all, Gersony was just a contractor, not a Foreign Service officer. Gersony walked back to his cubicle in the U.S. Embassy and began sobbing uncontrollably: a ridiculous overreaction brought about by the cumulative effect of physical fear and stress over his work.

  CHAPTER 16

  North Korea

  2002

  The Last Tofu Meal

  Bob Gersony’s bed was made, so to speak. The regional reassessments from the spillover effect of Plan Colombia never seemed to stop. He was making good pay and was beloved by the Latin America contingent at USAID and the State Department. He had just bought a nonrefundable ticket to Panama in order to travel in the eastern Darien region, an underdeveloped swampland close to the Colombian border. It was not especially safe, but he spoke the language and these trips were all, more or less, in the same time zone as his home, where his three kids were beginning to grow up.

  He was at USAID headquarters working up details for his Panama trip when someone told him that USAID administrator Andrew Natsios wanted to see him.

  “Maybe we should get you out to the North Korean border area to see what’s going on. There may be up to two million dead from the famine there. We have no idea what’s happening inside the country,” Natsios told Gersony.

  Gersony was immediately intimidated. Natsios had just published a book about North Korea, the result of his own days in the NGO community, while Gersony himself knew nothing about the area.1 Natsios’s book contended that there had, in fact, been a widespread famine in North Korea in the 1990s, and he wanted Gersony to find out if it was still going on. “I was obsessed with North Korea, and I knew that Bob wouldn’t lie to me,” Natsios explains.

  “It all sounded dangerous and I had triplets growing up,” says Gersony. “I worried about spending ten years as a captive doing hard labor, not getting paid consulting rates.” He also sensed a professional danger. Natsios was a handpicked political appointee of President George W. Bush, who was, in turn, in office only because of the Florida recount. Getting too close to Natsios might hurt him later on.

  Gersony provided Natsios with a noncommittal answer, agreed to meet again with him on the subject, and continued to prepare for his Panama assignment. His last day in the office he was picking up things on his desk when Fred Schieck, his old buddy from Guatemala a quarter century ago, hurtled in. Schieck was now the deputy USAID administrator, the official number two in the bureaucracy. “Andrew wants you right now!”

  Natsios cornered Gersony in a SCIF off his main office: a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” used for classified discussions. There he exclaimed: “Panama! You’re not going to Panama! I want you in Chinese Manchuria on the North Korean border!”

  Natsios then rattled off questions he wanted Gersony to answer:

  “What is the state of the North Korean economy? Is the communist food distribution system still working? Is all the food being donated by the U.N. World Food Programme getting to the people who actually need it? Is there a political angle to the feeding?”

  Gersony got the distinctly uneasy feeling that despite all the experts in all the bureaucracies in Washington and elsewhere, the future of food aid to North Korea would be decided by the results of his assessment. After all, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) was being funded heavily by the United States, and the United States in this matter would be basing its policy largely on the advice coming out of USAID.

  Gersony canceled his plans for Panama and began meeting experts all over Washington. North Korea was the hermit kingdom, and the experts on North Korea inside the Beltway were a bit of a hermit kingdom themselves. They did not welcome outsiders and guarded their information jealously. They were also divided among factions, generally hardliners against accommodationists. Communist North Korea was one of the last surviving remnants of the Cold War and thus of the Cold War mentality inside Washington. This was an ideological and military struggle.

  Gersony also began reading furiously about the subject, beginning with the late Washington Post correspondent Don Oberdorfer’s classic, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (1997). It had been almost two decades since he had been to the Far East.

  Gersony learned that for 1,300 years, from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the twentieth, the Korean Peninsula constituted one country, observed warily by China and Japan. At the end of the 1500s, Japan invaded Korea for the first time, as a stepping-stone to challenging China, even as the Chinese employed Korea as a shield against Japan. Meanwhile, from the sixteenth century onward, the Korean people suffered periodic famines, in each of which hundreds of thousands died. This was in addition to epidemics and chaos that led to waves of Korean migration northward across the Yalu and Tumen rivers into China, sometimes instigated by Japanese predations.

  The great famine of the 1990s, which formed the background to Andrew Natsios’s concerns, occurred in the context of a leadership change in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, with the death in 1994 of the communist regime’s founder and charismatic anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter, Kim Il-sung, and the ascent of his ill-prepared and undistinguished son, Kim Jong-il, to the position of regime strongman. Crucially, around this time, the collapse of the nearby Soviet Union led to North Korea’s GDP dropping by a third, even as a quarter of its GDP was going to the military. By 1997, government distribution of food had declined by 85 percent, according to some estimates, with refugees staggering north into Chinese Manchuria. In the midst of the largest international aid effort on the globe at the time, there were suspicions that the food being sent to North Korea under the auspices of the U.N. World Food Programme was being diverted to the North Korean military—something the United Nations strenuously denied.

  The fact that North Korea had become a political and human rights lightning rod was evinced by President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech of January 29, 2002, when Bush lumped communist North Korea together with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the ayatollahs’ Iran as constituting the signal threats to America. Just as Gersony was about to travel to the Korean Peninsula, Republican congressman Mark Kirk called the regime-inflicted famine there “the silent massacre,” at a May 2, 2002, hearing.

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  Gersony would spend a combined total of ten weeks in the North Korean border area between May and August 2002, mainly in Chinese territory north of the Tumen River across from the long, northeastern part of North Korea, not far from the Russian frontier. He would conduct eighty-six interviews with refugees and traders in thirteen different locations strung out along the border: not a great number considering his previous assignments, but each interview lasted an average of three hours and was of the highest quality. North Koreans, he found, were not unlike other Asians: whereas Africans were often vague with numbers and details, North Koreans were obsessively precise about everything. Because the Chinese had effectively ceded a ten-mile band of their own territory to North Korean intelligence, Gersony and especially the people he interviewed were in significant danger throughout. Each interview was precious.

  Because for his own safety Gersony required a degree of separation from the U.S. government, a Christian organization with an underground network in the border area facilitated his travels, and so far as anyone in the frontier zone knew, he was just another NGO worker. He conducted his interviews in bedrooms, in attics, in the basements of tea houses, in the oddest of places—since he and his subjects were always worried about North Korean intelligence. It was one of the only times in his career when he did not personally select the interviewees: they were sel
ected by local humanitarian organizations, based on criteria he gave them. They had to be people who had arrived from North Korea within the past six months, since he particularly needed to assess current conditions. He wanted people from throughout North Korea, not just from the particularly devastated northeast. His subjects had to be roughly between twenty-five and fifty-five—working-age people, in other words. He insisted on interviewing only one member of each family, again to get as wide a sampling of experiences as possible.

  He only accepted findings that were corroborated by at least a dozen people. If he heard particularly interesting or insightful things from one or two interviewees, he would consider the information as scraps: to be mentioned to officials in Washington, but with the caveat that he only had a single source.

  In the end, he listened for hundreds of hours to factory workers, teachers, doctors, waitresses, students, firewood salesmen, all manner of market traders, policemen, former military and party officials, and so on. Perhaps no outsider at this point had methodically interviewed so many North Koreans. Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick’s pathbreaking book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, would not be published until 2009. While Oberdorfer’s 1997 book, The Two Koreas, as well as other publications, spoke of extreme hardship and semi-starvation, firsthand stories of individual experiences were generally lacking in the literature.

  And so, for ten weeks, Gersony entered this grainy, black-and-white prison camp of a country, however vicariously, through his interviews. The stories he gathered humanized the ordeal of the average North Korean.

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  It became a matter of the microcosm illuminating the macrocosm.

  Several fishermen told him how they scoured the waters of the nearby Russian coast for pollock and sea bass. But there were no defections by sea to Russia (or to China for that matter), since if there had been, the North Korean regime might have sent several generations of their families to prison for the rest of their lives. But ultimately, they defected because there was no more fuel to be had for these boats in North Korea. This was after they had restricted themselves to working the North Korean coast close to Russia, which they soon overfished. Whatever they did catch, 60 percent had to go to the government. Despite all this, such fishermen were among the richest people in North Korea at the time.

  There was a man who was a laborer in an iron factory in Chongjin with thousands of workers, on the coast in the northeast close to Russia. In 1992, during the final years of Kim Il-sung, the factory maintained 236 trucks; by 2000, 70 percent were out of service. Production had also precipitously dropped, so that the factory closed in 1996. Because the employees were all out of work, food distribution to the factory stopped. The workers cannibalized the ceiling rails, the small motors, everything they could sell. When the government found out, it executed forty of the workers. The other workers and their families began dying of starvation. “No matter the cost, people must see smoke coming out of the smokestacks,” Kim Jong-il exhorted the survivors on reactivating the plant in 1997.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union made everything worse. (Indeed, here the end of the Cold War had mattered for Gersony’s work, just as it had in Bosnia.) For their walls, the copper, lead, and iron mines were all dependent on timber from the Russian far east, which stopped coming in the early 1990s. Mining, fishing, steel production, and other parts of the economy were gradually lost. Among the surviving factories were those for making guns and ammunition and extracting gold. The NGO and intelligence organizations in Washington and elsewhere were aware of little or none of all this prior to Gersony’s report. Gersony heard of a uranium mine not far from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, where political prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts with little food until they died. It was like a concentration camp. But as Gersony told U.S. intelligence officials later, he had only a single source for this particular information.

  Gersony discovered from multiple sources that the only places where civilians regularly received food handouts from the U.N. World Food Programme were in the capital, Pyongyang; in the region of Hyangsan, where the ruling Kim family had its mountain retreat; in the army gold mines; and in some other locations. In most of the rest of the country, WFP food would arrive only on official holidays, such as the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

  The efficacy of the U.N. kindergarten feeding program, a flagship World Food Programme operation, was a sensitive issue that Gersony bore down on in his research. Half of the eighty-six people he conducted extensive interviews with—parents, teachers, former party officials—had direct knowledge of what was going on. They reported that the overwhelming majority of the kindergartens were, in fact, closed in the course of the 1990s famine since feeding had stopped, with the WFP food going instead to members of the army and internal security organizations, and their families.

  U.N. officials conducted periodic inspections of their own at the kindergartens that did remain open. Twelve people who Gersony interviewed explained how these officials were deceived. As it turns out, the U.N. inspections had to be scheduled a week in advance and the United Nations was not allowed to bring its own Korean translators. North Korean security officials arrived two days in advance, provided food for the children, and coached them about what to say—not that it mattered much, since the United Nations depended on regime translators. Not one person Gersony interviewed had ever witnessed a U.N. feeding at a kindergarten, elementary school, or high school. Twenty-one interviewees reported seeing U.N. medicines on sale in local markets. Deceiving the “big noses,” as North Koreans called the white foreigners of the United Nations, was a standard operating procedure of the regime.

  In Hampyong, in the northernmost part of North Korea, there was one hospital that had no medicines, but that did display empty boxes of United Nations–donated medicines on a top shelf of the hospital pharmacy: U.N. inspectors never bothered to reach up with their hands to check the contents of the boxes, which had already been emptied by the military.

  Gersony, after dozens of interviews, came to the conclusion that the U.N. World Food Programme in North Korea at the end of the twentieth century justified the suspicions of the international body’s worst right-wing ideological critics, who were always disparaging the so-called fecklessness of the world body, even as he knew from his own experience elsewhere in the world how much good the United Nations had accomplished.

  So where did all the food and medicine that the United Nations was donating to North Korea end up?

  Thirty-eight of Gersony’s interviewees reported their own specific eyewitness sightings of food deliveries to army and intelligence units, to workers in essential war industries, and for the rebuilding of military reserves. At the country’s ports, army and security vehicles were disguised as civilian trucks with their license plates “muddied” and altered in order to collect the U.N. food deliveries. Gersony’s sources were port traders, local residents, and an artist who had repainted army license plates. There is little public vehicular traffic in North Korea and military trucks are very distinctive, so noticing the deception was not difficult. “This food distribution is life and death for us. Every old lady knows which truck is which,” said one interviewee. Another reported that “the U.N. foreigner who lived in the Chanmasan Hotel [in Chongjin] came to watch the unloading: he just drove in and out of the port, without following where the trucks were going.”

  Gersony estimated that as much as 80 percent of U.N. food aid went to the military and other security services. Given the scale of the diversions, you had to look at U.N. food aid as an indirect budget support for the North Korean military, he says. The figure was even higher for bilateral aid donated by individual European countries, such as German beef, which was all diverted to the North Korean army.

  Almost all of Gersony’s interviewees proved useful on the question of food deliveries because food was
in such short supply during this period in North Korea, and therefore food deliveries were a big event everywhere.

  The food and agricultural situation proved to be even worse than foreign intelligence assets were reporting. For example, satellites from space took pictures of what looked like normal cornfields. But as Gersony learned from his one-on-one interviews, because of the mass starvation people had already gone into these fields and stolen the ears of corn before they had a chance to mature.

  There was cannibalism and suicide, often by ingesting rat poison, on a significant scale.

  One vignette in Gersony’s voluminous notes was titled “The Last Tofu Meal,” told to him by an elderly lady:2

  Before this woman left for China in April 2001, she rented a room in her home to a family—a man, a woman, and two children aged 11 and 14. They came from Unsan, North Phyongan near the Chagang Province border. One day, January 18, 2001 (she will never forget the date), they asked for some tofu, and she gave them some. At 3 a.m., the family would usually go outside to collect grass and roots. But that day she heard nothing stirring, so she went to look after them. She found the four completely still, seated in a circle, hugging each other, dead. They had mixed rat poison with the tofu and taken it together. The elderly woman had already lost three of her own children, and she just hadn’t enough food to help the family more than she had, she said with regret.

  Because he now had three children of his own, this story affected him even more than that of the woman in Mozambique who had let go of her daughter in the river.

  There was also the story he heard about the women’s section of a prison in Chongjin.