Dear Leader (23 page)

I don’t think I’d ever taken such care with every single word of a piece of writing as I did that morning. Young-min too made a great effort, as if writing a letter to the South Korean president himself. We worked for over an hour and showed the results to Mr Shin. He said that even though we were writing in bullet points, we should explain enough to make sure we could be trusted. He suggested, for example, that I should hint at what the Seed-bearing Strategy referred to. I felt that in order to persuade the South Korean intelligence of our credentials, I needed first to gain the trust of Mr Shin, and told him that the strategy referred to a kidnapping operation practised by North Korean agents.

I first learned of this immense criminal operation when I was a student at Pyongyang Arts School. Among my classmates there was a girl called Ri Hyun-suk. We had just finished eating our packed lunches and had started to peel some tangerines to share between us when she confessed to me, ‘I’m actually Japanese.’

I choked on a soft segment of fruit. I’d known her for several years:
how could she possibly be a foreigner? All citizens of North Korea had to be Korean. I laughed awkwardly. Hyun-suk began to cry and then she left the room. A few days later, after going on a date together, I had the opportunity to see her home.

She lived alone with her mother in a very luxurious private mansion. Not only her house, but all the other houses in that walled compound were mansions. Before we parted, she told me, as if letting me in on a top secret, that all the residents of that walled compound were involved in ‘Localisation’ schemes. When I asked what she meant, she said this was where female North Korean agents who had been made pregnant by foreign husbands lived with their children. It was part of a plan to establish North Korean family ties for foreigners, to make them sympathetic towards North Korea. Her father, she said, was the most important figure in the Japanese Socialist Party.

I did not believe everything she told me then, not until the second time I encountered the ‘Localisation’ strategy after my admittance into the United Front Department. There, I learned first-hand that there were others like Hyun-suk who had foreign blood in them and were brought up not knowing their own fathers. This was 1999, when the Japanese government had raised the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by the DPRK as an issue, and was demanding their return.

At that time, I was working on a book of poetry commissioned by Director Im Tong-ok and was staying at Ui-am Guesthouse. Although, as head of the UFD, he was in charge of any espionage, policy or diplomacy related to South Korea, he needed to maintain his literary credentials because the UFD relied on tools of psychological warfare that encompassed the arts. Moreover, Director Im was caught up in a power struggle at the very top that required him to offer Kim Jong-il a book of poetry. OGD Deputy Director Hwang Byong-seo, having upset Kim Jong-il and been banished to the provinces, had offered his apology to Kim by dedicating a book of
poems to him. When Kim Jong-il reinstated the man on the grounds that the dedication was proof of his absolute loyalty in the face of adversity, North Korea’s most powerful men became pitted against each other in a battle to the death to please Kim Jong-il with their own ‘literary offerings’.

The Ui-am Guesthouse, in the Daedong River Area of Pyongyang, belonged to Director Im Tong-ok. A very limited number were permitted to go inside, and those allowed entry were being afforded a special show of trust by him. For this reason, conversation on classified state secrets was allowed to take place there to a certain extent. One day, when head of UFD policy-making Chae Chang-guk visited the guesthouse, I asked about our department’s need for Japanese citizens.

‘You’ll hurt yourself if you know too much,’ he responded with a hearty laugh, instead of answering my query. But that evening, as we dined with other cadres in the compound, the very same subject came up again in the context of diplomacy with Japan. Chae Chang-guk didn’t seem to be concerned that I was part of the conversation, and I understood tacitly that while he couldn’t tell me directly, it was something I was allowed to know. That evening marked my true induction into the nature and scale of international crimes perpetrated by the North Korean regime.

The history of North Korea’s kidnappings began in the 1970s. Until the end of the 1960s, North Korea was effectively ruled by the military. Following the end of the Korean War in 1953, Kim Il-sung built up the authority of the military in order to consolidate domestic politics on the basis of anti-South Korean sentiment, and to entrench his power. But for Kim Jong-il, who had been preparing the ground for his succession to the throne since the early 1970s, the military was a threatening entity: as long as it could influence policy-making, it effectively held power. Under the guise of forming a state based on single Party rule, Kim Jong-il took away the inter-Korean diplomatic
and business privileges of the military and transferred them to the Workers’ Party.

The military had to consent to Kim Jong-il’s proposals because of the nature of Kim Il-sung’s Koryo Confederation strategy, according to which there would be two political systems on the Korean peninsula initially, until such time as the two Koreas could be united under a federal government. For this to work in Kim Il-sung’s favour, what was required was not merely military might, but the dissolution of South Korea’s military leadership. This was to be accomplished through infiltrating South Korea’s democratic movements, which were increasingly rising up in protest against their military dictator.

This is what led to the creation of the United Front Department, the Strategic Command, Office 35, and the Foreign Investigations Bureau (the precursor to the Foreign Affairs Bureau), all of which were to be controlled by the Workers’ Party. In order to showcase the superiority of the Party over the military in activities in the inter-Korean sphere, in 1972 Kim Jong-il instigated an ambitious project called ‘Localisation’.

While the military’s Reconnaissance Bureau produced spies by training those who had defected to the North, the new departments of the Workers’ Party were more proactive in how they acquired ‘Localised’ knowledge: they chose to kidnap citizens of the country that would be spied on. Eventually, the military became restricted to gathering tactical intelligence in the inter-Korean sphere. While the Workers’ Party also conducted espionage in the inter-Korean sphere, its remit was extended to the promotion of Korean reunification (on DPRK terms) at the international level by means of cultivating pro-North sympathisers worldwide and engaging in counter-intelligence and psychological warfare initiatives.

There were three main reasons put forward by cadres working on these operations to justify Kim Jong-il’s strategy of kidnapping foreign citizens. First, to recruit teachers who would provide
‘localised’ knowledge of their country and thus aid in the training of North Korean spies. Second, it helped accomplish identity fraud and allowed North Korean spies to acquire genuine foreign identities. Third, depending on the individual circumstances of adaptation and loyalty, kidnapped children could be trained and returned to their country of birth as North Korean agents.

In 1977, Yokota Megumi, a Japanese girl who is one of the most well-known victims of North Korean kidnapping, was captured for the third reason when she was only thirteen years old. While she was fully foreign, her youth meant she could be persuaded to feel loyalty to the DPRK – or so it was thought. The following year, sixteen-year-old South Korean student Kim Young-nam was kidnapped in Gunsan, in Cheonbuk, South Korea, along with dozens of other teenagers from around the world.

Nevertheless, Japanese citizens made up the greatest number of foreign kidnap victims. This was because the Party’s inter-Korean operatives had an outpost in the Jochongryon, the Association of Chosun People in Japan, and there were political and geographical advantages in mounting operations against the South from a base in Japan.

However, no matter how thorough the reach of Kim Jong-il’s dictatorship of the mind, it didn’t win the genuine loyalty of the kidnapped. I think the kidnapped teenagers were able to resist ideological brainwashing because of their vivid memories of the lives they had known and the trauma of being separated from their parents.

In the mid 1980s, Kim Jong-il therefore proposed the Seed-bearing Strategy as a solution to the problem. The idea was to create spies who looked foreign, but who were North Koreans born and bred. In order to accomplish this task, the Party’s inter-Korean operatives pursued a two-fold tactic that involved kidnapping foreign women, and sending attractive North Korean women abroad to become pregnant with
men who had white, black or brown skin. Their children are born in North Korea with different-coloured skin from the rest of their countrymen, and the rest of their lives are spent in strict apartheid. Their health is looked after by Office 915 of the Party’s Strategic Command, which treats only inter-Korean operatives. Everything else they need in life is arranged directly by the most powerful entity in North Korea, the Party’s Organisation and Guidance Department.

My classmate Ri Hyun-suk, however, had spent her life in relative freedom, and was integrated into society to a certain extent. This was because her mere presence as a hostage in Pyongyang provided leverage against her father, giving him a greater incentive to encourage foreign aid to North Korea and advocate for engagement strategies favourable to the DPRK.

The scale of Kim Jong-il’s international crimes, which extended to kidnappings as he established his succession from Kim Il-sung, were first revealed to the world at the time of the 2002 summit with the then Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi. Before this time, even the Japanese were sceptical of the notion that the DPRK might be kidnapping their citizens. But at the summit, Kim Jong-il acknowledged the kidnapping of Megumi and others. He issued an apology, saying he had only found out about these incidents after the event, and that special departments had carried out the kidnappings out of heroic and nationalistic fervour. Not only Japan, but the rest of the world was shocked.

The gross miscalculation by Kim Jong-il had its roots in North Korea’s anticipation of US$11.4 billion of aid from Japan, and the following events unfolded behind the scenes. Just before Koizumi arrived in Pyongyang, the DPRK Foreign Ministry’s final agenda for the summit was to be provided to the UFD for viewing. As we waited throughout the morning for the agenda to arrive, the atmosphere was grave: we had submitted an unambiguous warning to Kim Jong-il earlier, saying that if the kidnapping issue
had already been included in the agenda for the North Korea–Japan summit, there was a serious risk that it might attract international attention through the interference of South Korean or Japanese civilians. This would put North Korea in a very difficult position, and someone on our side would surely have to meet a grisly end following the summit.

After receiving a summons from Supervisor Park Chul to appear at an emergency meeting, I joined other colleagues in the meeting room. On the table lay the agenda, a packet of documents printed on white paper.

‘This agenda must be confirmed by Office 101 and returned to headquarters before the end of the day. We have thirty minutes to complete the task. There’s not enough time to contribute individually, so I suggest we nominate someone to read the agenda out loud to the group.’ Normally, any UFD employee was permitted to view documents sent to the Department by Kim Jong-il. But if there was a departmental meeting to discuss them, the documents had to be sealed again and returned to their source.

As we had suspected, the agenda looked unfavourable. Above all, the tone of the Japanese response to North Korea’s proposal that they pay US$40 billion in war reparations was alarming. North Korea had argued that the war damage and interest accrued since the time of the Japanese occupation amounted to US$40 billion. Japan responded by saying that North Korea owed money to Japan for the use of factories, railroads and other infrastructure built by Japan, and subsequently not dismantled, in the period following the Japanese withdrawal from Korea. But the most pertinent card they played was that Japan could not pay in cash, because if they did it would afford opportunities to the US to meddle under the pretext of inspecting funds related to nuclear issues. In the end, North Korea had settled for a proposal of US$11.4 billion in material aid.

When Koizumi arrived, Kim Jong-il found himself entangled from the start in a discussion that centred on Japan’s seeking of a state-level apology for North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens. Just as the UFD had warned, Kim Jong-il had walked into a trap whereby he was obliged to engage in a ‘constructive’ dialogue that required real – rather than strategically feigned – give-and-take.

From Kim Jong-il’s perspective, the worst of it occurred after the first morning session. The Japanese delegation’s room had been bugged and during the break one of their team was heard to object strongly to North Korea’s unwillingness to negotiate a state apology for the kidnappings, and to recommend that Koizumi leave Pyongyang without participating in another session. The conversation was reported to Kim Jong-il, who then must have feared that the foreign currency aid package he so desperately wanted could be at risk. What happened next was shocking.

In the afternoon session that followed, Kim Jong-il made an off-the-cuff apology for the kidnappings. It was the only time in his life that he made a public apology. No one on the North Korean side had ever seen Kim Jong-il speaking on impulse like that, and it would never happen again. In an attempt to limit the damage, the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department immediately released the news that Kim Jong-il had ‘acknowledged’ the kidnappings. But it could not control the Japanese media, which duly reported that Kim Jong-il had ‘offered an apology’ for the kidnappings.

In Korean, there is a saying that goes, ‘The man with cake has no intention of sharing it, but the other man has already begun to set the cutlery.’ Kim Jong-il dreamed of modernising the country with a two-track railway as a central part of his economic reconstruction plan, because he hated the single-track railway laid by the Japanese and wanted to be ‘liberated’ from that particular reminder of Japan’s colonial rule. At the same time, the Propaganda and Agitation Department had ramped up anti-Japanese propaganda through all
media outlets, emphasising the suffering of the Korean people under Japanese occupation.