North Korea Undercover (15 page)

Exile warps minds. A group of defectors who are desperate to see the end of the regime may well overegg their opposition pudding. But at the time of writing, all the regime’s talk of thermo-nuclear war has come to naught, and the North Korean People’s Liberation Front’s analysis has proved, thus far, right.

Telling porkies about one’s readiness to stagenuclear war wasn’t the only big lie hanging in the air at the DMZ. Three million people died in the Korean civil war. Who started it matters. I asked the colonel whether it might have been the North. He said something-something in Korean.

‘That’s not true,’translated Miss Jun.

‘It’s not true?’

‘That’s not true,’ she repeated.

Telling lies about history matters, too. Towards the end of his long life, Stalin grew increasingly dejected: ‘I am finished. I trust no one, not even myself.’ But in 1950, Stalin trusted Kim Il Sung’s optimism that war against the South would be swift. Kim had pressed Stalin repeatedly to be allowed to make war against the South, convinced that it would crumble under pressure. The Soviet Commissar Shtykov met Kim on 30 January 1950 and told him the good news that Stalin, after alot of hesitation, was now in favour of war. Shtykov’s cable to Stalin reads: ‘Kim Il Sung received my
report with great satisfaction’ In April, Kim went to Moscow. As a Soviet memo at the time records:

The attack will be swift and the war will be won in three days: the guerrilla movement in the South has grown stronger and amajor uprising is expected.
²

The three-day war ended up lasting three years. It was a terrible mistake, one that millions – but neither Kim nor Stalin – paid for with their blood.

At first, things went brilliantly for the North Koreans. Diplomats in the British embassy in Seoul, only 40 miles from the border, listened to the sound of battle on the streets outside, and waited for the knock on the door. The ambassador was Vyvyan Holt, a brilliant linguist and a good and sweet man, almost too innocent for the cruelties of the Cold War chess game; one of his aides, thedouble agent George Blake. The British capitulated to the North Koreans, who treated them with a rapidly decreasing degree of civility.

Kim’s soldiers swept the whole of the peninsula, apart from one fraction of land around Busan (formerly called Pusan), a port in the south-east. Then the Americans struck, twice. Diplomatically, they secured United Nations backing for the defence of South Korea, meaning that soon Australian, Belgian, British, Canadian, Colombian, Dutch, Ethiopian, French, Greek, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Filipino, South African, Thai and Turkish troops were on their way.

Militarily, General MacArthur staged a brilliant amphibian
invasion at Incheon, and punched his way through to Seoul and then further and further north, almost all the way to the Chinese border. The Korean People’s Army all but collapsed, a broken force. Pyongyang was evacuated, Kim’s prisoners shot in a mass killing.

But as the United Nations forces neared the Yalu river and the Chinese border, Mao felt threatened. The Chairman struck back, sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops into the North. The human wave attacks by the Chinese overcame the United Nations forces, especially the British Gloucestershire regiment, who were dreadfully mauled. The Chinese elbowed the North Korean army aside and pushed down to the 38th parallel. By the summer of 1951, the front line was pretty much where the border between the twohalves of Korea had been at the start. Everyone was in favour of a ceasefire, apart from Stalin, who kept the wargoing for two more years. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors in the Kremlin soon gave the go-ahead for peace talks, and a ceasefire agreement took effect from July 1953.

The Korean civil war was a disaster for humanity. Atrocities occurred on both sides, as happens in every war. The United Nations forces, led by the Americans, used their firepower to bomb the North, the Soviets and the Chinese to the negotiating table, dropping more explosives on North Korea than they had on Nazi Germany. The effect was to flatten the North. Only three buildings survived intact in Pyongyang. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the bombing.

The detailed history of the war has been told brilliantly elsewhere.
³
Werner Bischof, a Swiss photographer for the Magnum
agency, took some incredibly powerful images of refugees on the run from the war.
⁴
A second series of photographs has recently been unearthed in the old, Communist-era archives of the Hungarian Foreign Office by an academic sleuth, Balazs Szalontai.
⁵
One picture of Pyongyang looks like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the atomic bombs. One can make out a kerbstone, a few spindlytrees here and there, the skeletons of three buildings. The rest, as far as the eye can see, is rubble. A second picture shows three child corpses huddled, as if in sleep, in the foreground; a few feet away a man and a woman, lost in grief.

The suffering of ordinary people was hideous. Maria Balog, a Hungarian diplomat working for the Soviet satellite, reported on 7 February 1951 from Pyongyang:

Korea has become a pile of ruins. There are no houses or buildings left. Cities and villages have been blown up, or destroyed by bombing, or burned down. The population lives in dug-outs in the ground. The people are literally without clothes or shoes... There is no food. They eatthe frozen cabbage roots unearthed from under the snow. Cholera... typhus... infections, meningitis... They are not prepared against these epidemics; there is no medicine; and there are not enough medical personnel. There is no soap. Here, for instance, women wash their clothes without soap, in the river because there is nofirewood.
⁶

More than sixty years on, I saw with my own eyes that women still wash clothes in the freezing rivers of North Korea.

Blake, originally a Dutch citizen who became a British spy and then turned double agent for the Communists during the Korean war, cited the bombing campaign as the thing that turned his mind against the West:

In Holland, during the war, when I heard at night the heavy drone of hundreds of RAF planes overhead on their way to Germany, the sound had been like a song to me. Now, when I saw the enormous grey hulks of the American bombers sweeping low to drop their deadly load over the small, defenceless Korean villages huddled against the mountainside; when I saw the villagers, mostly women and children and old people – for the men were all at the front – being machine-gunned as they fled toseek shelter in the fields, I felt nothing but shame and anger.
⁷

But one cannot condemn the American bombing on its own, while ignoring the cause of the war. The RAF bombing of Germany during the second world war which so heartened Blake was morally no different than the Allied bombing of Korea which so sickened him. Innocent men, women andchildren were killed by the RAF. But no one in the RAF had wanted to drop bombs over Germany until Hitler invaded Poland and started the second world war. Equally, the American bombing of North Korea was in response to a war started by Kim Il Sung.

The terrible destruction caused by the bombing created acruel reaction. The North Koreans and the Chinese were especially hard
on captured American and British airmen, some of whom were tortured, some shot, and some brainwashed and returned to the West with broken minds. The rules of war were pretty much abandoned.

Our coach moved on to Kaesong, a weathervane city just north of the DMZ. Before the Korean war it had been , in the South; in 1953, the border was redrawn so the North could have it. It’s now home to an industrial zone where Northern workers, mainly women, work in factories owned by the South. Kim Jong Un closed the zone, which stands on the northern side of the border, in the spring of 2013, when his nuclear sabre-rattling was at its fiercest. By the autumn, talks about reopening the zone were progressing. People in Kaesong looked the most prosperous of all in North Korea. They cannot have been happy that the Young Leader had cut off their opportunity to make money, but were in no position to protest about it. If there ever is an uprising, Kaesong might be the place where the first spark ignites.

After lunch off cripplingly low tables in a fake inn, the bus disgorged us outside an enormous statue to Kim Il Sung, high up on a hill. Here, Kim the First is cast inbronze, wearing a Mao jacket underneath an open long-length coat, standing on a white plinth which rests on the summit of a long series of steps. Below them is a preposterously wide road leading downhill away from the statue, so Kim Il Sung dominates the landscape for as far as the eye can see. By this stage in the tour, we were done with bowing, but our minders didn’t even suggest it. There was something revolting about this statue, a bronze god demanding adoration, and something revolting, too, about the mind-set of the people who require him to beadored.

Yet even here, there was evidence that the power of the Kim cult
might one day turn to dust. Two million North Koreans nowhave mobile phones, using a heavily circumscribed Egyptian mobile phone system, Orascom. The system is the opposite of 4G – you can’t surf the internet because there is no internet and you can’t make a call outside of North Korea because the system blocks all international calls. So the digital revolution that has rocked the world is locked out of North Korea. Or is it?

The youngest student of all,‘Dylan’, an African American and quite the coolest and most fashionable of our whole party, and also the sleepiest, powered up his iPhone on the hill by the Kim statue, and got a signal from mobile masts in the South, just a fewmiles away. Dylan tweeted: ‘At the DMZ, #JustChillin’. Soon, the whole party were on their phones, texting away. The thing is, if we can do that, so can an enterprising North Korean with a Chinese phone.

Working out what is happening on the outside may nolonger seem unimaginable, and that spells trouble for the regime. The ice-wall blocking out the world of information is beginning to crack, not just for the elite, but for ordinary people too.

Gaddafi’s Libya back in the late 1990s was another state where information about anything was lost in fog. It seemed astonishing that such a bonkers regime hadbeen able to stay in power, by that time, for three decades. I was also surprised to see so many satellitedishes on people’s houses. Clearly, Gaddafi was losing his grip in the information war. It took a long time, but fourteen years later it was the tyrant’s turn to face a horrible death: first a grenade blast, then being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet, all of it caught on a mobile phone, news that was no doubt received in Pyongyang with a degree of unease.

¹
We were making a documentary about landmines in the same minefield – an activity no less lunatic than lepidopterology.

²
Lankov,
The Real North Korea,
p10.

³
Max Hastings:
The Korean War,
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1987.

⁴
Werner Bischof: ‘An Era Defined by Exile’,
Time
, http://lightbox.time.com/2013/07/25/an-era-defined-by-exile-korean-war-photos-by-werner-bischof/

⁵
Chris Springer, Balazs Szalontai:
North Korea Caught In Time: Images of War and Reconstruction
, Garnet, Reading, 2010.

⁶
Springer, Szalontai, pxii.

⁷
George Blake:
No Other Choice,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1990, pl41.

8

Facing the Final Curtain

Kim Il Sung faced the first great threat to his grip on power in 1951, when it was clear that he’d made a terrible mistake in assuming that the South would fold, and the Americans and the West in general would let that happen. Even while the civil war was at its height, and American bombs were raining down on North Korea, he cracked down on enemies of the state, real or imagined, and they were sacked, imprisoned, shot or simply disappeared.

Two years later, the moment the shooting war stopped in the summer of 1953, there was another purge. This time, Pyongyang staged its first major show trial. There were adozen defendants, the most prominent Yi Sung Yop, the former secretary of the Central Committee and one of thevery, very few guerrillas who, unlike Kim, had enjoyed a full education. The prosecution charged that an American diplomat called Harold Noble in Seoul told Yi through a hapless go-between to create anti-Communist insurgents inthe North, prior to the American invasion at Incheon. ‘At this point,’ writes Lankov, ‘any notion of plausibility seems to
have deserted the script writers of the show trial; it is too improbable that the Americans would have trusted their agent with such highly classified information.’
¹
But the script writers had made an evenbigger error, by attaching a date and a place for Nobles order to Yi’s man – court papers showed that it happened on 26 June 1950, when the American was supposedly in Seoul. On that date Noble was on holiday, in Japan.
²

All of the accused spoke their lines well. One defendant kept on repeating: ‘I am a running dog of American imperialism.’ When it came to the turnof the defence lawyers, they stated that all the accusations against their clients had been proven. Yi told the court:‘Had I two lives, to take them both would have been too little.’
³
YimHwa, a writer who had tried to kill himself, apologized to the court, and demanded to be executed. Lankov summarizes: ‘The trial which had started as farce ended as black comedy.’ Ten got death sentences; two, longspells in prison.

Why beg the regime for execution if you face certaindeath? Offstage, out of sight of blind justice, they torture your loved ones in front of you, and threaten to torture them some more, or execute them, unless you stay on script.

But the regime may have been sensitive to the mocking publicity it got in the international press for the script-writing errors; from then on, it became more fashionable for people just to disappear. Kim did all this when his stock was low, and his particular blend of national Stalinism was out of favour. For Stalin’s death in March 1953 had cast a cold wind against those leaders of Soviet satellites who were seen to be too dictatorial, too enamoured by their own
personality cults. In eastern Europe, the new mood of de-Stalinization saw some leaders toppled from their plinths. In the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev ruled the roost. The new breed of Soviets saw Kim Il Sung as yesterday’s man. Many Soviet and Chinese archives remain locked up, but the fall of the Berlin Wall has meant that the documents of Communist ambassadors from satellite countries are now readily available. Szalontai has unearthed a fascinating insight by Soviet Counsellor A.M.Petrov, reported by Hungarian diplomat Laszlo Keresztes, from 1955: