North Korea Undercover (25 page)

Fujimoto says of Kim:

Kim Jong Il is a warm person with many hobbies, and always wears a smile. But when someone fails to report an important item, or when something goes wrong, he yells and screams into a telephone like a madman. I have often witnessed this. He has no qualms about chewing our senior officials, no matter who they are.
²⁵

The more his people starved, the more Kim Jong Il loved to eat and drink the finest things. Fujimoto was dispatched to the far corners of the world to track down goodies: caviar in Iran, Pilsner beer in the Czech Republic, bacon in Denmark, and regular trips to Japan to buy tuna, sea urchin, and ‘toro’ sushi – a prize cut of
fatty, marbled tuna. Kim Two was a night owl, and would often demand a lavish meal at two o’clock in the morning. The longest banquet went on for four days and everyone invited to it dared not fall asleep before the Dear Leader went to bed. ‘It was torture for them,’ wrote Fujimoto in
Kim Jong Ils Cook.

He consumed vast amounts of alcohol, and once, reportedly, was told off by his old man for turning up to a meeting drunk. Jasper Becker reports that Soviet diplomats – the best informed, or rather, the least in the dark in Pyongyang – picked up rumours that Kim Jong Il may have picked up a drug habit too. ‘Cocaine Kim’ has the
Private Eye
ring of truth about it.
²⁶
The Soviet diplomats had heardthat in the mid-1980s Kim Jong Il attended several meetings in which‘he talked such a stream of gibberish that not even a personal translator could follow’.
²⁷

Drugs could also account for Kim Jong Il’s gibberish on the secret tape recording made by Shin and Choi. At the very top of one of the most feared regimes in the world was a silly man babbling poppycock. And yet he managed to overcome his demons, alcohol-or drug-induced, and stayed in power until 2011, when he died in his bed – the only serious test of success for a tyrant.

Even so, according to these witnesses, there was also something unhinged about the man, a little boy lost, engulfed by power, something in him, perhaps, that realized that everything he did and everything he stood for was fundamentally wrong. In 2008 he suffered a stroke. Aphotographer captured him, scowling in his Mao casual wear, his face like a devil’s, sick of sin.

¹
Martin, p196.

²
Martin, pp205-9.

³
Martin, p206.

⁴
Martin, p354. The claim is rubbish, not Martin's reporting of it, of course.

⁵
Martin, p745.

⁶
Breen, p12.

⁷
Lankov,
The Real North Korea
, p68.

⁸
Breen, p77.

⁹
John H. Cha, K. L. Sohn:
Exit Emperor Kim Jong Il: Notes From His Former Mentor
, Abbott Press, Bloomington, 2012, p49.

¹⁰
Ken E. Gause, pl20.

¹¹
Cha, Sohn, pl09.

¹²
Cha, Sohn, p95

¹³
Simon Sebag Montefiore:
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2003, p25.

¹⁴
Yoshi Yamamoto
Taken! North Korea's Criminal Abduction of Citizens of Other Countries
, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2011, p27.

¹⁵
Taken!,
p29.

¹⁶
John Gorenfeld: ‘The Producer From Hell’,
Guardian
, 4 April 2003.

¹⁷
Shin Sang Ok, Choi Un Hee:
Kidnapped by the Kingdom of Kim Jong Il
, Donga Ilbosa, Seoul, 1988.

¹⁸
Cha, Sohn, p97.

¹⁹
Gorenfeld, ‘The Producer From Hell’,
Guardian
, 4 April 2003.

²⁰
Cha, Sohn, p94.

²¹
Cha, Sohn, p96.

²²
Gause, pl23.

²³
Gause, p127.

²⁴
Jang Jin Seong: Inside North Korea: ‘The day Kim Jong-il gave me a Rolex’, 6 January 2012, http://www.bbcxo.uk/news/magazine-16413669

²⁵
Cha, Sohn, p96.

²⁶
A phrase reportedly heard at a
Private Eye
lunch about a story: it may not be true, but one would like it to be.

²⁷
Becker,
Rogue Regime
, p43.

15

Fifty Shades of Green

I sit in a bar in Belfast, and nurse my Guinness, and listento an IRA man tell how he spent two months in North Korea in 1988 learning how to make bombs. There are threemen: the go-between; ‘Len’, who went to Pyongyang; and another IRA man called‘Eddie’. It’s a little tense as we start. Ihave an Irish surname but an English accent and my employer – the BBC – could not be more British. Into this awkwardness I find myself stumbling. Eddie leans forward, deadpan: ‘Before we start, John, I want you to know one thing. I’m a member of the Church ofScientology.’ I replied: ‘Fuck you.’ After we’d stopped laughing, I thanked the Churchfor breaking the ice for me with all sorts of unlikely people.

Len turned out to be a soft-spoken Irishman from WestBelfast with a bone-dry wit. But there is a toughness about him, too. Back then, Len was, as he saw it, a soldierin an army, his general Sean Garland, one of the great, flawed heroes of Irish Republicanism. There’s anIRA ballad called ‘Sean South of Garryowen’ which tells the story of a doomed attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in 1957. Three IRA men were injured in theshoot-out. Under fire, Sean Garland carried Sean South on his shoulders, in a hopeless attempt to save hisfriend’s life. Garland escaped to the Irish Republic, but severely injured, ending up in hospital, and, oncerecovered, Mountjoy Gaol. The legend of Sean Garland, IRA hero, had started. Today, he is a sick and dying man. They callhim Old Blue Eyes, and Len tells me he is one of the hardest men he has ever met.

Come the start of the Troubles in 1969, the IRA splitinto two. The nationalist wing – the Provisional IRA or Provos – set out to bomb their way to aunited Ireland. The smaller, more avowedly socialist wing, the Officials or ‘Stickies’ or‘Sticks’, after some hapless bloodshed came to believe that civil war between Nationalist and Unionist workingpeople was a disaster. The Sticks were so called because to honour the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916, they sportedadhesive ‘stick-on’ lilies; the Provos used pin badges, and are sometimes called the Pin-Heads.

Ideology restrained the Sticky IRA from killing, but didnot stop it completely. One estimate by the University of Ulster is that the Officials killed fifty-two peopleduring the Troubles: twenty-three civilians, seventeen members of the security forces, eight republicanparamilitaries, three of their own members and a loyalist paramilitary. The lion’s share of the murdershappened in the early 1970s. The single worst outrage was the bombing of the Parachute Regiment headquarters in Aldershotin 1972, a revenge attack for Bloody Sunday when the Paras shot dead thirteen unarmed Civil Rights protesters inDerry/Londonderry. Instead of the intended target, the retaliatory car bomb killed five female kitchen staff, anelderly gardener and the regiment’s Catholic chaplain, Father Gerard Weston. Republican anger at the slaughter of civilians pushed the Officials to announce thatthey would renounce violence and give up the ghost – a claim that wasn’t quite correct. But from thetime of the Aldershot bomb onwards, it is true to say that whatever else the Sticks got wrong, they did not commit massmurder again. Had the Sticks joined in with the Provisional IRA’s sectarianism, the story of theTroubles would have been far bloodier. Twenty-five years later, the Provos joined the Sticks in questioning whetherviolence could pave the way to a united Ireland. In the meantime, 1,800 lives had been snuffed out.

Garland was the king of the Sticks, officially Secretary-Generalof the Irish Workers’ Party, which had real clout back then with the Soviet Union and its satellitestates. The Soviets and their allies were wary of the Provisional IRA, but treated Garland’sWorkers’ Party seriously. As far as the public and the media were concerned, the Official IRA had ceased to exist. Inreality, they walked off into the shadows as Group B. Something of the Workers’ Party’scontinuing paramilitary wing is told in
The Tost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’Party,
a fascinating and scholarly investigation into a black hole of Irish paramilitarism by Brian Hanley and ScottMillar.
¹
But Hanley and Millar didn’t get to meet a volunteer like Len.

In October 1988 Len and five other Sticks – all soldiersin Group B – flew from Shannon to Moscow. Their cover story was that they were studying at Moscow University, soto make that work they wrote a series of postcards, which would be posted from Moscow while they were away. TheOfficials’ go-between in Moscow was an Irishman, ‘Fat Frankie’. He smoothed their way, and was extremely well-connected in the old Soviet Union. The wordis that Fat Frankie once witnessed a fist fight in the back of a limo in Moscow between a high-up in theWorkers’ Party and Boris Yeltsin, both of whom had enjoyed perhaps one shandy too many. Neither Russian President norIrish rebel was a clean winner. Fat Frankie also helped organize the Sticks’ rather special method offund-raising: money-laundering fake $100 bills manufactured in North Korea, including sending a party of Irish Republicanpensioners on holiday to the Black Sea, each carrying a small fortune in Pyongyang’s finest US dollarfakes.

The Sticks stayed at North Korea’s embassy inMoscow for a few nights, then they were driven to the airport in a Mercedes with diplomatic plates. At thecheck-in desk, no passports were shown. They went straight through to their seats at the very front of the plane. Nosecurity for them. The flight was fourteen hours, refuelling in Siberia and then again in Beijing. They hadbeen told to explain to anyone who asked that they were a group from the Maltese Communist Party, ‘Malta215’, preposterous cover for six hefty, white-skinned, un-tanned Irishmen, though as ‘a historyprofessor’ who am I to condemn a bunch of Maltesers?

‘How did you find Pyongyang?’ Iask, so excited I almost shout. ‘Sssh,’ Len said, and looked around the bar. No one was paying any attention, but just in case I corrected myself: ‘How did you find Preston?’ He smiled, and told me his story.

On landing, the rest of the passengers got off before Lenand his men were taken in a small procession of Ministry of Interior Mercedes to a barracks‘about 30 miles north of Preston’. Len guessed it was north of the capital, because the sunset was on the right asthey were driven along dirt roads up in the mountains. They ended up somewhere near a town called‘Mariban’ – Len remembered it phonetically, and there’s nowherespelt like that in North Korea. It was a military establishment, complete with a big parade ground.

Len explained what happened at the very first briefing:‘We were told through an interpreter that the North Koreans were helping with our revolution, but that wemustn’t talk about our time here, ever.’ They wore suits and each sported a badge with Kim Il Sung on it.

Lecture over, the boys from West Belfast found a shopwhich sold beer in big green bottles. ‘That first night, we had a good piss-up. The food was crap. They gaveus dog soup once. There was a scrap of meat and it had dog fur on it.’ Len pulled a death mask face, rigid with disgust. ‘And chicken. They told us it was chicken, but the legs on these chickens were so small. Onceon the parade ground, one of them said, “There are your chickens,” and he was pointing to abunch of crows.’

They were given North Korean officer uniforms, billetedtwo to a room, and taught how to salute, North Korean-style: a kind of half-clawed gesture to the temple.‘They told us about the great revolution, how they were fighting US imperialism, the atrocities in the Korean civilwar. They also took down all our personal details ... They asked us, “If ever we wanted to call on you, would you say yes?” They’ve used people from here as couriers.’ Next came a medicalexamination complete with chest X-ray, taken by equipment so old-fashioned it was straight from a cartoon, recalled Len.

The North Koreans told the Sticks about Jucheism, but Lenquickly came to his own conclusion: ‘That was an absolute load of fuck. Your man Kim One, he wasGod.’

The military training started. They were taughthand-to-hand combat, a military version of Taekwondo. ‘I wasfit at the time, but this was way beyond me.’ In a deserted, mock-up town they weregiven practice at firing weapons: assault rifles, pistols, belt-fed general purpose machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, explosive ordnance, booby traps, demolition, all forms of explosives: command detonation, radio detonation.

They learnt the best way to kill a man –‘Stab a man in the back of the neck, and then twist, cutting into the cerebral cortex’ – next camekidnapping techniques, but it was the explosives training that interested the Sticks the most. They worked with ammoniumnitrate explosive, which looked like a bar of soap with a pre-drilled hole in it, in which Len, the engineer in thegroup of six, would place his detonator.

‘They gave us a mathematical formula forknowing how much explosive you’d need to blow the doors off a Securicor van but it was too bloodycomplicated.’ Gauging how much explosive to use on a job was a real problem for the Official IRA when they went‘fund-raising’, a West Belfast/North Korean echo of the moment in the film
The Italian Job
when the bullion gang blow a van to smithereens and Michael Caine complains: ‘You were only supposed to blow thebloody doors off! ’

The Irishmen talked about a gift for Kim Il Sung, whichhad been delivered to him, but they never got to meet him in person. The gift was a beautiful piece of Belleekporcelain, woven in ceramics to look like basketwork, and more than a century old. Where did you get that from? Iasked, foolishly. ‘It wasn’t bought in a shop,’ said Len. Whether the Great Leader everrealized that he was on the receiving end of stolen goods is another matter.

The Koreans thought that back home the Sticks had afull-scale army, with tanks in the mountains, waiting for the revolution. ‘Garland was conning them/ said Len. The Stickskept mum about how small their numbers were – perhaps fifty fighters, if that – and carried on with the training. Eventually, the North Koreans sent them around fifty Tokarev handguns, the Pyongyang edition of an old Soviet pistol.