North Korea Undercover (26 page)

They had two minders, Mr Ho and Mr Hong, whom theyjointly nicknamed ‘Hong Kong’. They got on with them well enough, but made time go faster by taking themick. They realized that food and drink came best in quality and quantity when there was a banquet, so the Stickstold the Koreans that Halloween was a holy feast day for the Irish. They boosted the ‘Holy Feast ofHalloween’ as much as they could, drank themselves silly, but Len was still conscious enough to notice that MrHo and Mr Hong wrapped up the leftovers from the banquet in napkins and spirited them away in their pockets.

Their living conditions were Spartan, but they knew theywere well off in comparison with the North Koreans. One group of soldiers lived in a hole in the ground, with awooden roof keeping the snow – which started to fall in late November – off their heads.

The Irishmen were not the only foreigners at the base. There were some Palestinians, too, whom the ‘Maltesers’ were kept well away from, and a group of Africans from the Tanzanian Air Force. Other sources say that the North Koreans have traded weapons withand/or trained a Liquorice Allsorts of terrorist organizations over the years, including Hezbollah, the TamilTigers and even Osama Bin Laden’s moneyman ‘Dr Amin’ and others in theTaliban.
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The goal appears to have been to maketrouble for the West.

‘We became bored extremely quickly,’ said Len.‘Up at 6.30 a.m. running around the parade ground in pitch darkness before breakfast. We knew it was a load ofbollocks.’ Pretty soon, the Sticks started to mutiny. ‘Getting up and running around in thedark... we thought, Fuck this, and told Ho and Hong we weren’t doing it.’

To keep morale up, they were taken to the circus – ‘It was amazing, but the whole audience was in uniform.’ Most comical of all was that they weretaken on a merry-go-round. ‘They filmed us. If that film ever comes out, it would be a disaster. The sight ofthe men from the IRA riding up and down on hobby-horses, we all looked like such a bunch of fucking cunts.’

There were precious few women around – theylived a monastic existence – but Len recalled one of the maids in the barracks. ‘When we were servedfood, she always served me first. When we had apples, she would peel it for me, the whole thing coming off, so thinlypeeled it was a work of art.’

A punch-up brought an end to their stay. Two Sticks gotstuck into each other, hammering away. When one of the fighters was beaten, he slunk off, lay in wait in the dark, and got hammered again, almost killing him. The North Korean base commander called them in, dressed them down. TheSticks replied that their training programme wasn’t working for them. After two months, Lenand two others were on their way home. As he was leaving, Len gave the apple-peel lady a chocolate bar, for which shethanked him with a gracious smile. The three others stayed an extra month and then packed their bags as well.

It was wonderful getting home to Belfast after all thattime. The cold, the hunger, the boredom, the power cuts, the lighting of candles in the evening, the lack of freethought, in the end Len hated it. Looking back on North Korea now, Len believes:‘It was the worst place I ever went to. The poor bastards believe they are living in Utopia.’

I met Liam, another surprisingly well-travelled Irishman, this time from the south, in a bar in Dublin. Back in the 1970s he got involved in a strike and the experiencescarred him. He became a committed man of the Left, a Marxist and a member of the Irish Workers’ Party, a Stick, but not an IRA man. When Liam was asked to go on a trip to East Germany, the Soviet Union and North Korea inthe autumn of 1989 – one year after Len – he leapt at the chance. It turned out to be the greatestadventure and the most eye-opening experience of his life, but it ended up killing his ‘faith’.

In September 1989 Secretary-General Garland and Liam flewto Moscow to attend an immense Soviet book fair. Three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Liam had no sensethat anything very much was in the air. Soviet power seemed solid enough. But the trip didn’t fuel hiscommitment to socialism. Far from it. ‘They put us up in the Hotel Rossiya, a huge fucking dump by the Kremlin. Garland pulled some strings and we moved to a party hotel, the Octoberskaya. There, the food was excellent andwe didn’t have to share rooms.’ Already Liam was beginning to sense that socialism, Soviet-style, was less about equality for all and more about who you knew. But the person who really knocked his faith was abeautiful young Russian woman, Elena: ‘She had amber hair, green eyes, skin like the inside of aneggshell.’ At first Elena just came to the Irish Workers’ Party stand at the book fair to practiseher English, but soon Liam had to be inventive so that he could spend more and more time with her – andless with Garland. Elena, once she realized that Liam was a true believer, was cruelly dismissive: ‘She took me to GUM, the biggeststore in the whole of Moscow, and threw open her arms and said: “There is nothing that we want here. Youcan’t want this. You have no idea what it’s like. We cannot breathe. You’re going home to spread thegospel of bread queues.”’

Their love affair was never consummated, but even now, more than twenty years later, the light in Liam’s eyes grew fierce when he talked about her.

Garland and Liam flew first class to North Korea, with astopover in Siberia. That experience, too, dented his passion: ‘We got out of the plane, and had a spellin the Siberian airport. A fucking pig would have thought twice about going to the toilet. Blood lay in a pool on thefloor of the duty-free shop.’

Their welcome in Pyongyang was astonishing.‘No one else was allowed off the plane until Garland and I walked down the steps. We were driven away in a great bigblack Mercedes Benz. I had never been in one before. There was maybe thirty police motorbike outriders, racingdown these enormous empty roads.’

Liam was awe-struck by Pyongyang, at first:‘It looked magnificent, the physical structures were impressive.’ The city had been dolled up to thenines in 1988, to look its best as Seoul hosted the Olympics. One year on, Pyongyang still looked smart.

Garland and Liam were given luxury villas in a compoundnot far from the heart of the capital. It was the absolute subservience of the staff that chilled Liam:‘If they saw you, they would freeze on the spot, eyes down, and stay frozen until you passed. They were virtuallyslaves. It was so servile, the bowing and scraping. I remember I said to myself: Do we really want this forIreland?’

Liam continued: ‘Sean did the politicalmeetings, and I was not invited to them. I had a driver who spoke some English, and he drove me around, we saw the sights. Onemorning I spotted the workers in their black clobber going off to build the Christmas Tree’ – at theRyugyong Hotel, which does have a rough triangular symmetry – ‘singing their hearts out. They worked likedants. Jaysus, imagine waking up to that every day of your life. North Korea was the strangest place I’veever been to. Back then, Pyongyang was a beautiful city but the people, the people ... It was like a science fictionmovie, the people were the aliens. Jaysus Christ, you can’t but feel sorry for them.’

They flew home via East Berlin. Liam took a deep breath:‘If Elena and the poor people of North Korea didn’t do it for me, the fucking Wall did. Thecloser I got to it, the more horrified I became. I said: “Jaysus, no, no, no... for fuck’ssake. Any fucking system that needs a wall needs tearing down.”’

Once they got back to Ireland, Garland asked him a subtlequestion: would Liam know of anyone who would be willing to take a small package from Dublin to Copenhagen?‘He was really asking me to do it, of course. Denmark was then the only place with a North Korean embassy, so I kind of guessed it was something to do with them. I said no.’

Liam was wise not to play courier for Sean Garland. Ithadn’t been Garland’s first trip to North Korea, but his sixth. The Korean Central News Agency – themouthpiece of the North Koreans – reported Garland’s first trip in 1983. Garland had toldhis hosts, according to BBC Monitoring at Caversham: ‘The Korean people under the wise guidance of thegreat leader President Kim Il Sung are registering wonderful successes in the struggle to reunify the dividedcountry...! firmly believe that the US and other imperialists would surely be annihilated on the globe by thestruggle of the Irish people and the Korean people.’
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Why did Garland go to North Korea six times? It mighthave seemed that Garland was taken in on that first trip to North Korea in 1983.
Workers’Life
, the Workers’ Party magazine, reported on his visit tothe much-vaunted West Sea Barrage: ‘The standardof living is quite high and the ships are well stocked... the people are well dressed and there were no indicationsof the sort of poverty that we witness in this country.’
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What Garland and his fellow Sticks actually thought wassomewhat different. Colm Breathnach, in the Workers’ Party youth wing, went with Garland onhis first trip to Pyongyang. Years later, Breathnach reflected on the trip to
NK News
:‘In many ways, they [the Workers’ Party] were more old-fashioned Republicans who had kind of grafted on pro-Sovietpolitics on to some kind of left-wing Republicanism. And they weren’t fools. Of course they knew itwas a load of shit.’
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So why did Garland keep going back? Was it theideological twinning between the two movements, both of which were intent on uniting their divided countries? The greatman himself is quoted in
The Lost Revolution
talking about the 1983 trip, which had arisen afterconversations with the North Korean embassy in Denmark. Garland said: ‘We had heard all these stories about NorthKorea but we met them anyway. It was a small country divided, isolated, blockaded economically, politically, militarily, and they were trying to do what they could themselves... We pointed out to them, for instance, puttingfull-page ads into the
Irish Times
of Kim Il Sung’s thoughts was a waste of money becausenobody fucking read them. They were paying £5,000...’
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If the North Koreans were so daft they would throw away £5,000a pop by droning on about Kimilsungism in Ireland’s most conservative newspaper, would theyfund the Workers’ Party, and chums? That was the view of Breathnach: that the driver ‘in the 1980swas funding for elections’. To that end, perhaps, dissent about North Korea was suppressed. When journalistPaddy Woodworth wrote a critical article in 1983 for the Party’s magazine rubbishing the Kim dynasty, itwas not published. Garland reportedly told the author: ‘Ah come on, Paddy, I’m looking forsupport from these people.’
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In 1984, Garland and the President of theWorkers’ Party, Tomas Mac Giolla, met Kim Il Sung and Hwang Jang Yop, who subsequently defected to South Korea in 1997. The Great Leader told the Irishmen: ‘Both the Korean people and the Irish people have a bitter past whenthey were oppressed and maltreated under the colonial rule of the imperialists... The relationship between ourtwo parties was established on the occasion of comrade General Secretary Sean Garland’s visit to ourcountry in September last year. Your party is vigorously struggling to get the British occupation forces out of theNorthern Ireland...’

The Irishmen gave Kim Il Sung a present. The news agencydid not report exactly what kind of present but added, po-faced, that the delegation ‘explained the gift to Comrade KimII Sung’. This may have been the Belleek porcelain, in which case it was stolen goods.

In 1986, there was no BBC Monitoring report of aWorkers’ Party trip but reportedly one took place. One of the delegates with Garland was Proinsias De Rossa, wholater became a government minister and Euro MP. As the wheels came off the Workers’ Party bus later on, De Rossa openly criticized the Pyongyang connection: North Korea was, he said, ‘a completely unreal societywhere people were basically treated as children, not as adults at all’.
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In 1987, Garland was reported by the BBC, who had beenmonitoring the KCNA, to be back in Pyongyang; and again in the following year, 1988, for the regime’sfortieth birthday celebrations, along with other European Communists, including one David Richards of the CommunistParty of Great Britain. It was time to return North Korea’s hospitality. Kim Yong Sun, a director ofthe International Affairs Department, arrived in Dublin for a fraternal visit.
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That OctoberLen and the boys from West Belfast arrived in Pyongyang.

Garland returned to North Korea twice in 1989, accordingto the KCNA, in May, when he met Kim Yong Sun for a second time, and then, with Liam, in September. On thissecond 1989 trip, Garland was also reported to have met Kim Yong Sun, again. Remember that name.

Sinn Fein, the political movement which marched in stepwith the Provisional IRA, dallied with North Korea, too. The main Sinn Fein enthusiast for Pyongyang was GerryMacLochlainn, who served two and a half years from 1981 for conspiracy tocause explosions. Once out of prison, he knocked out a pamphlet entitled
The Irish Republican and JucheConception of National Self-Dignity are One
.
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The pamphlet concluded, accordingto Martyn Frampton, a British academic and the only man I know who’s bothered to read it, that the

Juche
concept of
Chajusong –
the notion that national pride is the foundation uponwhich revolutionary struggle must be based –‘expresses so clearly the aspirations and the needs of colonial and semi-colonial peoples’ that itsmessage was relevant not just to Ireland but to all ‘freedom struggling peoples throughout theworld’.
¹¹

In 1986, Sinn Fein sent a message of solidarity to theNorth Korean regime: ‘We offer our support to the Workers’ Party of Korea in its fight for theestablishment of the Democratic Confederated Republic of Korea.’
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In 1987, SinnFein’s president, Gerry Adams, attended a reception at the North’s embassy in Denmark to toast theseventy-fifth birthday of Kim Il Sung.
¹³
In 1989, Sinn Fein delegates MacLochlainn, Sheena Campbell – later shot dead in 1992 by loyalists – and John Doyle attended the World Youth Festival inPyongyang.
¹⁴
Whether the IRA proper was trained by North Korea is unknown. The evidence in thepublic domain suggests that Sinn Fein did not develop the same kind of traction with Pyongyang that Sean Garland andthe Workers’ Party did.