North Korea Undercover (28 page)

My Irish friend, Liam, after his adventures in the SovietUnion, North Korea and East Germany, stayed connected to the Workers’ Party for another ten years buthis passion for the cause was slowly dying. It was a case, he thought, of not knowing that to do next. After he left, other members questioned him at funerals: ‘Why weren’t you at the party meeting?’Soon, he was shunned, he said, ‘like the Amish’.

And what of Kim Yong Sun? The North Korean who metGarland twice in 1989 came to a sticky end in 2003 – not that long after the British trial when the superdollar mules wereconvicted. Kim died in yet another North Korean ‘car accident’, most likely executedby the state for failure.

The North Koreans had their official say in 2005, shortlyafter Garland was arrested. The BBC reported that the North’s KCNA news agency in Pyongyang had struckback, declaring: ‘The United States has recently escalated its smear campaign against the DPRK [DemocraticPeople’s Republic of Korea]. Typical of this is its fiction about a “deal incounterfeits” floated by the US this time. The US is claiming thatthe DPRK is massively issuing highly sophisticated false 100 USdollar notes known as “super money” and spreading them worldwide. In order to verify this, no soonerhad [Sean] Garland, leader of the Irish Workers’ Party, been arrested than the USDepartment of Justice released on 7 October a “written indictment” which it has long prepared. The“written indictment” characterized by extreme nature of politicization and selection said that there was a“deal in counterfeits” between the DPRK and Garland. Nothing is clumsier than what was invented bythe US, a past master at lies, fabrication, disinformation and plot.’

The accused – North Korea – doth protest toomuch. I say that with confidence because, apart from the American indictment against Garland, the British courtconvictions and all the other evidence cited above, Len the Stick told me that he had counted some of the cash inBelfast, after it had been converted from the moody North Korean bills into pounds sterling. ‘I would count£30,000, just in one day. And remember we had only one team and there were five teams working. Men were sentaround Europe. I had a contact in the United States, and he moved $700,000 in the fake bills.’ What washis cut? I asked. ‘Remember, I was fighting for a cause. So I got paid around £40 a day to count£30,000.’ Today, Len realizes that the Sticks were little more than Sean Garland’s private army – ‘I woke up in around 1996’ – but like all the Sticks he remains grateful that his versionof the IRA didn’t go in for twenty-five years of mass murder. I had to ask onelast thing. I’d heard a story that one Stick got to go to the DMZ and managed to look at a US Marine throughthe sights of a sniper rifle. Did you do that? No, said Len. It was Fat Frankie who did that, on Christmas Eve.

I shook Lens hand and he walked out of the bar, one ofthe Irishmen kicked out of North Korea because of bad behaviour.

¹
Brian Hanley, Scott Millar:
The Lost Revolution
, Penguin, Dublin, 2009.

²
Bruce Bechtol:
The Last Days of Kim Jong Il: The North Korean Threat in a Changing Era,
Potomac Books, Washington DC, 2013, ppl 13-23.

³
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
, 20 September 1983: Irish Labour Party delegation in N. Korea, North Korean Central News Agency in English, 2210 GMT, 16 September 1983. BBC summaries of KCNA reports are sources for subsequent trips by Garland to North Korea, too.

⁴
Hanley, Millar, p462.

⁵
Tom Farrell: ‘Rocky road to Pyongyang: DPRK–IRA relations in the 1980s’,
NK News,
17 May 2013.

⁶
Hanley, Millar, p462.

⁷
Hanley, Millar, p463.

⁸
Hanley, Millar, p483.

⁹
Hanley, Millar, p489.

¹⁰
G. MacLochlainn,
The Irish Republican and Juche Conception of National Self-Dignity
, Mosquito Press, London, 1985.

¹¹
Martyn Frampton: ‘Squaring the Circle: The Foreign Policy of Sinn Fein, 1983–1989',
Irish Political Studies
, vol. 19, (2) 43–63, 2004.

¹²
The Blanket
e-magazine, a blog by Liam O Ruairc called ‘From Havana to Pyongyang’: Sinn Fein Letter to Korea,
Ireland's War
, issue 18, lune 1986, p7.

¹³
‘Gerry Adams visits Scandinavia’,
Ireland's War
, issue 23, luly 1987, p7.

¹⁴
‘Sinn Fein Delegation at World Youth Festival’,
An Phoblacht — Republican News
, vol. 11, no. 26, 29 lune 1989, pl4.

¹⁵
BBC
Panorama
: ‘The Superdollar Plot', 20 June 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ l/hi/programmes/panorama/3819345.stm

¹⁶
Stephen Mihrp, ‘No Ordinary Counterfeit':
New Yor\ Times
, 23 July 2006.

¹⁷
Daily NK
website, Seoul, in English, 4 December 2005.

¹⁸
Bill Gertz,
Washington Times
: ‘N. Korea charged in counterfeiting of U.S. currency', 2 December 2005.

16

Empty Bellies

Day Six: and our coach left Pyongyang for the east coastresort of Wonsan. We were crossing the spine of the country, going up and up, through terrifying tunnels, entirely unlit with dripping wet walls, where the danger came from oncoming lorries with poor or no lights, and then out again into the fresh air, birds of prey spinning in thermals far below us. At lunch, we stopped for a picnic atwhat promised to be a magnificent waterfall. We could hear the Ullim waterfall, but we couldn’t see it. Stiff after three hours in the coach, we all wanted to walk towards the falls, but for some reason our guides heldus back.

And then it came to me in a brainwave. ‘They’re switching on the waterfall’ – a jokethat had Miss Jun bent double with laughter. Even Mr Hyun may have raised a wintry bank manager’s smile, but I might have been mistaken.

Bizarrely, there were two roads to the waterfall, a wholly unnecessary waste of tarmac. The road on the right of the river flowing down from the falls was beautifully asphalted and rested
on concrete stilts, elegantly constructed. The road on theleft was far simpler. I started walking up the posh road – nothing is too good for ordinary people – and was quickly ordered by one of the guides to get back on the simple road.

Only when the waterfall hove into view did the reason forthe two roads become obvious. The road to the right ended at a Bond-villain style chalet, with a prime view of the falls. We were asked not to take photos of the chalet, but everyone did anyway. The special road and the chalet had clearly been created for the Leaders, Great, Dear and Fat. From this, you could get some sense of the colossal waste of resources the demands of the palace economy create for the whole country. It is hard to imagine anything more economically unproductive than a duplicate road: one for the scum, one for their majesties.

The walk uphill made me fancy a swim. This might have been an eccentric decision. Mr Hyun, Miss Jun and the Continentalists looked on, aghast, as the only British student, ‘Fred’, and I stripped down to our underpants and waded in. On the bank, a great block of unfrozen ice lay, a warning unheeded. It was testicle-shrivellingly cold, and I wanted to go back the moment I had stuck my toe in. But thankfully Fred gave me a playful shove and I collapsed into the ice-water. Once in, it seemed only proper to swim towards the falls a bit. On the way out, I stood up and posed for the cameras, arms akimbo, in prize-fighter mode. But this was fakery. On leaving the water I was shivering so much I could barely stand up, and Mr Hyun, wearing a full-length black overcoat and frankly creepy black gloves against the cold, steadied mewhile I put my socks and trousers back on.

Only at the end of the tour did Mr Hyun point out that other tour groups had gone for a dip but later in the year, in the summer.
This was the earliest, and coldest, swim ever. As Fred and I basked in the warm glow of his praise, Mr Hyun unsheathed his dagger: ‘Next time you go swimming, Professor, no holes in your underpants.’

I blushed then. I blush now.

Our picnic in the cold sun was a pleasant break from thetorture of long-drawn-out meals in the fanciest restaurants in North Korea. While we were messing about, a North Korean child came out from nowhere and started fishing for frogs. He used a long stick with a dead frog speared on the end of it. The moment a live frog would grip the dead frog, he upended the stick and dropped the frog into a bucket. It was only when we got close up that we realized he wasn’t a child at all, but a tiny adult, with a wizened face, maybe fifty years old. Outside of Pyongyang, people we saw were generally shorter. This man, from the mountain country, looked like a pygmy: evidence of famine written in bone.

The hotel/restaurant affair where our coach was parked had not yet opened for what passes as the tourist season, so we had to pee behind it. There, we saw our first dog in our whole time in North Korea, a miniature Alsatiany-thing, cute, fluffy but filthy, covered in dusty mud. No onedared touch him. The absence of things dulls the mind quite quickly, but it is worth reporting that even here, faraway from the city, there were no ducks, chickens or birds to be seen; no wildlife of any kind, apart from the stray dog and frogs being remorselessly hunted by the child-man.

Next stop was the Wonsan Agriculture University. As ever, our tour started with an introduction by the local guide dressed in traditional garb. As ever, she said that the university had been founded thanks to the wisdom and inspiration of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the DearLeader, Kim Jong Il. We were taken to
the main entrance of the university, a grey monstrosityboasting a large portrait of Kim Il Sung with gleaming, Doris Day teeth. Inside, there was yet another exhibition of the great and happy moments when Kims Major and Minor had visited the university. There were no students in sight.

Jais and Fred were dawdling at the back and somehow took a wrong turning and ended up in a courtyard. There, they found a drum-set. Jais, who fancies himself as a Moroccan Charlie Watts, takes up the story: ‘I decided to jam on the drum-set for about five minutes, only to findout at the end of my jam that forty North Korean students had emerged from nowhere and were staring in awe atthe performance. When I finished, they were all clapping. Mr Hyun appeared, infuriated since I had strayed off with Fred for my little performance. It was one of the most surreal experiences ever. I was like an alien to the North Korean students. It was probably the weirdest thing they’d seen: a foreigner from Morocco who couldn’t communicate with them, who just started playing on their drum-set while another filmed with his iPhone, and then just left, dragged away by his angry minder.’

The tour, like the struggle, continued. We came upon afairsized greenhouse complete with ripening tomatoes and orchid-like flowers. I zoned out, but I may well have been shown Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia – two flowers specially made to honour the great men. Kimilsungia is apurple orchid; Kimjongilia, as the Hitch, ever the one to spot small gradations of class differentiation, even in horticulture, points out, a low-rent begonia. Everard, the former British ambassador, is especially funny about the fuss the regime made when it came to floral respects to the Leaders, Great and Dear. He writes: ‘Ambassadorswere routinely invited to see the displays of flowers by different units from around the country. This
unusual form of political flower arrangement was fiercely competitive... An official from a central government ministry once invited me to come and look at the ministry’s display – and it was indeed impressive. Then she took me to see the display of another government department, a much less elaborate offering. “I think they tried quite hard,” she said, oozing
schadenfreude.
’

Everard goes on: ‘I worked out that in one year we had spent longer debating the EU presence at the flower show than discussing human rights in North Korea.’
¹
The former ambassador adds a footnote, mildly enfeebling his point; whether the footnote was his own idea, or something suggested by a desk wallah at King Charles Street before copy approval for hisbook was given, is not entirely clear.

To be fair to the European florist-diplomats, the regime addresses any attempt to discuss human rights of its own people with a wall of marble, as Senator Macaluso observed way back in 1969. But, for example, in the late 1980s at least some of Europe’s diplomats did stick it to Ceausescu’s tyranny. Arranging flowers nicely should not, perhaps, be a primary occupation of European diplomacy in Pyongyang.

Our tour continued along a concrete path on which were marked two green crosses, indicating where the hallowed feet of Kim Il Sung had stopped, the better to give‘on-the-spot guidance’: yet more evidence that visiting North Korea is like being inside an enormous cult.

To rub the point home was a large painting of Kim the First sporting a white hat, in grey business suit and tie, shielding his eyes from the sun, with Kim the Second standing a few yards back, in blue Mao suit and holding a stalk of wheat in his hands; behind
him a Korean farmer and his wife stand, smiling appreciatively, in a field bursting with wheat. Hes holding a book, presumably Juche’s line on planting wheat. The sun is shining but there are some sweet fluffy clouds in the sky. The reality, of course, is entirely different: that the first two Kims wrecked North Korean agriculture, and the people starved because of their folly. The painting is a monstrous deceit.

The true cause of the famine which gripped the land from 1996 to 1999 is a non-subject in North Korea. It happened, according to famine expert Jasper Becker, because of a long-term collapse in agriculture under Kim the First which no one could articulate: ‘The leadership never grasped the extent of the unfolding disaster because no one dared tell Kim Il Sung the truth.’
²

The great economist Amartya Sen, whose native Bengal suffered too often from famine during centuries of British imperial rule, noted: ‘A free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threatened by famines can have.’ In North Korea, journalism, the job of telling the stories power and money do not want told, of giving a voice to the voiceless, does not exist.