North Korea Undercover (31 page)

Dresnok’s story, officially, runs like this. He was born into a poor family in Virginia, in 1941. His father abandoned the family before he was ten. After abroken up bringing, in and out of foster homes, he enlisted in the US Army when he was seventeen. His first marriage broke up after he returned from a two-year tour in Germany: ‘I’m just thankful we never had any kids, because I swore I would never leave my children/ he says in the film, tears pouring down his face. Dresnok re-enlisted and went to South Korea. He found discipline unbearable, was caught with prostitutes and faced court martial. One summer’s day in 1962, while cleaning his army shotgun, he upped sticks and walked across ‘the Zee’:1 was fed up with my childhood, my marriage, my military life, everything. I was finished. There’s only one place to go. On August 15th, at noon in broad day light when everybody was eating lunch, I hit the road. Yes, I was afraid. Am I gonna live or die? And when I stepped into the mine field and I seen it with my own eyes, I started sweating. I crossed over, looking for my new life.’

The Korean People’s Army took him prisoner, but treated him correctly, the story goes. Soon, he was introduced to another American deserter: ‘I opened my eyes. I didn’t believe myself. I shut them again. I must be dreaming. I opened them again and looked and, “Who in the hell are you?”’ His name was Larry Abshier, another GI defector who had crossed the line three months before Dresnok. Two more US Army defectors would join them in the next two years, Jerry Parrish and Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins.
All four were running away from internal torment; they had no idea what they were getting into. Dresnok recalled what it was like being an American in North Korea a decade after the civil war: ‘The uneasiness of the way people look at me when I walk down the street.“Oh, there goes that American bastard.’”

In 1966, the four Americans sought asylum in the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang. The Russians said sorry, but handed them straight back. Dresnok set his mind to making ago of his new life. Or so he says: ‘They might be a different race. They might be a different colour. But God damn it I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna learn their way of life. I did everything I could. Learning the language. Learning the customs. Learning their greetings. Their life. Oh, I gotta think like this, I gotta act like this. I’ve studied their revolutionary history, their lofty virtues about the Great Leader.’

His devotion was rewarded in 1978 with a starring role in one episode of a North Korean TV series,
Unknown Heroes.
Dresnok plays Lieutenant Colonel Arthur, a psychotic American commander of a POW camp, in shades, Zapata moustache and matching handgun.
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Unknown Heroes
makes a bad Spaghetti Western look like
The Searchers.
It is ‘the Yankee soldiers took out their bayonets and sliced through the women’s breasts like bean curd’ on acid, on tape. Dresnok told Bonner and Gordon: ‘Idon’t consider it a propaganda movie. I took great honour in doing it.’

Orwell’s clock just struck thirteen. One is compelled to wonder whether Dresnok’s lost his marbles or whether he is a captive who has to say what his gaolerswant him to say. Having been inside North Korea for more than fifty years, that may come fluently, but
one should not mistake fluency for truth.

Crossing the Line
does not cross the line by asking simple questions of the regime. Gordon has said: ‘We have taken an apolitical viewpoint.’ The assumption that you can be apolitical in a totalitarian dictatorship like North Korea is a big fat one.

Over pictures of soldiers running into battle, American bombers dropping their payloads on the North, flaming houses and refugees running from the inferno, the commentaryvoiced by Christian Slater of
Vampire Chronicles
fame intones: ‘In 1950, Korea experienced at first hand the brutal realities of the Cold War, a clash of ideologies that would devastate the peninsula. The Korean war was one of the most vicious of the century.’ Nowhere does
Crossing the Line
make clear that this war was started by the North. Is that apolitical? Or mucking about with history?

As well as being a Pyongywood star, Dresnok helped translate the Great Leader’s wisdom into vernacular English and taught English at the spy school, er, sorry, Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages. In the film, he tells how he met a beautiful brunette: ‘I thought I was the happiest man in the world. I went completely crazy.’ But her name, identity and origin remaina mystery for the viewer. Dresnok says: ‘I’d get her drunk and ask her, and she’d say: “Shut up, don’t ask that question.”’

The mystery European woman and Dresnok had two sons, Ted Ricardo Dresnok and James Gabriel Dresnok. His wife died, and he married the daughter of an African diplomat and a Korean woman; she and Dresnok have a boy, now eleven years old.

Dresnok’s second son, James Gabriel, is a real catch for Pyongywood: a handsome blue-eyed strapping young man, who looks 100 per cent American but speaks English with a halting, heavily Korean accent. He doesn’t just speak like a North Korean,
he acts like one too. If you were to do a twenty-first-century remake of
The Manchurian Candidate
, James Gabriel would be the star. Funnily enough, he too is studying at the elite foreign language university. ‘My father is American and I’ve got American blood. But as I was born here I consider myself as Korean/James Gabriel told Bonner and Gordon. James Gabriel is a living fossil from the Cold War, a human coelacanth.

Crossing the Line's
director, Gordon, told CBS: ‘His best friend, who’s Korean, says, “All the Korean girls love him.” They love him. He’s got blond hair and blue eyes.’

In the film, James Gabriel says: ‘I start to learn English to become a diplomat. I’d like to make the world which has no war at all. And no terror at all.’ James Gabriel seems unaware of the Kim dynasty’s track record on terrorism: the bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, killing 115 people in 1987; the training camp for the IRA men; the kidnapping of foreign nationals. On that very issue, he could have asked his mother.

Was she Doina Bumbea, the Romanian artist who vanished in 1978? That question haunted her family back in Romania when they heard about the film and got to watch it, and with mounting horror realized that James Gabriel looked astonishingly like their daughter, missing for almost three decades. Had Doina ended up in North Korea?

Doina’s tragedy is as black as can be. On Facebook, there is a page dedicated to her memory.
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The photographs are heart-breaking, showing a young woman of real beauty, dark-haired, elfin. Born in 1950, the daughter of a Romanian officer and a Russian woman, she became an artist. One photograph shows her cuddling her much
younger brother, what looks like a self-portrait in the background; a second, the cocky artist on the make, sporting a black hat, leopard-skin coat and jeans, standing by one of her paintings – she had real talent, her work reminiscent of Modigliani; a third, Doina in a floral-patterned dress, eyeing the camera, self-confident, poised, happy to take on the world. She married an Italian, moved to Rome, fell pregnant, had a miscarriage, and got divorced. Looking for fresh adventure – and who doesn’t at the age of twenty-eight? – she was approached by an Italian man who offered her exciting prospects of working in the art scene in the Far East. She jumped at the chance. Her family last had contact with Doina when she called from Italy to say she was travelling to Tokyo and promised to call immediately after she arrived. That was in 1978. The family never heard from her again. Doina’s promise, her future, was robbed from her; instead she entered a world of worry.

None of Doina’s story is clear or easy to tell. Instead, there are scraps of dog-eared information here and there, which float down over the decades. After her trip to the Far East, no one hears of her for nigh on thirty years. We know what happened next thanks to another kidnapping, on the far side of the world.

In 1978, the same year that Doina vanished, Hitomi Soga lived on a small island off the west coast of Japan. One August evening she went for a walk at dusk with her mother, enjoyed an ice cream, and was only a few hundred yards from home when her life changed forever. Three men grabbed her from behind, tied her hands, stuffed a gag in her mouth, bundled her into a big black plastic bag and carried her to a skiff. The skiff went out to sea, then she was dumped in the hold of a ship. She never saw her mother again; it is most likely that she resisted and her kidnappers murdered her. The ship sailed for a whole day until it arrived at the port of Chongjin.

The next morning, they told Hitomi: ‘May be it would be fun for you to go to the beach and look for some clams’ – evidence, to the man who became her husband, ‘of how strange the North Korean cadres are, how out of touch they are with the emotions normal people have.’

Hitomi was bereft, afraid, sick to the bottom of the heart. And then one day she was introduced to a small, wiry American, who became the great love of her life.

Charles Robert Jenkins, one of the four soldier-defectors like Dresnok. Dreading the thought of being sent to Vietnam, unhappy and insecure, Jenkins ran across the DMZ in1965, a decision he was to regret. He owes his liberty to the regime’s obsession with racial purity, the feckless incompetence of Kim Jong Il, and the power of Hitomi’s love for him.

The kidnapping of foreigners began in 1977, as Kim the Second’s sway in the regime grew. But Kim Il Sung had survived in Manchuria in the late 1930s by kidnapping the family members of rich farmers, demanding ransoms. Kidnapping was old Kim family business. Thirteen of the known kidnap victims were Japanese, plucked from ordinary lives, walking home at night, going for a stroll on the beach, then suddenly pinioned by strangers, forced into a small boat and down the hatch of a North Korean submarine or fishing boat, only to reappear in Pyongyang, to start a new life in absolute terror. Some were from Lebanon, Thailand, ordinary people engulfed by a power acting with no accountability.

Why kidnap foreigners? The most likely explanation is the regime’s obsession with espionage. Professor Yoichi Shimada of Fukui University in Japan told a US Congress Human Rights sub-committee in 2006: ‘North Korean defectors have told us that in 1976 Kim Jong Il issued a secret order to use foreign nationals more systematically and thereby improve the quality of North
Korean spy activities. He dubbed it “localization of spy education”.’ The professor suggested six reasons for the kidnapping: ‘North Korea appears to abduct foreign citizens in order to eliminate hapless witnesses who happened to run into North Korean agents in action; steal victims’ identities; force abductees to teach their local language and customs to North Korean agents; brain wash them into secret agents; use abductees’ expertise; use abductees as spouses for defectors or other abductees.’
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Thanks to its belief in racial purity, the foreigners could not marry North Koreans. But if the defectors and the kidnapped women could have children together, then theirprogeny might be useful as agents – this, sick as it is, might also be part of the regime’s logic.

In 2002, in a thaw in relations between the old colonial power, Japan, and North Korea, the Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang. On offer was a big deal: billions of aid money from Japan in return for North Korea burying the hatchet. One irritant for the Japanese were the persistent rumours that a score of their people had been kidnapped. To smooth things along, Kim Jong Il blithely admitted the regime had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s, and released the names of a handful of Japanese who were still alive, including Hitomi. The irony is that she was not on any Japanese list of abductees, her disappearance and that of her mother had been all but forgotten. It took the Japanese media less than twenty-four hours to stand up the story: she and her mother vanished in 1978, and the immensely hostile reaction from the Japanese public to the kidnaps smashed the proposed deal
to pieces. Kim Jong Il, with no sense of what public opinion can do, was at sea. Soon, the Japanese abductees were on their way home. Hitomi never gave up on her man, and eventually, after pressure from the Japanese, Jenkins was allowed to leave too, escaping after forty years from what he describes as ‘a giant, demented prison’.

He tells his story in The
Reluctant Communist
.
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Read it.

Jenkins paints a bleak and wholly convincing picture of four decades inside the DPRK. He describes the freezing cold; the hunger that lasted for year after year; the petty corruption of the cadres detailed to look after them; the boredom; the emotional anguish of realizing his treachery against the United States was an unrecoverable mistake; the brain washing; the ‘gibberish’ and ‘horse-shit’ of Jucheism; the time they found a cat’s cradle of microphones in the loft of one of their houses, listening in to their every word.

Initially, the four Americans shared a house. Nearby, there were some houses which they had been told were off-limits. In the same area they had seen the army digging a hole in the ground. A while later, the hole had been filled in, leaving just a bald spot of earth. A dog was digging up the fresh dirt: ‘That’s when we saw them: two dead human feet sticking right up out of the ground. We didn’t believe what we were seeing, but we took a closer look, and sure enough, there was no mistaking it. From the size of the grave, about two by five yards, it could have held five to ten people... A few days later, however, we saw a woman running down a hill from where the grave was. She was screaming her head off, and we knew exactly what it was all about. A little while later, people from the army came around and killed every dog in the neighbourhood.’
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Jenkins says Dresnok became a stooge, a loyal and faithful servant of what Jenkins calls in his book, ‘the Organization’, that is, the regime, the Party, the secret police, whatever. Jenkins says Dresnok tortured him on the orders of their minders, habitually beating him to a pulp.

Dresnok in
Crossing the Line
calls Jenkins ‘a liar’ and says of his fellow American: ‘Bye-bye, baby! Who cares?’ CBS asked Gordon was there any sense of the government ordering Dresnok to beat Jenkins? The Pyongywood director replied: ‘We never got that sense from Dresnok. He just denied and denied and denied that he was the North Korean strong arm... From what we can gather there was a lot of times when it was drink oriented. They went out and they drank and they drank and they had a fight.’
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