North Korea Undercover (35 page)

During our stay in North Korea, we bumped into some foreign diplomats and I asked them whether, since the switch over in power from Kim the Second to Kim the Third, they had observed any serious changes. ‘It’s been very disappointing,’ said one. ‘Not that much change.’

On the ground, there are a few signs of something new. It was hard not to spot the Chinese bank slowly growing up outside our hotel window; kids roller-skated across Kim Il Sung Square with expensive-ish Chinese-made roller skates where before only tractors towing ballistic rockets were allowed; the Pyongyang traffic jam-ettes seemed to get longer during our stay. Middle-class North Koreans, Iheard, these days were watching Tom Cruise star in
Mission: Impossible.
Life was too shortto explain the Church of Scientology to my interlocutor, so I gave up.

The augurs for Kim Jong Il did not seem so bad. Kim Jong Un was schooled in Switzerland, where he must have picked up a few odds-n-sods of Western civilization. Well, the cuckoo clock, perhaps, and a taste for chocolate. Everything is a bit fuzzy because he was there at roughly the same time as a slightly older brother, and no one is quite sure which Kim did what. Kim Three is the youngest of Kim Jong IPs three sons, but clearly the savviest. The oldest, Kim Jong Nam, also seems to be the most sensible.

He’s on the record as saying that the North Korean economy is bust, but fixing it would be regime suicide. Kim Jong Nam told a reporter: ‘Taking North Korea’s unique position into account, there is a fear that economic reforms and openness will lead to the collapse of the present system... The North Korean leadership is stuck in a bind. Without reforms the country’s economy will go bankrupt, but reforms are fraught with the danger of systemic collapse.’
¹
Lankov commented wryly: ‘This is a remarkably forthright – but completely reasonable – admission.’

Kim Jong Nam was groomed for the top. In 1998, he joinedthe Ministry of Public Security, the key organization in the police state. But administering the gulag and running the state’s torture machine must have paled. Leastways, the oldest of the trio lost the keys to the throne in May 2001. Kim Jong Nam was arrested in Japan, travelling with two women and his four-year-old boy. He had forged a Dominican Republic passport using a Chinese alias, Pang Xiong, or ‘Fat Bear’. The Pyongyang wannabe dauphin told interrogators that he wanted to visit Disneyland. Big mistake. He now lives in Macao, wherehe takes well-aimed pot-shots at the regime from afar.

Fujimoto, the Japanese thug-cum-chef, had been Kim JongUn’s nanny for a while, a little like Nana the Newfoundland dog-nanny in
Peter Pan
. Heneatly skewered the succession chances of middle brother Kim Jong Choi when he said that Kim Jong Il preferred his youngest boy. Fujimoto reported that Kim the Second had said in front of top officials: ‘The big one [Jong Choi] has a weak heart and is feminine, but the young one is manly.’ Fujimoto explained: ‘To afirst-time observer, it looked like Jong Un was the older brother and Jong Choi the younger.’
²

As the Young Pretender entered his teens, Fujimoto played Falstaff to Kim Jong Un’s Prince Harry, it seems. Kim Jong Un liked Johnny Walker whisky and secretly smoked Yves Saint Laurent cigarettes with the naughty sushi chef. He drove a Mercedes, listened to South Korean pop and played Super Mario and Tetris. Had he been an ordinary North Korean, any single thing on that list of conspicuous Western consumption would have meant trouble.

The old man dies in 2011, Kim Three takes power and all that normality ends up in the spring of 2013 with the crazy rhetoric that thermo-nuclear war is on the cards. In the summer of 2013, a story breaks in China that Kim Three has had an old lover machine-gunned on framed charges of being a porno star. Are we happy that this man has a finger on a nuclear trigger? Not very.

It’s hard to assess the truth of the matter but Chinese sources, cited in the South Korean daily
Chosun Ilbo
, say that Kim Jong Un’s former lover, pop star Hyon Song Wol, and a dozen friends inthe North Korean music scene, were machine-gunned by firing squad.
³
The Chinese sources said that Hyon and Mun Kyong Jin, head of the Unhasu Orchestra, had been arrested for violating North Korean laws against pornography. Three days later, Hyon, Mun and ten or so band members, singers and dancers in the Unhasu Orchestra and the Wangjaesan Light Music Band were executed in public. Officially, they were accused of making porn videos. It seems hard to see why that justifies the death sentence. ‘They were executed with machine guns while the key members of the Unhasu Orchestra, Wangjaesan Light Band and Moranbong Band as well as the families of the victims looked on,’ the source said. Surviving family members have been sent to the gulag, the source added.

Hyon’s band were famous in the North, knocking out smash hits like ‘Footsteps of Soldiers’, ‘I Love Pyongyang’, ‘She isa Discharged Soldier’ and the pop-pickers’ favourite, ‘Excellent Horse-likeLady’. Actually, that’s a lousy translation:it’s a song about a woman who completes a five-year plan in three years or something like that, and could be better rendered as ‘Hard-working Woman’. A video on YouTube, with more than a million hits so far, shows Hyon in fine form, running around a clothing factory with anorange headscarf, sticking cotton reels on bobbins.
⁴
It’s impossible to reconcile this silly innocence with her being murdered.

Chinese whispers started in China. The story may be entirely untrue. The sources, clearly relying on information coming out of Pyongyang, say Kim Three and Hyon had been lovers, but Kim Jong Il did not approve. She married some one else and had a child with him, but the pair kept on seeing each other. Kim Jong Un’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, was also a member of the Unhasu Orchestra before shemarried him. Whether she had any hand in the spilling of blood is not clear. In democracies, this kind of stuff ends up in the tabloids, not in the mortuary. If they are indeed dead – and, this being North Korea, the dead do sometimes pop back up again, very much alive – Kim Three’s old girlfriend and her friends may have been victim of some terrible palace intrigue. Perhaps they were taped speaking disloyally or plotting revenge against Kim Three. Perhaps they had porn tapes of Kim Jong Un behaving in a way that might embarrass him. If someone was trying to blackmail him, that could explain the extent of the bloodbath. The easiest way for the regime to deny the allegations is a big concert, with the alleged corpses headlining the bill. In the event of this not happening, that is not a good sign for them, and, because it reflects on the mental stability of North Korea’s new ruler, the entire world.

When the machine-gunning story surfaced in the Japanese media, the regime fired back in the language it alone holds dear: ‘These days the South Korean authorities let reptile media run the whole gamut of vituperation hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK.’
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The Korean Central News Agency, the voice of Pyongyang, proclaimed that Marshal Kim Jong Un hadbeen slandered, ‘an unpardonable hideous provocation hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership ofthe DPRK and thrice-cursed crime which can be committed only by the confrontation maniacs. No matter how mad the puppet group goes with confrontation with compatriots, there is the red line of recklessness it should not cross... This is barbarism and thrice-cursed treason which can hardly be imagined by human beings.’

In plain English, Fat Boy Kim is pissed off. But the bluster means little. What the world needs to see is the alleged dead brought back to life. If proof of life of Hyon and others is not forth-coming, then we may be forced to conclude the worst, that the Young Leader is like his grandfather and father before him, a gangster running, not a racket, but a state. The difference is that in the twenty-first century, the dynasty can no longer annihilate an ex-lover and no one notice. Hyon exists forever on YouTube, singing ‘Excellent Horse-like Lady’. This particular snuffing out of innocent life may come to haunt the murderer. Further evidence of Kim JongUn’s brutality concerns the fate of former vice minister of the army, Kim Choi, who was reportedly executed with amortar round in october 2012. He had been caught by the Bowibu drinking and carousing during the official mourning period after Kim Jong Il’s death. Kim Jong Un ordered that ‘no trace of him should be left behind, not even his hair’. Kim Chol, according to the South Korean media, was forced to stand on a spot that had been zeroed in for a mortar round and be ‘obliterated’.
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This killing, and the purge of other old generals, suggests that Kim Jong Un was using ‘mourning period’ breaches – surely a fault in etiquette, not conduct requiring obliteration – as an excuse to get his father’s cronies out of the way and put in his own people. But the purge, and what appears to have happened to his ex-girl friend and her band, shows that Kim Three is happy to continue the family tradition of mass murder. We have been warned.

Kim Jong Un might think he can get away with Armageddonunscathed. North Korea is the gruyere state. Defectors have been telling stories for decades of great tunnels underthe earth, housing fake South Korean streets, the better for spies to practise on, and secret bunkers for the regime’s leaders, and secret nuclear and chemical weapons factories in the bowels of the earth.

‘Kim Jong-il builds “Thunderbirds” runway for war’, was a smashing headline in the
Sunday Times
in 2008.
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The story’s source was a North Korean air force defector, who said that the dynasty had built three underground fighter bases, part of an extraordinary troglodytic world below ground. Just as in the
Thunderbirds
TV puppet show, tunnel doors would open and aircraft would shoot out to strike the Americans with one blow, etc., etc. What is so silly about these underground airfields and the rest is that the information from the defectors is hoovered up by the spy agencies in South Korea, Japan and, of course, the United States. A secret base your enemies know about is not a secret but a target.

North Korea has certainly exported this tunnelling know-how to its friends in Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, making life difficult for the makers of bunker-busting bombs. The North has also been caught exporting chemical weapons technology to countries like Syria. In 2009 Greek authorities seized 14,000 anti-chemical weapons suits from a North Korean ship most likely headed for Syria.
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In 2013, a Japanese newspaper,
Sankei Shimbun
, reported that a Libyan-registered vessel, the
Al En Ti Sar
, out of North Korea bound for Syria, was stopped by Turkish authorities. Turkish officials seized 1,400 rifles and pistols, 30,000 bullets and anti-chemical weapons gas masks.
⁹

Nate Thayer, a brilliant investigative journalist whose first great scoop was tracking down Pol Pot in languid internal exile in Cambodia – the Khmer Rouge killed theex-tyrant off, Nate once told me over a beer, before he could get a proper interview – investigated a peculiar train accident in North Korea in 2004.
¹⁰
A blast, measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale and detected atinternational earthquake monitoring stations in Russia and the United States, blew up a train in Ryongchon as it headed to the port of Nampo, the site of the West Sea Barrage. The explosion was so big Pyongyang appealed for emergency inter national help. The Red Cross counted 160 people killed and 1,300 injured; the blast left a crater 60 metres (196 feet) deep. Thats a big hole in the ground. The regime said the explosion was caused by fertilizer. Haha, good joke. Thayer speculates that the true cause was a remote-detonated bomb which blew up the train, loaded with rockets and rocket fuel, destined for Syria. The bomber may have been a Mossad agent. Thayer says that amongst the dead were a dozen Syrians, and that North Koreans wearing chemical weapons suits worked on the clean-up.

The traffic of chemical weapons technology to Syria overthe years suggests it is not unlikely that the North Koreans had some hand in the nerve gas attacks on rebelareas in Damascus which President Obama contends were the work of the Assad regime. A photograph of two North Korean military attachés paying their respects to injured regime fighters in a military hospital in Damascus hardly allays the world’s suspicions.
¹¹

Chemical weapons, grim as they are, kill thousands. Nuclear bombs kill millions. In a wine bar off Fleet Street I asked one of the best Dr Strangeloves in the business, Mark Fitzpatrick, the ‘will he, won’t he?’ question at the start of this chapter. Mark explained that the regime’s threats of lobbing rockets all the way to mainland United States were so much hot air. Their most reliable rocket, he said, could hit South Korea in minutes, Japan easily and possibly one of the American bases in the Pacific. Possible, but unlikely. The two challenges of nuclear warmongery are having the right missile, he explained, and making the bomb small and light weight enough to be carried on it. Thus far, the North Koreans have proved that they can lob amissile over Japan, a distance of around 1,000 kilometres, but they have yet to stick a bomb on top. Bombs aren’t feathers; a one-kilotonne bomb weighs so much that it would considerably reduce the range of a rocket.

So, phooey, Mr Kim, I asked. Mark pulled a face. It’s still dangerous, he said. The thing that worries people like him is that if North Korea sinks a South Korean warship or shells a South Korean island, as it did in 2010, then the South will not be so easygoing this time. They’ve given orders for commanders to react on the spot, an eye for an eye, so that if the North shells the South, the South will fire back. Instantly, this raises the problem that the South, with all its twenty-first-century firepower, will shatter the North’s fragile bellicosity. From then on in, the North has only its shiny nuclear button to press. Mark had to go. He had a vegetable garden to attend to in south London. Life must go on.

But will Kim Jong Un, won’t Kim Jong Un, blow up the world? Three words: I don’t know. If he does, he is dead, along with the regime his grandfather built. My guess is, he won’t, but that does not mean that we can rest easy for a long, long time to come. It could last fifty years, said Izidor, Ceausescu’s interpreter. I hope he’s wrong. In the meantime, it seems sensible not to fall for their bluffs, and right to press the regime on human rights, and wait.