by Kenneth Bae
9. I apologize for trying to mobilize, train, and send missionaries into the DPRK.
10. I apologize for not speaking the truth from the beginning.
I handed my finished apology to Mr. Park. He was clearly very pleased as he read it. “This will do. This will do nicely.”
I wish I could say I was relieved, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to go home. I would be relieved when they finally released me.
Mr. Park left. A guard came in and told me I could lie down and rest for a while. I collapsed on my bed and fell asleep. When the guard woke me, he had me return to my chair to wait. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was hoping for some good news.
Later in the evening, a second guard came in. “Stand up,” he ordered.
I stood up as the bujang from my first day of detainment walked into the room. After spending a month surrounded by very thin, small people, I thought he looked even larger than before. He had some papers in his hand.
The bujang took the seat across from me and waved his hand at me, telling me to sit down. He laid the papers on the desk. It was my signed confession.
“You have confessed to a very serious crime. Do you understand? You have violated Article 60 of our constitution, and for that you face jooktang.”
The word jooktang is difficult to translate into English. South Koreans never use the word; only North Koreans do. It kind of means, “You are the scum of the earth, and we are going to beat you to death and completely destroy you.” Basically, it is a death sentence carried out with a joyful vengeance.
“However,” he continued, “you have been very cooperative, and you have behaved yourself so far. Of course we will take all of that into consideration.” He smiled, but his smile did not reassure me. To me it felt like the smile a cat gives a mouse right before eating it. “Other people want to see you now, people in Pyongyang. We know there is more you have to tell us, but those in Pyongyang want you, so we are going to send you there.”
“When?” I asked. Since we were close to the border where this situation had started, I had assumed they would send me back the way I came and tell me never to return. Now the bujang was talking about sending me to Pyongyang.
Whatever, I thought. I’ll make a side trip to Pyongyang before I go home. Then I will get to see my wife and everyone else. With any luck I will be home for Christmas.
The thought of going home excited me. I had not stepped a foot out of this suite, much less gone outside, since my walk in the hotel parking lot a month earlier.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “When you get there, cooperate with the investigators. If you do, everything will be fine for you. Just listen to them and do what they tell you to do.” With that, he stood up and walked out of the room.
A short time later Mr. Park returned. For the first time I was actually glad to see him. “You told me that if I confessed, I would get to go home,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“But they are sending me to Pyongyang tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said in a way that sounded like, “Of course. What’s the problem?”
“So why are they sending me to Pyongyang, and how long will I be there?” I asked.
“You are going there to meet with the federal authorities. They want to verify the answers you gave us here. It will not take long,” he said.
“How long?” I asked again.
“Not long. Perhaps a month,” he replied.
“And then I will get to go home,” I said.
“As long as you keep your story straight,” he replied.
After Mr. Park left I spent the rest of the evening getting my things together and preparing to finally leave the room that had been my prison for a month. Although I had not seen most of my possessions since my arrest, the Rason officials let me have some of my clothes so that I had something to wear during the interrogation period. As I packed my bags, Mr. Park walked in and handed me a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Why, your bill, of course,” he said.
“My bill? For what?”
“Your room and your food.”
I read through the bill very quickly. At the bottom it said, “Total: ¥20,000,” which is about $3,000. I’d brought about ¥1,300 into the country with me to cover taxis and other small expenses my group would incur during our four-day stay. But this was ridiculous.
“I don’t have this kind of money,” I said.
“Perhaps you can contact your wife and have her bring it to you,” he said.
As much as I wanted to talk to my wife, having her bring me money was the last thing I would have ever done, even if I had the money lying around at home. I wanted to keep her as far from North Korea as possible.
“I can call her and ask her to wire the money here,” I said, hoping that at least she could hear my voice and worry less about me.
“No, I don’t think so. No phone calls for you,” Mr. Park said on his way out the door. Another official came into the room to further discuss the bill with me. After much back-and-forth with this official, another man who must have been a little higher up in authority came in and told me not to worry about paying the bill. “We’ll just add it to the expenses you will incur in Pyongyang.”
“Fine. That will be great,” I said. If it would have gotten me out of the country, I would have found a way to raise the money. I just wanted to go home, and the sooner the better.
The very thought of my ordeal finally ending made me too excited to fall asleep. I was going to go home to my family. I couldn’t imagine how worried they must be because I had not been able to contact them during the entire investigation. But now I was going to Pyongyang for a short stay, and then I was going home!
Little did I know, the worst was yet to come.
EIGHT
ON TO PYONGYANG
“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?”
—HEBREWS 13:6
I THOUGHT I was on my way home when I left Rason. I knew I had to go to Pyongyang first, but I believed it was just a formality. In my first month of detention, keeping track of time was difficult, because I never got to go outside. Every day felt exactly like every other day. But by listening to the officials and the guards in and around my room, I was able to tell I had been in custody exactly one month. They had detained me on November 3. That meant it was now the first week of December.
The trip to Pyongyang started early. A little before six o’clock, Mr. Park came to my room and said, “Let’s go.” He escorted me outside to a waiting Toyota Land Cruiser. Another man, who I assumed also worked for the same government agency, stood next to the car, waiting for us.
“Get in,” Mr. Park said, opening the back door for me. I climbed in. The other man got in the car on one side of me; Mr. Park sat on the other. Just as in my car ride to the Bipa Hotel, I was once again stuck in the middle of the backseat. Thankfully, the Land Cruiser was much roomier than the Chinese compact car the first agents drove.
Two other men approached the car. Before they got in, Mr. Park warned me, “Do not say anything about your case in front of these men. They do not work with us. They are local Rason officials who also have business in Pyongyang. They’re basically just along for the ride.”
I nodded in agreement.
One of the two men got in behind the wheel to drive us. The other sat in the front passenger seat. Mr. Park bowed slightly to him and said, “Good morning, sir. Thank you for coming with us today.”
In the DPRK, the language you use shows the importance of the person with whom you are speaking. The respect Mr. Park showed told me that this man must be a high-ranking official. Later I found out that he used to be a deputy director of the international trade department of Rason.
“All right, let’s get going,” the official on my left said once everyone was in the car. The driver started the engine, and we were on our way. The sun had not yet come up when we pulled out of the hotel parking lot.
We headed south out of Rason. No sooner had we left the city than the roads turned to gravel. Rason is a major city and a key economic center of northeast North Korea, yet the highway that goes to Chongjin, the third largest city in the country, and then to Hamhung, an industrial and manufacturing hub and the second-largest city in North Korea, is nothing more than an unpaved country road, the kind one might expect to find in only the most rural, remote parts of America. Here, it passed for a major highway.
We had not driven far when the eastern sky began to brighten. The sun broke from the horizon over the Pacific Ocean. The important man in the front passenger seat smiled and pointed. “Wow, look at that sunrise,” he said.
I didn’t know how Mr. Park and the other official in the backseat might react. My only other car ride with DPRK officials was quite tense. Not this one. Mr. Park and the other official in the backseat both looked and oohed and aahed over the sunrise.
“Beautiful,” Mr. Park said.
I leaned up and looked out the window. It was the most beautiful sight I had seen in a long time. Something to remember before I leave the country, I thought.
We drove a little farther. The driver turned and asked, “Does anyone mind if I turn on the radio?”
“Please do,” Mr. Park said. North Korean pop music filled the car. Mr. Park started singing along. I had never seen this side of him.
More surprises followed. At one point in the middle of the day, Mr. Park pulled out his phone and started watching a North Korean martial arts action movie. He held out his phone toward me. “Do you want to watch with me?” he asked. This did not seem like the man who had threatened to have my head chopped off.
After we passed through the city of Chongjin, the gravel road climbed up the mountains near the coast. Every once in a while, the Land Cruiser bounced and jumped from the big holes in the road. The road became quite narrow in places. I saw the remains of trucks and cars that had gone off the road and plunged down the mountainside. I prayed to God for safety, and I thanked him that our driver rarely got the car over thirty miles per hour.
The drive down the gravel highway turned out to be a real blessing for me. I had always wanted to see rural North Korea and the homes of average people. Now I got my chance.
Most of the houses were built by the government, which is another way Pyongyang keeps the people dependent on the Leader. Almost all the houses had the same cookie-cutter look. They were made out of concrete instead of traditional building materials. Most were painted white or sky blue.
Throughout the drive I noticed the men in the front seat kept turning around to have a look at me. Eventually their curiosity got the best of them. The official in the passenger seat asked a few questions about the cost of living in America. He had spent a lot of time in China because of his position, he explained, so he knew what life was like outside of the DPRK.
When we stopped for lunch at a seafood restaurant, the man who had been sitting in the front passenger seat said to me, “Mr. Bae, what would you like to eat? You can order anything that you like.” He pointed at the crab on the menu. “How about some crab, or maybe some shrimp?”
I had trouble believing he was sincere. I had been told that I was the most dangerous criminal since the Korean War, and now this man wanted to buy me lunch.
“You know, I think I will just have soup with pork,” I said.
Mr. Park shook his head but didn’t say anything. He ordered the same thing as I did. The front seat passenger wasn’t so shy. He ordered several dishes and shared them with the rest of us. Mr. Park and I ate well even though we did not order seafood.
When the man paid the bill, he used Chinese yuan rather than the DPRK currency. In Rason, where people have access to euros, Chinese yuans, and even American dollars, no one wants to accept North Korean money because its value constantly drops in the exchange rates.
As we walked out to the car, the front seat passenger laughed and said, “We all ate very well for less than one hundred yuan. This same meal would have cost us at least twice as much in Rason.” One hundred yuan comes out to around fifteen dollars.
We drove several more hours after lunch. The sun went down, and we kept on driving. Finally, around nine or ten at night we reached Hamhung. The city is known for being an industrial and manufacturing hub, but it is also famous for Majon Beach.
As we got close to the city, the passenger in front turned and asked me, “Where do you prefer to sleep, near the beach or the city center?”
“I prefer the beach,” I replied.
“Sure. I’ll arrange it,” the man said. He made a phone call and then announced, “We’ve got a place.”
Before we headed for the hotel by the beach, the driver looked for a gas station to fill up the car for the next day’s drive. We pulled into a few stations on the main road, but they either were closed or would not sell us gas because our driver wanted to use a gas ration card instead of cash. He finally found a place that agreed to accept his ration card. However, the electricity was out. The female attendant said she had to first turn on the generator before the pump would work, but the manager had just gone home and she didn’t have a key to the storage room where the generator was located. “I’ll call him and have him come back to turn it on,” she said.
“How long will that take?” the driver asked.
“Not long,” she said. “He doesn’t live far away.”
She made the call, but the manager never showed up. We sat in the car, waiting. After half an hour she came over to us. “Well, I guess he is not coming back. I will do what I can so you can get gas now.” She disappeared for a few minutes and returned with an ax. I could not believe what happened next. She took the ax and started chopping away at the storage room lock.
I told everyone in the car, “This is really what is called Hamnam spirit.” (Hamnam is short for Hamgyong Namdo, the province of which Hamhung is the capital.) This was a popular figure of speech for the can-do attitude of this part of the country.
Everyone laughed. Mr. Park asked, “How did you hear about Hamnam spirit?”
I smiled and said, “I know a little more than the average tourist.”
After spending an hour trying to get gas, we finally left and headed to the hotel. The beach hotel took us about another half an hour out of our way. The fact that no one minded surprised me. The two agents who hauled me to the Bipa Hotel would never have gone for such a detour.
When we arrived at the hotel, we pulled up to a big metal gate. The guard asked us who we were and where we had come from. Then he asked, “Who does the car belong to?” He wasn’t asking which of us owned the car but what branch of the government owned it. In North Korea, only the government owns cars.
“National Security Bureau,” the driver answered. That’s when I knew for sure that Mr. Park, the bujang, and all the other officials with whom I had dealt in the past month were all part of the NSB, which is the DPRK equivalent of the FBI and the NSA.
The hotel had a few villas, each with multiple rooms. Mr. Park and I stayed in one on the first floor. The other men in our group stayed upstairs. No sooner did we get to our room than Mr. Park said, “Why didn’t you order something nice today at lunch when they offered to buy it for you?”
“I’m a criminal. How can I ask for crab or shrimp from the menu?” I said, only half kidding.
“You should have asked, and then I could
have eaten it,” he said. That’s when I realized that eating out was a rare treat for him.
The rest of the evening Mr. Park seemed like a different man from the one I had known during my interrogation. He spoke to me as though I were a friend. When we got settled, he lay down on the bed and said, “I hate being gone like this. My little girl misses me so much when I am away. It’s hard leaving her.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Seven. You have children, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Three.”
“Are they over here or back in America?” he asked.
“Two are in America, and one is with her mother in our home in China,” I said.
Mr. Park shook his head. “I don’t know how you can be so far away from them.”
We talked like this for a little while. Finally I had to ask, “How can you be so relaxed with me now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You aren’t pressing me for information. You haven’t asked me about my crimes. You are treating me like a friend.”
“Why shouldn’t I be relaxed? You’ve confessed to everything. I don’t have to try to extract any more information from you. Plus, I realized you aren’t a bad guy. You did what you did because you were deceived by all the misinformation you received in school in South Korea and through the media in America. Your religion also misguided you. I know you were sincere and thought you were doing good. You aren’t a bad person; you’ve just been brainwashed with a lot of bad information.”
I just smiled at him. I didn’t know what to say in response. Over the next two years I would learn how ironic his statement really was.
When morning came I made a simple request: “I would like to go down to the beach before we leave.” Our hotel was near the beach but not right on it. I had heard stories of how pretty this beach is, and it was one of the places I hoped to visit if I was granted permission to expand my tours. Now that I was actually here, I thought this might be my only chance to see it.