Not Forgotten

by Kenneth Bae

  On December 12 the television broadcast started earlier than usual. As always, I had no choice but to watch. As soon as the television came on, I saw a very excited newswoman in a pink traditional dress. She almost bounced out of her seat with excitement.

  “We have successfully launched the Kwangmyŏngsŏng 3 satellite aboard a Unha 3 rocket!” she said in a way that reminded me of Walter Cronkite announcing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon. “I repeat,” she said, “we have successfully launched the Kwangmyŏngsŏng 3 satellite aboard a Unha 3 rocket!”

  The newscast then switched to scenes of people celebrating in the streets of Pyongyang. Many cried for joy. Some danced while most just walked about almost in shock, like a little kid who finds a pony next to the tree on Christmas morning. To them, this news was almost too good to be true.

  I did not have the same reaction. “This isn’t good,” I said as I stared at the television. Pyongyang had tried several times to launch a satellite but had never succeeded, although they always claimed that they were successful. All the previous attempts had been condemned by the United States and most of the rest of the world as nothing more than a concerted effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. This situation is very serious because the DPRK also has nuclear weapons.

  I knew that if North Korea truly had put a satellite into orbit—and you never can really believe anything you see on North Korean television—they now had a way of dropping nuclear weapons on the West Coast of the United States. Pyongyang had already threatened to use nukes against America. I don’t think they really will, but to the people of the DPRK, the Korean War never officially ended. Both sides reached a truce, but a formal peace treaty has never been signed.

  When I put all this together, for me—sitting all alone on the other side of the world, held prisoner by a country that hates my home and blames it for every evil North Korea has ever suffered—December 12, 2012, was not a good day.

  I started to lose hope. I had not received any mail from home, nor had I heard anything that might lead me to believe the United States government was working to rescue me. Even though I had twice been told that the US State Department had been notified of my detention, I doubted that they had. If they did know about me, I could not understand why they did not appear to have taken any kind of action. Now, after the missile launch, I wondered if they could even if they wanted to.

  North Korea tells its people that the United States started the Korean War when it invaded the North. America is considered to be a continuous threat, which makes engaging in any kind of negotiations—even over something as small as an American missionary who mistakenly carried an external hard drive into the country—really, really complicated.

  I later learned that the State Department had publicly acknowledged the fact of my detainment only the day before, on December 11, 2012. My guess is that the overlap of these dates was not a mere coincidence but a part of the larger North Korean political strategy.

  The celebration in the streets was still on the television, but I ignored it. I wanted to turn off the television, or at least turn off the sound, but I knew the guards would not let me. I did my best to shut out the noise as I sat in my room, thinking about my situation. My mood sank. Depression set in.

  Then I remembered all the giants in the Bible who also ended up in jail unjustly. I thought about Joseph. I could really relate to him. First, his brothers sold him into slavery. Then he ended up in prison because his owner’s wife lied and accused him of attempted rape after she failed to seduce him. Joseph’s family had pretty much assumed he was dead. No one remembered him in that jail. But the Lord “was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did” (Genesis 39:23).

  I sensed God whisper to me, Remember, I am still with you.

  I opened my Bible to the psalms, whose prayers carried me through many dark days. Flipping along I came to Psalm 91. The words leaped off the page at me, especially the last few lines. While people danced in the streets of Pyongyang, celebrating the launch of a rocket that might one day be able to deliver nuclear weapons as far away as California, I read:

  “Because he loves me,” says the LORD, “I will rescue him;

  I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

  He will call on me, and I will answer him;

  I will be with him in trouble,

  I will deliver him and honor him.” (vv. 14–15)

  I read these verses over and over. I heard God repeating these promises to me. I will rescue you, Kenneth. I will protect you. I will answer you. I will be with you in trouble. I will deliver you and honor you!

  Joy washed over me. I thought about the charges against me. The DPRK had accused me of planning to start a prayer house in Pyongyang. Since I had already been charged, I might as well make good on it.

  “God, this is your house!” I proclaimed out loud.

  The guards heard me. If Mr. Lee was nearby, he had to have heard me too. Anyone on my floor of the detention center must have heard me. I didn’t care.

  “Oh Lord, you love these people. You want to restore your people back to you, so I lift them to you. Draw them to yourself, O Lord.”

  The more I prayed out loud, the more I felt the Spirit of God moving within me. I mixed in praise songs with my prayers. I looked around my room. “O God, I give this room to you. This room is your place. This is holy ground, O Father! And on this holy ground I stand. I will not move. I will not retreat. I will not stop declaring your praises. I will stand with you no matter what! I will hold my ground!”

  The guard at the door glanced in at me. The expression on his face suggested he thought I was crazy, but he also looked a little frightened. He didn’t say a word but just went back to his post.

  The Spirit filled the room as I continued to pray aloud. “My enemies surround me, Father, but I will not give way, and I will not give in. O Lord, open their eyes. Show them your glory.” Suddenly thoughts of the 1907 Pyongyang revival filled my head. “Do it again, O Lord! Restore this land. Do again the work you did before. Turn the hearts of these people back to you.”

  A vision came to me: Kim Il Sung Square, in the middle of Pyongyang, filled with North Korean people worshiping and praising the one true God. “Oh, make it so, Lord!” I cried. “Oh, make it so!” What had started as a terrible day turned into one of the greatest moments of worship I have ever experienced in my life.

  In the days after the satellite launch, the North Korean media increased its anti-American rhetoric. The government released a statement condemning the United Nations for hitting them with more sanctions; in the government’s words, “The DPRK has a perfectly legitimate right to advance our space program.” They went on to blame America for the sanctions. North Korea blames everything on America, even the fact that there are two Koreas.

  (Guards and other officials told me, “If America would just leave us alone, all of Korea could come together under the Supreme Leader.” I tried to explain how different South Korea is, including the large number of Christians there and how South Koreans have a freedom no one in the North has. “No one is going to want to give that up,” I said, but no one believed me. They so firmly believed in the greatness of the Supreme Leader and the superiority of their juche system that they could not comprehend anyone not wanting to embrace it.)

  Not only did I hear more anti-American rhetoric on television, but I also noticed my four guards’ attitudes toward me were changing. At first they treated me a lot like the guards in Rason did. I was just a prisoner under investigation, nothing more. However, it didn’t take long for my guards to start looking at me as though I were nothing but a filthy pile of scum.

  It didn’t help that the December temperature kept dropping. My room had heat, but the hallway where the guards had to stand did not. Twice a week a guard had to
escort me to the sauna on the other side of the building, where I took a real bath and washed the few clothes I had with me. I always thanked the guards and tried to smile at them to show them I was not a threat. My attempted kindness did not help. The more times I went to the sauna, the angrier the guards became.

  I think they also resented the fact that I was fed well, at least by North Korean standards. As I have mentioned, food is not abundant in the country. While I lost a lot of weight during my time in pretrial custody, I was not on starvation rations in Pyongyang. I think the guards resented that. They weren’t yet openly hostile to me, but I sensed growing animosity.

  The growing anti-American mood in Pyongyang made me leery of the prosecutors assigned to my case. I had met three so far. The first, Mr. Lee, was the man who had told me on my fourth day in Pyongyang that I had been formally charged. He had returned the next day with two other men. One introduced himself as the chief prosecutor. He explained how I was going to go to trial and how he, along with Mr. Lee and the other man, were going to bring the charges against me.

  While the chief prosecutor spoke, Mr. Lee stood to one side, and the other man stood farther back still. The other man was older than Mr. Lee, perhaps in his midfifties, but much shorter. He didn’t look like a happy man. Once the chief prosecutor finished his explanation, he and the second man left, leaving me alone with Mr. Lee.

  Mr. Lee then became the primary prosecutor of my case. In the beginning he seemed pleasant enough. On the first formal day of the pretrial process, he explained how his job was to verify everything I had written during my time in Rason. This was no small job, because I had written about three hundred pages by the time they took me to Pyongyang.

  “We have also brought in people for questioning to verify your accounts. And we have had investigators check out the people and places you talked about to make sure those all check out as well,” he explained.

  All of this struck me as strange because the officials in Rason had pretty much told me exactly what they wanted me to write down. When I didn’t write it exactly like they wanted, they wrote it for me.

  I asked, “Am I going to have to write everything out for you again and again, like I did in Rason?”

  Mr. Lee waved his hands and smiled, “No, no. That’s all finished,” he said. “You have given us everything we need. I just want to go over it with you. Now, on the first day of your confession you said . . .” We spent the next couple of hours going over that page. He’d read off a line, and I had to say, “Yes, that’s what happened.”

  We did this every day. He went line by line through my testimony, and I confirmed what I had written. He assured me that if I cooperated, things would go well, which meant I would go home. I held on to this hope, but at the same time, Mr. Lee often mentioned my upcoming trial. How can I go home if I go to trial? I wondered.

  Also, the more of my confession Mr. Lee read out loud, the worse the guards’ attitudes toward me became. When they heard what I had done, they went from treating me like an ordinary criminal to treating me like an enemy of the state.

  After the missile launch, I expected Mr. Lee to start treating me badly as well. Thankfully, he maintained his same gentle tone. The way he asked his questions made me feel as though he were more my attorney than a prosecutor. He told me if I ever needed anything to just ask.

  One day, a few weeks into the pretrial process, I said something to him about wishing I had a piece of candy to keep nearby because of my diabetes. “When my blood sugar drops, I really need to have some candy to bring it back up quickly,” I told him. The next day, one of the guards brought me two bags. One was filled with all kinds of candy and chocolates, while the other had several two-liter bottles of soda. The guard had a scowl on his face. He was angry I received special treatment and enjoyed treats he probably could not afford.

  Mr. Lee either didn’t notice the guards’ attitudes or didn’t care. When he came to see me later that day, he said, “If you need anything else, you just let me know.” I thanked him. He did things like this for me more than once.

  A couple of weeks later, at the end of a session, Mr. Lee leaned back in his chair and gave me a once-over with his eyes. Then he smiled and said, “You know, you and I are about the same age.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I have to tell you that from everything I’ve learned about you, I can see you are the kind of guy who doesn’t need the law to make you do the right thing. I know you came to our great country because you wanted to do some good. You aren’t a bad person.”

  “I am glad you think that,” I said. I kept my guard up. Even though Mr. Lee had done much for me, I could never be certain of his motives. He was the one prosecuting my case, after all.

  “I am serious,” he said. “You seem very sincere. Your ideas about right and wrong are just off, that’s all. The teachers you had in South Korea filled your head with a lot of misinformation about communism and our country. And then you lived in the United States, where the twisted Western media spreads so many lies about us. They say our government let three million people starve to death at the beginning of the century, and you think, What kind of government would do that? So you come here to try to help people, and part of that is you tell people the stories you were told are true. I can understand that. But that stuff never happened. It’s all lies.

  “I can tell you are not really a bad guy,” he concluded. “You are actually a missionary, not a CIA operative. I think you deserve a chance.”

  I thanked him for what he said. In the growing anti-American environment in which I now found myself, these were very bold words from a prosecuting attorney.

  “I think you deserve a chance,” he had said. I started to believe that he might actually try to make that happen.

  TEN

  FIRST CONTACT

  “Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”

  —JOHN 12:26

  A FEW DAYS before Christmas, Mr. Lee came into my room with paper and a pen. “I would like you to write letters to your family,” he said. “You have a wife, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “And you have extended family as well? A sister. Mother and father. Children, correct?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Can I write all of them?”

  “No, just your wife, mother, and sister for now.”

  “How will they get my letters?”

  “I can take care of that. Do not worry,” Mr. Lee replied.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should believe him. As far as I knew, this might be another way of extracting information from me.

  “Your letters cannot be long. You must urge your family to petition your government to do something to bring you home,” Mr. Lee said.

  “I will do my best,” I replied. Since my arrest, I had replayed in my head conversations I wanted to have with my wife and family. Every night, when I tried to sleep, I thought about all the things I needed to tell them. I knew I couldn’t pour all those thoughts and concerns into the letters I had been asked to write. My stories would never get past the official DPRK censors that I knew were going to read my letters before they sent them on to my family. If they even sent them.

  I reminded myself that I didn’t have to say much. They just want to know I am alive and well, I told myself. So that’s what I told them. “Please do not worry about me,” I wrote. “I am in trouble because I brought people into the country to pray for the people of North Korea, but I have been treated well. I am okay. God is with me. Please contact the State Department and ask them to help me come home.”

  All the letters had this same message. I added personal touches for my wife and also gave a longer reassurance that I was okay for my mother. Moms worry in a way no one else can.

  Mr. Lee took the letters
and placed them into a large manila envelope.

  The next day, which I believe was December 21, Mr. Lee came into my room with two guards. “Please, come with us,” he said.

  I didn’t ask where we were going. I had learned not to ask too many questions. Mr. Lee led me outside to a small minivan. Black curtains covered the windows. One of the guards opened the side door. He climbed in and slid to the far side. “You next,” the other guard said. I climbed in, and the second guard got in next to me and shut the door. Once again I was stuck in the middle of a very small seat.

  “Put your head down between your knees,” a guard said. I did as I was told.

  Then I heard Mr. Lee say, “All right, let’s go.”

  The van traveled about ten minutes. We made a few turns along with a few stops and starts, which told me we were still in the city. When the van came to a full stop, the guard on my right opened the door and grabbed my arm.

  “We’re here,” he said. “Get out.”

  Even though I was not supposed to know where I was, I immediately recognized the building in front of me as the Yanggakdo Hotel. It sits on an island in the Taedong River that runs through the heart of Pyongyang. The hotel is very popular with Russian and Chinese tourists. I had visited it on one of my earlier trips as a possible place for my tour groups to stay when I got the green light to expand my tours to the city.

  Mr. Lee told the uniformed guards to stay in the car. He then led me inside the hotel. The doorman was expecting us.

  “Good morning,” he said to Mr. Lee. “Take the stairs there on the right.”

  Mr. Lee and I followed his directions. Once we reached the third floor, Mr. Lee took me to one of the hotel conference rooms. A couple of officials were waiting for us near the door. I guessed that they might be from the foreign affairs department. I was told to sit and wait.