Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Listening to KBS from Seoul, it struck me that while North Korea’s broadcasts would often criticize South Korean President Kim Young-sam, the South Korean broadcasts didn’t say much at all about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Nothing bad was said. Once, though, I did hear some criticism. A broadcast quoted a French reporter as saying Kim Il-sung had put a lot of political offenders into prison. I was very surprised. Of course, I knew about that. But how did people in France know so much about North Korea?

  Real change started-with the 1989 youth festival. During 1989 a lot of foreigners came into North Korea. We heard about that. And lots of music cassette tapes were brought in [from the ethnic Korean region of] Yanbian in China. Foreigners brought their culture. That aroused curiosity. The regime loosened up a little. When Kim Il-sung realized that people were getting a bit free, he put the lid back on. That aroused more curiosity: Why were we being suppressed?

  I’ll tell you about an incident at Kim Il-sung University. Some sons of high officials were having parties, playing jupae, a Korean card game. They also danced the disco style they had learned from watching the foreigners during the youth festival. Besides dancing and drinking, they got naked with women and played jupae on their naked stomachs. When Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il heard of it, they kicked them out of the university.

  In the old days people used to shout “Long live Kim Il-sung!” But after hearing this disco music, people would shake their hips. Not only in Pyongyang but in other places as well, people were getting wild. In the late 1980s, a song called “Huiparam,” meaning “Whistle,” came out. It was the kind of song that made people want to move their bodies. But the government suppressed the original song and changed the rhythm before re-releasing it.

  You wonder how news and pop culture got all the way out to North Hamgyong Province? Most North Koreans don’t rely on broadcasts. Instead, news spreads very quickly via the grapevine. Whenever officials weren’t around, everyone danced, and even sang South Korean songs. I did, too.

  The slogan about university life was the same as in the 1960s: If you’re cold and hungry, you study more because your mind is clear. Meals were rice and soy sauce or beancurd. The soup was saltless, tasteless. There was no heating. Actually there wasn’t enough time for study. We had to do our labor, in the fields and elsewhere. Most students study their major subject plus Kim Il-sung ideology. You would be expelled if you didn’t do well in ideology. I used to give speeches in the university about how great the Great Leader was. I was a member of the Propaganda Club. But I used to read novels and study English surreptitiously during the Kim Il-sung ideology class. If I got caught, they would accuse me, saying: “Your ideology is wrong.” There are special spies—I don’t know how many. Party secretaries act as their controllers. We don’t know which people are spies, so we can’t really trust each other.

  I think North Korean university graduates would cope all right with reunification. Students in North Korea don’t really have aspirations while they’re in the university because, even if they study very hard, the government decides where to assign them. When students return from abroad, I hear they get two months of re-indoctrination. And wherever they go, someone is with them, so they can’t talk. And they’ve signed contracts saying they will not talk about what they saw overseas. Still, it gets around.

  Things will be worse for my family now, but even if I had stayed in North Korea I couldn’t have been much help to the family. I have a new vision now. I’m waiting for reunification and then I think I’ll be of more help to my family. But I believe the regime will not collapse without outside influence, such as the flow of foreign culture. Otherwise, unless high officials turn their backs on Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and stage a coup, there won’t be any collapse. Now, looking from South Korea, I can see so many reasons to believe the Northern regime has to collapse—but when I was in North Korea I never thought such a thing. So why should others there think so? The authorities have this special magic: If there’s a war even the criminals in North Korea would unite and fight for the country. I like the American plan to start Radio Free Asia and broadcast in Korean to North Korea. I hope it would help North Koreans open their eyes to the faults of the regime. If the regime does collapse, it won’t happen peacefully as in Russia. If people turn against the regime there will be bloodshed. They’ll kill the high officials.

  In my home area only about 30 to 40 percent of factory capacity is in use. People still go to the factory sites each day, though. They may cut the grass and do maintenance work. I don’t know how the living standard could decline much more. People figure there has to be a war or something. The government told us all the resources had to be devoted to military needs to prepare for a war. I think about six months’ worth of food is stored up for war. I heard that from people in the military. I don’t know about fuel. People believe that if there is a war, and if reunification comes, the sacrifice will have been worthwhile. The problem is, people want war. They believe they are living this hard life because there’s going to be a war. If there’s going to be a war, why not just get it over with? They believe they’ll die either way from hunger or war. So the only solution is war. What Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are saying now is that even if foreign nations force economic sanctions on the nuclear issue, we can survive. The ordinary people say “OK, let’s have a great harvest.”

  Foreigners and South Koreans believe it’s the North Koreans who will bring war. But ordinary North Koreans believe the Americans will invade them. I used to believe the Americans were ruthless, scary people. If anything went wrong in North Korea, it was “because of the Americans.” Still, North Koreans underestimate the United States. Despite the Americans’ global policeman role, the North Korean mentality holds that Americans are no threat if a war breaks out. The real threat is Japan, they think. They have experience with the Americans in the Korean War and say, “We can beat them again, any time.” Most people, civilian and military alike, think that way But university students know that the U.S. has great power. In university we study international institutions like the United Nations. And a lot of high officials when they talk say that war is out of the question.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Pickled Plum in a Lunch Box

  Why would a nuclear reactor for peaceful use be built with no electrical power transmission grid; a heavy-water reactor without an adjoining commercial reactor? Why would the plant complex include a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility of the sort used to produce bomb-grade plutonium? Those were key questions Western and South Korean analysts raised about the mysterious North Korean reactor complex that had risen beside a winding river at Yongbyon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang. Logical explanations that sprang to mind were that: (A) North Korean leaders were trying to make atomic bombs, or (B) they wanted their antagonists to think they might be doing so. Concern in Washington and Seoul grew as American and French satellite photos showed the complex taking shape. But without sending in inspectors there was no way to prove that the reactor was for weapons production.

  Pyongyang had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1985— but then had not carried out its treaty obligation to permit full International Atomic Energy Agency inspection of its nuclear facilities. North Korean spokesmen trotted out increasingly elaborate defenses of the refusal to accept IAEA inspection. But “the more they dig their heels in, the more you think they really have something to hide,” a Western diplomat in Seoul said. It seems that, when North Korea signed the NPT, parts of the Yongbyon facility were already in place. There were reports that Moscow had demanded that Pyongyang sign the treaty as a condition for the export of Soviet power reactors similar to the one at Chernobyl, for use not at Yongbyon but elsewhere in the country. North Korea under the terms it had agreed to was then expected to sign an IAEA safeguards agreement by June 1987. That turned out, coincidentally to be a month when South Korea was consumed in rioting that offered Pyongyang its best hope in years of seeing an indigenous southern uprising or revolution,
a situation that the North might then exploit. Instead the chaos of that month led to the collapse of the South’s military dictatorship and the introduction of democratic elections. The IAEA safeguards signing deadline kept slipping, and it was April 9, 1992, before North Korea’s rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly ratified an agreement. Even then Pyongyang refused to accept “overall” inspection of any and all facilities, including some of the newer construction at Yongbyon. Only years later would a high-ranking defector, Hwang Jang-yop, report that North Korea in 1991, before accepting the IAEA safeguards agreement, had carried out underground nuclear weapons testing.1

  Mean-while, in the West and South Korea the reports that the North might be developing the bomb at Yongbyon came with greater frequency. Few details were made public. Washington did not care to show the precise capabilities of its satellite and other intelligence. “I gather they can identify a pickled plum in a lunch box,” said a Japanese researcher.2 Still the reports were persistent enough that North Korea in February 1990 felt compelled to respond. A comment distributed by its Korean Central News Agency strongly denied that Pyongyang was producing nuclear weapons. It said the focus should be not on the North but on the South, where it alleged the United States kept some one thousand nuclear weapons. The publicity was “helping the bad and attacking the good,” the KCNA complained.

  For a while, the people paying attention were mainly officials and specialists. From shortly after the reactor complex was started, global media focused on the dramatic end of the Cold War—not on the continuing danger from a lone, unreconstructed Stalinist holdout. From August 1990, media and public interest shifted to the first Persian Gulf crisis. The North Korean nuclear issue simmered along, drawing only sporadic outside attention. But then Japan turned up the heat near the end of 1990 by moving abruptly toward diplomatic recognition of Pyongyang—recognition that Tokyo planned to couple with financial aid worth billions of dollars to the cash-strapped regime. Alarmed American and South Korean officials warned that such aid could help the Kims strengthen a military already ranked the world’s fifth largest, its forces forward-deployed along the South Korean border in what the U.S. military claimed was an offensive posture. Washington quietly sent a delegation of intelligence people to Tokyo with stacks of satellite photos of the suspicious reactor complex. Chastened Tokyo officials backtracked and handed Pyongyang a list of tough preconditions for normalization—including acceptance of the IAEA safeguards. Even that flap didn’t get very big headlines outside Asia. But once Saddam Hussein was beaten, for the time being, in April 1991, anyone asking where other potential Saddams might be lurking was pointed in Kim Il-sung’s direction.

  Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of North Korean Prime Minister Kang Song-san, gave a Seoul newspaper, JoongAng Ilbo, his take on the situation in 1995, after he defected to the South. “If you really want to know the North Korea problem,” Kang said, “you have to know the apprehension the ruling class feels. Their fears started with the August 1976 tree-cutting incident at the Demilitarized Zone. At that moment they were on the verge of war. North Koreans believed they would lose because South Korea had one thousand U.S. nuclear weapons and the North Koreans had none. I think that was when Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il decided they needed to develop nuclear weapons.” Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss who became the top Soviet leader in 1982, “wanted conflict with the United States so he sent a secret message saying, ‘The Soviet Union will help you, so attack.’ From that moment, the Russians suggested a North Korean nuclear development project. They sent about seventy nuclear specialists to North Korea. The specialists stayed until August 1993. I heard of Andropov’s urging when I was at the People’s Armed Forces. In 1992, North Korea acquired two nuclear submarines from the Soviet Union, saying they-would be used for scrap. But they-weren’t scrapped.”

  North Korea, Kang said, set up its nuclear system with Kim Pong-yeul, a graduate of a Soviet military academy, as the “key person in the Moscow-Pyongyang nuclear pipeline. Because he leans toward Russia, he’s not very close to Kim Jong-il. But his ties to the Soviets made him valuable. The people in charge of nuclear policy are officials of vice-ministerial rank in the Central Committee Information Department. Mr. Chang and Mr. Choe of the Research Department are in charge of nuclear policy. They are in their 50s. The nuclear strategy procedure is for Kim Jong-il to give an order to Kim Yong-sun, who instructs the Research Department to collect data and formulate policy proposals. The proposals go to the Research Department head, Kwon Hi-kyong, and to Kim Yong-sun, who is in charge of spy activities in South Korea. They discuss it, send it to Kim Jong-il, revise it and do final drafts. In 1992, they absorbed the Workers’ Party International Department into the Research Department’s North American Division. They wanted to use the nuclear issue as a way of bettering relations between North Korea and the United States. Kim Yong-sun had been in charge of the International Division.3

  Kim Dae-ho, one of the teenaged gang fighters featured in chapter 12, matured enough to become a model soldier and was able to land a job with many special benefits including extra food rations. However, it was a job that turned out to have some serious disadvantages. Starting in 1985, he treated waste water at the Atomic Energy April Industry, so named because it had been founded in the month of Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Situated in Tongsam-ri, North Pyongan Province, April Industry was a uranium processing facility. The waste water that Kim Dae-ho treated had been used in uranium processing. He put limestone into the water, causing the solids to sink to the bottom, and then sluiced the somewhat cleaner water into the river system.

  “The authorities claim they’re concerned about the environment but it’s not the case,” Kim Dae-ho told me. “The trees next to the river died and so did all the fish. Workers’ white blood cell counts were down. They had liver problems and their hair fell out. In 1990, I had to work in vanadium processing, using sulfuric acid. I worked in that for about a week. For a long time blood seeped out of my mouth. Even now if I put something in my mouth and suck on it I can see blood.”

  Eighty percent pure by the time the plant finished with it, the uranium then was taken to Yongbyon for further purification. “At Yongbyon they made it 100 percent pure and used it for power generation,” Kim Dae-ho said. “They used it in the experimental reactors. In October 1986 and February 1987, I visited Yongbyon. In 1986, I heard from workers that someone working there got exposed to plutonium rays in the reactor. His whole body deteriorated. In 1988 Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il inspected Yongbyon. I heard they gave the workers presents such as Japanese TVs as a re-ward for achieving the extraction of plutonium, but I have no idea if it was weapons grade. It was also in 1988 that I heard about a special military unit for nuclear development that had been assigned to make a storage place and store plutonium.”

  In 1988, Kim Dae-ho transferred to Namchon in North Hwanghae Province, which he described as “the other place besides April Industry where they processed uranium. That year while I was there I got a Toshiba color TV from Kim Jong-il. Color sets were a big deal. The government didn’t sell them. In the black market one cost 4,500 or 5,000 won —five or six years’ pay. I got mine for being a good, steady worker—nothing to do with plutonium.”

  As Kang Myong-do suggested, the nuclear weapons issue needed to be seen against a background of a generally perceived lessening of the North Korean military threat. It was not that Pyongyang’s military was shrinking. Rather, Seoul increasingly had the resources to counter it. By the time the project to build A-bombs at Yongbyon began in earnest in the 1980s, it was becoming clear that South Korea’s economy-was growing so fast that the North’s military superiority soon would be a thing of the past. The Kims evidently thought they needed nuclear weapons for a variety of purposes: to keep alive the possibility of reuniting the peninsula by force, on their terms; to deter South Korea and its American ally from trying to reunify on their terms; and to force concessions from the United States and other countries. Even with a nuclear equalizer, the
Kims were confronted with more and more compelling evidence that they could not win a second Korean war. Everybody “would lose grievously not least the North. Perhaps the most daunting evidence was Operation Desert Storm, in which American equipment like what the Americans and South Koreans were deploying south of the Demilitarized Zone was credited “with having chewed up Soviet-supplied Iraqi equipment similar to what North Korea had bought.

  Some observers still worried that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait proved that irrational or foolhardy dictators do start wars, even when it should be obvious they will lose. The question often asked was whether Kim Il-sung was rational. Certainly there was plenty of evidence suggesting megalomania in the giant statues and portraits of the Great Leader everywhere in Pyongyang. Like Saddam, Kim wanted to hear nothing but good news from his minions and consequently was given a distorted version of events. But, reassuringly, in the four decades since he had started the immensely destructive Korean War, Kim had not started another one—although there could be little doubt he had been tempted several times.

  At the beginning of the crisis North Korea’s suspected bomb-building capability was less a military threat than a threat to the concept and practice of nuclear non-proliferation. “North Korean nuclear weapons are for deterrence, not offense,” Kang Myong-do told me. “They don’t have enough strength to strike.” But the lessons of China, India and Pakistan strongly suggested that if North Korea were allowed to get away with refusing to allow inspection of Yongbyon, then both South Korea and Japan would feel strong pressure to acquire their own nukes. Neither would have much trouble with the technical aspects if they went ahead, and the chain reaction might not end with them.