With that in mind, what follows is what the United States and their henchmen in Seoul claim as the facts behind the tragic bombing. This is their version of a realistic narrative of events. It demonstrates quite plainly which side is the one telling impossible stories that don’t make any sense. Not only is the American perspective implausible, it sounds like nothing as much as the ravings of a movie fanatic that is utterly out of touch with reality. To wit:
Once upon a time, there lived a girl in the DPRK named Kim Hyun Hee. She grows up and is accepted to Kim Il Sung University, the most prestigious learning institution in all of Korea. After doing well at university, she is selected by the Party and taken from her family. Then she enrolls into Keumsung Military College (a school that does not exist in Korea, and one that has never been mentioned by anyone else either before or since).
There, Hyun Hee is put under grueling training in order to become a top-level spy. Three years later, she is given an exam. If she failed, Hyun Hee would be kicked out of the Party and disgraced for the rest of her life. As part of this test she is forced to go toe-to-toe with two male third-degree black belts in a row, the second of whom is armed with a mock knife. Miraculously but necessarily for our story, our heroine manages to dispatch both assailants. She also manages to run ten miles in just over two hours, as well as bench press 50% more than her body weight. Very impressive feats, indeed.
Having passed the test, Hyun Hee is next given a spying exercise: she is to break into a fake embassy in the woods in the middle of the night and then steal a document by cracking a safe. An entire slew of actors will be posing as an “ambassador” and his staff. Provided with a black mask, shoes and jumpsuit, Hyun Hee dresses “like some old ninja,” as she puts it. It is of course a well-known fact that we love anything Japanese in the DPRK. We always do our best to indoctrinate our people in as many aspects of traditional Jap culture as possible. Truly, “Japanese” is the Korean word for “delightful.”
Sure enough, our heroine accomplishes her mission. She slips past the guards at just the right moment, uses her grappling hook as people look the other way, hides breathlessly in a closet as the “ambassador’s wife” hangs up her dress (what a close call that was!), darts past the surveillance cameras, finds the safe hidden behind a painting in the library, uses a stethoscope to crack the lock and then escapes scot-free—incidentally “killing” several guards with mock bullets in the process. Although murdering guards in their own embassy would create a gigantic international incident in the real world, our heroine’s test run is counted as a resounding success. After all, she managed to open a fake safe in an imaginary set.
Our heroine is then partnered with an older spy on his last run. The two are sent abroad to practice passing as a Japanese father and his daughter. It is, after all, impossible to tell a Korean from a Japanese, because all Eastern people have similar features that are indistinguishable even to one another. Hyun Hee and the older spy next tour Europe. Though our heroine has never left north Korea before, she later can only describe her European travels as a “blur.” In her defense, it’s not as if spies are known for their ability to notice detail, or are trained for it, or are selected because of it.
After their European grand tour, the pair return to Korea to be given their ultimate mission. The orders they receive are personally handwritten by me, because whenever I give out spy assignments I like there to be no doubt that I’d personally been involved. I could easily deny having given a verbal command, and a typed piece of paper could have been written by anyone. It needs to be clear that the orders came directly from me—although the pair of spies somehow never end up getting to meet me. So what crime would the nefarious international terrorist Kim Jong Il have the two commit? Why, nothing less than making sure that south Korea won’t get the Olympics. The way to do so is to put a bomb on a south Korean plane. The turmoil from the plane crash—combined with the political unrest that was a perennial southern issue—will be enough to force the Olympic Games to be stripped from them. Other nations will apparently become afraid that their own planes will be bombed, or that their athletes will become the victims of terrorism once in Seoul. Like a jealous lover, if I can’t have the Olympics, then no one will! (Surely I was shaking my fist with rage as I plotted all this.) To make certain that this vitally important attack takes place correctly, I entrust it to an agent whom I’ve never even seen, and who has had zero, literally zero, successful missions under her ninja black belt.
Before the two agents leave to execute my diabolical scheme, they are each given a cigarette containing a hidden cyanide ampule. On the off chance that they get caught, breaking the ampule will kill them instantly. Dutifully the two undertake the mission, thinking nothing of murdering many south Koreans whom they’ve always been taught to regard as their own countrymen.
Posing as Japanese tourists, the pair board the plane in Baghdad and then safely stow a clock-shaped bomb in the overhead compartment. As the bomb counts down fatefully to its explosion, the other passengers sit blissfully unaware that death is about to befall them. When the plane stops in Abu Dhabi, my minions disembark and try to fly to Rome via Bahrain. Once in Bahrain, their forged Japanese passports are identified as fake and the two are held for questioning. Meanwhile, Korean Air Flight 858 explodes as planned, killing everyone on board.
In Bahrain, our heroine’s partner takes the cyanide and dies immediately. She, too, tries to kill herself but for some reason the cyanide doesn’t work on her (perhaps this is meant to be a slight against DPRK workmanship). Hyun Hee wakes up in a hospital. Then, for the first time in her life, this woman who was raised in the north of Korea, this woman who has just killed over a hundred people in the name of her country, starts to pray. Her indoctrination into Juche wasn’t very effective, it seems.
Hyun Hee is taken to Seoul amidst a huge media controversy. As she gets off the plane she hears a man comment “How could anyone so beautiful be a terrorist?”—well of course she’s beautiful, she’s the heroine—as she is taken in for questioning. All the while, Hyun Hee maintains that she is Japanese. The press then parade her in front of the TV cameras. They even releasing a photo allegedly of her as a child, presenting flowers to a south Korean delegate. (When I uncover and produce the actual woman in the picture, I am denounced as a liar.)
Our heroine is treated very well by the Korean CIA, and is not subject to the myriad tortures for which they are known. She is so taken by Seoul that she quickly realizes the folly of her actions and turns her back on everything that she has learned her entire life. Hyun Hee repents completely, holding a press conference to confess her actions. At her subsequent trial she is sentenced to death. There isn’t really any other option: she went on national television and admitted to planting a bomb on a plane, intentionally killing over a hundred people.
But the story can’t end there. That ending would be too depressing for this tale of redemption. What happened next is so unbelievable that if it were in a film everyone would roll their eyes and groan. Yet it is exactly what happened, and not in a movie, but in the real world that is south Korea. Some time later, Roh Tae Woo—the same man who oversaw the Olympic preparations—became “president” of south Korea. And what did he do to the woman who went on national television and admitted to bombing an airplane in an act of terrorism?
He pardoned her.
I do not mean that he commuted her sentence to life in prison, or that he pardoned one of her crimes but kept her in prison for some other ones. No, Kim Hyun Hee was allowed to completely roam free, walking the streets of Seoul with no repercussions for her actions whatsoever. It would be like President Clinton pardoning Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed a similar number of people.
The reason given for the pardon was that the woman had been “brain-washed” by the Great Leader and myself. My opponents often say that I claim to possess mystical powers for myself...but mind control? Regardless, we were the ones who should have been on trial, not Hyu
n Hee. After all, she was “only following orders”—an international legal defense whose validity is beyond question. It didn’t matter that Hyun Hee could have simply chosen to defect during her mission at any point. No, she was an innocent victim—who happened to plant a bomb on a plane. In a twist ending, President Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il are the true evil villains in this story.
And, of course, a “story” is all that this is. In fact, the admitted terrorist Kim Hyun Hee was rewarded with a book contract from an American publishing house. She even entitled her memoir Tears of My Soul, a fairly obvious allusion to the “Seoul” where she must have actually came from.
Unfortunately, many are indifferent to the incongruities in the official American version of the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858. They dismiss them as mistakes, instead of the lies and fraud that they are. For those people, it simply becomes a matter of my word against the word of the US imperialists and their puppets in the South.
Yet I can offer absolute proof that the American story behind Korean Air Flight 858 isn’t true. That proof is as follows: I would never have to send a Korean abroad to impersonate a Japanese person, since I’d been kidnapping and training actual Japanese women for that purpose for many years.
Here’s how my system worked. Our agents would visit Japan with fake passports and identification. There, they’d grab people and spirit them back to the DPRK. The abductees were often taken at random, and had nothing to do with one another. Even the circumstances of their kidnapping varied utterly: on a beach, at the mall, on the street. Once in Korea, they’d undergo extensive work to both become foreign agents for the DPRK and to assist native Koreans in becoming better spies.
For one reason or another, some of these abductees didn’t work out as agents. These were given the privilege of marrying Korean men as chosen and arranged by the Party, living out the remainder of their lives in far better circumstances than back in Japan. It was a wonderful arrangement for all parties concerned, and no one was ever hurt.
The ironic thing is that these abductions were noticed, but few believed that they were actual abductions. People instead assumed that the women ran away or were, say, raped and murdered. There was so much anti-DPRK sentiment in the world press that these incidents were even taken as examples of the extreme lies told about Korea—though it was probably the one and only time when the anti-DPRK propaganda was true!
I admit all this to demonstrate that I wouldn’t use a native Korean if I ever needed to have a “Japanese” bomb a plane in order to derail the Olympics. At the time I couldn’t say as much, since the program was still in full swing. I felt for the abductees’ families, yearning to know what happened to their sons and daughters, pleading with the Japanese authorities for answers, but there was little I could say without revealing my hand. Such were the difficult choices that accompanied my role.
All I could do was deny, but it was very hard for my denials to be heard against a backdrop of a plane crash and over one hundred deaths, in addition to decades of animosity and propaganda. Regardless, it was a very bitter time for all concerned. Relations between the two parts of Korea became absolutely dreadful, and it seemed possible that war might break out again. The United States chose to officially designate the DPRK as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” a title that held many negative consequences.
In the end, the plane bombing was forgotten and the Seoul Olympics went on as scheduled. On a personal level, I refused to allow the setback to become a complete defeat. That would go against the Olympic spirit and, more importantly, was completely out of line with the Juche tactics of President Kim Il Sung. I regarded the situation as a mere temporary “strategic retreat.” In the DPRK we had socialism “in our way,” and we had arts “in our way,” and we had construction “in our way.” There was no good reason why we couldn’t have the Olympic Games “in our way” as well.
Chapter 15
The Thaw
The enemy liked to called it “the Communist Olympics,” and in a sense they were right. The first World Festival of Youth and Students had been held in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1947. The original idea behind the festival was of ensuring peace and security by fighting imperialism, as well as promoting friendship and unity among the world’s young people. Over the decades, the festival began to be a less ideological event and became more of a venue for merry-making.
This history provided a great opportunity for the DPRK to host the next festival. No other nation upheld the socialist, anti-imperialist banner with such clear-cut ideals as north Korea. We were in a position to revive both the festival’s original progressive nature and the militant solidarity inherent therein.
The festival had never been held in Asia—let alone Korea, with the peninsula’s constant danger of aggression and war. It was not at all a given that Pyongyang would host the event, especially given that the Olympics were so close by. In fact, many nations didn’t want to antagonize the US imperialists and wanted to settle on an uncontroversial hosting venue.
The festival would be a huge international function with which nothing could compare, and as such would require vast preparation. Some of the requisite construction normally took decades to complete. One after another, the skeptics on the host committee spoke with one voice: “This is beyond Korea’s ability.”
When I got word of these criticisms, I didn’t vacillate in the slightest. “The DPRK can and will carry out the huge amount of work by ourselves,” I informed the committee. “To be candid, it won’t be easy for a small country like Korea to do the colossal preparation work. But I’m firmly convinced that we can hold the festival in our own grand style.”
Thankfully, my reputation for construction and artistry had won me international acclaim, especially among the socialist nations. Despite some resistance, Pyongyang was decided as the host. The US-led reactionaries were greatly frustrated to learn that they wouldn’t be able to emasculate the anti-imperialist nature of the festival and weaken its political significance. Things were getting off on the right foot.
I knew how curious foreigners were about Pyongyang. The city had such a reputation that those who visited it seemed to be unable to stop discussing it. There were many good reasons for this. For a capital city, Pyongyang was unique by its very layout. Generally speaking, the downtown area of a capitalist nation’s capital is occupied by government buildings and monopolies—of no concern to the general public. Japanese and European cities were likewise filled with blunt and scandalous commercial advertisements. But in Pyongyang there are only signboards of department stores, shops, cinemas and theatres. Instead of advertisements we have billboards with powerful slogans, inspiring the viewers to greater efforts at revolution and construction. Orderly and agreeable to their surroundings, they’re made up of such fine pictures and letters that they are often mistaken for works of art. These signboards—not garish neon—make the city particularly beautiful at night.
Since Korea’s capital had become legendary in its time, I wanted to show it as its absolute best when hosting the festival. I began new construction immediately. I launched a gigantic operation to complete the appropriate festival venues. The whole country was roused, supported by colossal sums of money and materials to implement the plans. We had a very short period of time to build two entirely new streets containing structures, including four new hotels and a new stadium. International activities were conducted in order to create a favorable atmosphere for the festival, highlighting its political significance. I invited many youth and student delegations from all over the world, as well as many heads of state and party leaders.
Yet the highlight of the construction had great personal meaning to me. I never forgot what I’d promised my mother, anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk: one day, I would build the people a building one hundred stories high. Finally, the DPRK was at a point where such a building could be justified and paid for. The Ryugyong Hotel was to stand 105 stories tall, with 3,700 rooms—twice as large as its nearest equivalent in
the south. The gigantic pyramidal structure would be Korea’s tallest building by far, and in fact would have been the tallest hotel in the world. Though the rest of my preparations were finished ahead of schedule, the hotel unfortunately wasn’t completed in time for the festival. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it.
Much of my effort was expended going over the plans for the opening ceremony: extending honor to President Kim Il Sung the moment he appeared on the platform; the procession of delegations entering the venue; the military men blowing horns to signal of the festival’s opening; the lighting of the torch; the performance of the band. The venue, the May Day Stadium, was provided with a flower-petal-shaped stage, as well as jets of water, a salute of electric sparks and other special devices.
The 13th World Festival of Youth and Students officially began on July 1, 1989. More than twenty thousand foreigners attended, an occurrence unprecedented in decades. Youth and student delegates came from 180 countries. But though every one of these visitors was a honored guest, one stood out above all the others: south Korea’s own Rim Su Gyong.
Rim Su Gyong was a member of Jondaehyop, a council of student representatives that counted more than one million south Korean students as its members. Under the south’s obscene National Security Law, residents were forbidden to step foot in north Korea. In order to reach the DPRK, Rim Su Gyong had to circumnavigate the globe. From Seoul she flew to Tokyo, Anchorage, Zurich, West Berlin, East Berlin and Moscow. Ten days after she left home, she alighted in Pyongyang.
Rim Su Gyong was mobbed by admirers everywhere she went in the north. They cheered her speeches and banged on the walls of her car, crying with delight. She began to be known as “the Flower of Reunification” for her outspoken support of reuniting Korea. She did this without advocating Juche or praising the north. And to her great credit, Rim Su Gyong also kept quiet about the horrors of the south.
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 25