In February 1994, the appeals court amended my custodial sentence from eight to six years, with six years of suspension of qualifications. But in May, the Supreme Court dismissed the previous verdict of not guilty on the charge of leaking intelligence and sent the case back to the High Court. They declared:
“It has been the Supreme Court’s consistent ruling that even if a fact had already been widely disseminated through newspapers or books, any information that is useful intelligence to the anti-government organization that is North Korea and can put South Korean interests at a disadvantage pertains to this charge.”
In other words, even widely distributed information can be considered “national secrets” if it happens to be advantageous to North Korea. The activist lawyers vociferously objected to the courts’ retreat into Cold War thinking.
Around this time, the US and North Korea reached a stalemate regarding nuclear disarmament talks, and the US was readying an airstrike against the North’s Yongbyon nuclear facilities. It is a well-known fact that during the Korean conflict, President Rhee Syngman relinquished wartime operational control to General Douglas MacArthur, a control which we never took back, so that the ability to decide war or peace on the peninsula lies with the United Nations Command in Korea. In other words, with the commander of US forces in Korea. Any military movement or the right to declare or stop war belongs to the US commander, and there is nothing the South Korean people, their president, or their government can do about it. The Pentagon had already completed war simulations. According to President Kim Young-sam’s memoirs, he was unable to sleep the night he heard about this. Those few weeks were like a very taut tug-of-war. It was then that former president Jimmy Carter stepped in to visit North Korea.
There are some who argue now that it would have been better to go to war, and that Carter was used by Kim Il-sung. They claim that his visit only bought the North more time to develop nuclear weapons. But let’s look back at the roots of North Korea’s nuclear development for a moment. Our division has persisted for seventy years since Liberation. Our war is both a civil war and an international war, part of a Cold War system that formed from Europe all the way to East Asia. When the Cold War ended in 1990 and Germany was reunified, Eastern Europe’s socialist system collapsed. North and South Korea eventually joined the UN as separate, sovereign nations. In other words, Russia and China finally accepted South Korean sovereignty, while the US and Japan approved of North Korea’s. Russia and China in turn normalized diplomatic relations with South Korea, but the US and Japan decided to delay doing the same for North Korea. A disappointed North Korea then turned to nuclear development as the trump card to force America to the negotiation table. The ultimate goal of such a negotiation was the stability of their regime and a peaceful reunification, which could only come about if a formal end to the Korean War was declared.
South Korea’s Kim Dae-jung administration pushed their “Sunshine Policy” by drawing North Korea, the US, South Korea, and Japan to the negotiation table and tried to make international society more inclusive for North Korea. Their idea was to pursue a one-nation, two-systems arrangement, and guaranteed peace was essential to this vision. The rules had been laid down with the September 19, 2005, agreement in Beijing; but due to America’s failure to lift sanctions, among other things, the deal fell apart. America then embarked on a protracted war in the Middle East and neglected North Korean relations, leading to North Korea firing long-range missiles and going ahead with their fifth nuclear test. Meanwhile, South Korea’s conservative governments were completely ineffectual in taking the lead and dealing with America and Japan’s attempts to curb China’s influence. With US cooperation and approval, Japan moved to rewrite its constitution of peace, which it had maintained since the end of World War II, and upgraded its national defense force to globalize its reach. The Japanese Armed Forces had long defined China as enemy number one and the Korean peninsula as its foremost theater of war. This was a continuation of the Japanese military class’s traditional mindset regarding Asia. Today, the US is attempting to bind Japan and South Korea into a Northeast Asian Cold War system, with China as the enemy. It is more important than ever, as we stand on the brink of war, that international forces work together to turn the peninsula’s state of armistice into a state of peace.
~
In June, the South Korean media reported extensively on former US president Carter’s prospective talks with Kim Il-sung. As a North–South summit began to seem like a possibility, my writer and politician friends went as far as to congratulate me during their visits. They no doubt thought that once the summit was held, I would be pardoned. Around this time, one of the guards told me that there was “someone who came down from North Korea” in our block. I asked if he had breached the National Security Act, and he replied he was a “plate.” We were in the habit of using flippant terms to refer to different types of criminals, like “water gun” for rapists. “Plates” referred to con men—I assume this came from the jester-act of spinning plates in the air while con men move through the crowd to steal money from distracted spectators. The guard also told me the plate was claiming to be related to Kim Jong-il. I wasn’t interested, and figured it was just a defector who was not adjusting well to South Korea’s capitalist lifestyle. Many North Korean defectors claimed to have been important people back home.
One day, a crowd of regular prisoners was walking past my door on their way to exercise when my food hole opened and a bright, energetic young face appeared in it.
—Hello! Nice to meet you. I am from North Korea.
I had my suspicions about him, so I simply smiled and said:
—I hope things look up for you soon. How did you end up escaping?
He smiled back and dodged the subject.
—Long story. Anyhow, my wife collected your North Korea travel writings and sent them to me here.
I feigned modesty at the interest from this supposed North Korean.
—I only described what they were willing to show me. They did seem to be a very hardworking people, so I tried to keep it positive.
—It’s the same here, no? There is light and dark everywhere. You captured the bright parts for the sake of reunification.
This young North Korean man seemed a simple soul, and yet he spoke to me as if he clearly understood what I had meant to write. For a while after that, we only exchanged quick greetings, until a guard who trusted me came in for duty and I asked him to let me talk more with the young man. We would sit in the washroom and talk comfortably while the others were out in the exercise yard. I realized he wasn’t fake when he guessed right away where I had stayed while in North Korea.
—If it’s near Pyongyang Station, it has to be the visitors’ center in Seojaegol, and you said you fished at a reservoir, which means it’s the Cheolbongri VIP visitors’ center. That’s where the actress Choi Eun-hee and director Shin Sang-ok used to live.
We had several shower room conversations like this where I got to hear his whole story. His name was Ri Il-nam. He was the only grandson of Song Yu-gyeong and Kim Won-ju. His grandfather had studied in Japan during the occupation and become a socialist. Right after Liberation he was put in charge of fiscal affairs at the Workers’ Party of South Korea, despite the fact that his family, the Changnyeong Songs, had been landowning aristocrats throughout feudal times. His grandmother, Kim Won-ju, was a “New Woman” who had been a reporter at Gaebyeok magazine. In 1948, she participated in the North–South Conference as the South Korea Democratic Women’s Federation’s representative. Her eldest son, Song Il-ki, was conscripted at the age of seventeen and operated as a partisan in the South Gyeongsang Province branch of the Workers’ Party of South Korea. He became a prisoner of war after the armistice and was left behind on his own in the South. Song Yu-gyeong fled to the North, but his fortunes fell with the end of the Party, and he died in sorrow. His eldest daughter Song Hye-rang raised her children, Ri Il-nam and Ri Nam-ok, alone after her husband died in a car crash
. The second daughter, Song Hye-rim, graduated from the Pyongyang University of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts, became an actor, married, became famous, and was awarded the People’s Prize, catching the eye of Kim Jong-il, who was younger than her. Her husband reluctantly gave her up in light of Kim Jong-il’s interest, and in the late 1960s Kim Jong-il and Song Hye-rim started living together in the infamous Residence No. 15, a secret kept from Kim Jong-il’s father, Premier Kim Il-sung. The couple later gave birth to Kim’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam. It was around this time that Kim Won-ju lived with Song Hye-rim at the residence, helping to raise her grandson.
When Kim Jong-nam entered elementary school, Ri Il-nam and Ri Nam-ok moved with their mother into Visitors’ Residence No. 15. Song Hye-rang had been a physics major, but under her journalist mother’s influence, she also developed a talent for writing and was publishing short stories.
Around the time I was released, a friend of mine brought a copy of Song Hye-rang’s memoirs, Deungnamu jip (Wisteria House). This was long after the scandals of the sisters Song Hye-rang and Song Hye-rim and Ri Il-nam’s death, and so the book was overlooked by the general public and quickly fell out of print. What moved me deeply about this memoir was how it maintained a politically impartial perspective regarding the North and South and, while it was a personal record, it still contained many valuable details otherwise forgotten by history. The first part was about the revolutionary activities of her journalist and socialist activist mother, Kim Won-ju, and the son of a feudal lord, Song Yu-gyeong, continuing on to the war they experienced in North Korea and its aftermath. The second half offered a calm and objective account of Song Hye-rang and Song Hye-rim’s life in the Visitors’ Residence and their relationship with Kim Jong-il, against the backdrop of the changes in North Korean society.
Ri Il-nam told me about life in Residence No. 15 with his mother, aunt, younger sister Nam-ok, and Kim Jong-nam, who was technically a cousin but as close as a younger brother. The family was segregated from the other citizens of Pyongyang and they were indeed treated like “visitors” in the residence. They called Kim Jong-il, who came to the house every few days, “the Chief,” and because they were not allowed to play outside or have any friends, the three of them stuck together. In an annex to the residence lived a driver, a cook, and a middle-aged assistant. Ri Il-nam said that every day there would be transcripts delivered to Kim Jong-nam’s office of phone conversations with higher-ups in the Party, like O Jin-u or Kim Yong-sun, and the Chief would look through them and then feed them into a shredder. No matter how august an official came to visit, the young Kim Jong-nam always spoke to them in informal Korean, and while Kim Jong-il said nothing about this, Song Hye-rim would admonish him and say he needed to use the polite form to adults. Ri said that more than once he had seen the driver and the assistant stack boxes of dollars and gold ingots into a cabinet taller than a person inside the office. If the Chief mentioned a dish at dinner, it would invariably appear on the table a few days later, and even a dish that wasn’t available in North Korea would be served at least a week after it was invoked. There was a screening room in the house, and the family watched a European or Hollywood movie once every few days.
Ri studied at Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, then went to Moscow, and then to Geneva with Kim Jong-nam when the latter was sent abroad. Their lives were the same overseas, as they were stuck at home all the time, and Kim Jong-nam started to get into the new pastime of video games. An assistant took them to and from school. That was in the early 1980s, and Ri, nineteen at the time, wanted to visit America. He had grown up watching Hollywood movies in the residence, his video game equipment was from the States, and he loved American pop music. When he talked about this to his friends at school, they said he would need a visa to go to America and that he would have to contact the Korean embassy. Ri, like his Swiss classmates, didn’t know much about the North–South division of Korea, or maybe he just didn’t think about it. He hesitated a few times before calling the South Korean embassy from a pay phone. The person who picked up managed to grasp who the caller was and offered to help him get to the States. When Ri called again a few days later, he was instructed to not tell anyone and come to a place where he would be given a passport. Ri met the contact at a café and then got into a car with him, supposedly to go pick up his passport together.
—I don’t know how many days went by after that, but when I came to, I was in a two-story house in Seoul, South Korea.
That was September of 1982. Ri said the people who had brought him to South Korea seemed disappointed. They had thought he was one of Kim Jong-il’s children and were excited that he had voluntarily contacted the South Koreans, but he was only the nephew of Kim Jong-il’s mistress, a nobody.
Ri lived for years in the ANSP residence. He changed his name to Yi Han-yong—meaning “I will live forever in South Korea”—and had plastic surgery. It was said that, whenever there was contact between the two governments, North Korean officials would ask if the South had him. He earned a degree in drama from Hanyang University, and the South Korean government got him a job as a producer at KBS. He began to brag a lot about his best days. The ANSP helped him as much as they could, and he even got married. His wife was a demure young woman from an ordinary family who worked as a model. He drove a Grandeur complete with a car phone, his wife drove an SUV, and they lived in a huge eighty-pyeong apartment (about 265 square meters) in the most expensive complex in Gangnam.
He had never had to strive for anything in his life and had been protected and cared for, in both North and South, like a hothouse plant, which might explain why he was even more naïve than he looked. His cheerfulness and simplicity came from being clueless and always doing whatever he felt like. It was no wonder con men couldn’t leave him alone. He flaunted his wealth, drawing the attention of a group of con artists who proposed a real estate development project, in which they negotiated with apartment owners to knock down and replace their old apartment buildings. Ri invested all of the resettlement money given him by the South Korean government into this scheme, and mortgaged his own apartment, but the buildings that were constructed were shoddy. The proprietors refused to move into the new buildings, on the grounds that they were not up to par, and sued the developers. These promptly disappeared with the money, and Ri found himself in prison. He worried about his wife and daughter, sighing that they had nowhere to go but his mother-in-law’s house.
One day, on the way out to the exercise yard, Ri opened my food hole and urgently blurted a question.
—Mr. Hwang, do you happen to know anyone at the Hankyoreh?
—Why? What happened?
He was agitated and breathing hard.
—They’re going to blame me for everything at the trial.
I told him that civil suits like his were hardly in the purview of a newspaper like the Hankyoreh’s interests, but he went off on a tangent.
—Bastards! They dragged me here against my will and now they’ve washed their hands of me. If they don’t intervene, I’ve got a lot to say for myself, I’m telling you. I’m going to talk to the press!
I finally understood what he meant. I said that he must have had a handler before, and that he should get in touch with him and explain the situation.
—My wife says everyone’s positions shifted after the change in administration.
I reasoned with him, saying the country could not take responsibility for every last individual’s life; he had an unusual story and if he went public with it he would only harm himself, and he should learn not to abuse that secret. Things went quiet for a while until one day, passing by my cell, he opened my food hole again.
—I think I’m headed out now. My old handler said he would take care of it.
I understood. His situation would have been a pain in the neck for them. As he predicted, he was out on probation a week later, but he was like an innocent little boy to the end. He was carrying his things down the corridor, so I asked a guard to let me out to say go
odbye to him at the entrance of the cell block. He was ecstatic at the thought of getting out.
—Mr. Hwang, I am indebted to you in many ways.
—I hope you live diligently in the future.
He bowed and shook my hand.
—Yes, I will work diligently for reunification.
I didn’t let go of his hand but patted his shoulder with my other hand, saying:
—Don’t even think of doing such a thing. Just concentrate on making a living.
And I added, insistently:
—You are in a very special situation and therefore must be extremely careful. Live quietly and happily with your family, because your life won’t be like it was before. Be frugal and live earnestly.
Years later, in perhaps the winter of 1995 when I was at Gongju Correctional Institution, the Chosun Monthly started to serialize Ri’s memoirs and included a transcript of phone conversations with his mother Song Hye-rang, who was living in Moscow. For weeks the papers talked about Song Hye-rang and Song Hye-rim and Kim Jong-il’s private life, speculating that the Song sisters would go into exile. Ri looked as if he would never go back to the kind of life he’d led before. According to the reports, he was running a chocolate shop in a department store (I suspect this was also thanks to some outside help). This would have been a great favor by the standards of ordinary South Koreans, but to him it was perhaps not enough. That’s why he sold his story to the magazine and published a book. There was a rumor that, after his phone calls with his mother, Song Hye-rang, he had sent his wife to Hong Kong to meet with her to receive some money, or that Song had wired some to him. Song Hye-rang and Ri Nam-ok managed to leave Moscow around that time, but they did not end up in South Korea.
The Prisoner Page 9