by Paul Fischer
The same evening she and her mother were abducted, just a few hours later, Suichi Ichikawa, twenty-three, and Rumiko Matsumoto, twenty-four, both disappeared from Kagoshima Prefecture, 870 miles away on the southern tip of Japan; they were married in North Korea the following year.
A month later, two Japanese men called an escort company in Singapore and requested that five beautiful ladies be sent to their yacht for a “floating party.” Twenty-four-year-old Diana Ng Kum Yim, twenty-two-year-olds Yeng Yoke Fun and Yap Me Leng, and nineteen-year-olds Seetoh Tai Thim and Margaret Ong Guat Choo were sent to the yacht to spend the evening with the men. All of them—men, yacht, and young escorts—disappeared that night and were never seen again, except for Yeng Yoke Fun, who in 1980 resurfaced working in a Pyongyang amusement park.
In June 1979, South Korean Ko Sang-Moon got into a taxi in Oslo, Norway, and asked to be taken to the South Korean embassy. The driver—by accident or by design—took him to the wrong Korean embassy. The next time anyone heard of Ko, he was in North Korea, and Pyongyang claimed he had defected of his own free will. That same year four Lebanese women were told by an employment broker that there were four secretarial jobs paying $1,000 a month in Japan. They all eagerly signed up and got on a plane they thought was bound for Tokyo, but its actual destination was Pyongyang. As soon as they landed, their passports were confiscated and they were sent, one of them said, “to an institution where we were trained in spy activities including judo, tae kwon do, karate, and eavesdropping, as well as being given indoctrination lectures to believe the teachings of Kim Il-Sung. There were twenty-eight young women in the institute, including three French, three Italians, and two Dutch ladies, among other Western European and Middle Eastern women. They were equally powerless in rebelling against their captors.”
Some people were luckier and managed to evade capture. In 1977 the actress Young Jung-Hee and her partner, the pianist Paik Kun-Woo, narrowly escaped an attempted abduction by North Koreans in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. They had been told that a wealthy Yugoslavian wanted Paik to perform for him live at his home. Zagreb’s police chief had been paid $30,000 to cooperate with North Korean operatives hiding inside the residence, ready to pounce on the couple as soon as they arrived. But Young and Paik had grown apprehensive, and as soon as they arrived in Zagreb they took a taxi to the U.S. embassy. The embassy was closed, but the vice consul was in his first weeks in the post and working late. He took the couple to the Palace Hotel, where he was staying while he found a residence, and booked them a room on the same floor as his. At 6 a.m. there was a knock on their door. Paik called the vice consul, who looked out his own door. “There are three North Koreans outside your room,” he told Paik. American personnel was called to the hotel and helped the South Korean couple escape to the lobby via the service lift, then took them straight to the airport.
On August 15, 1978, a Japanese man and his fiancée in Takaoka City were attacked by six suspicious men after returning to their car from an afternoon swimming in the ocean. They were saved by a dog barking nearby, which startled their attackers as they tried to bind them and stuff them into body bags. The woman ran to a nearby house, which happened to be inhabited by a retired policeman. The man, with the bag still tied around his head, managed to run to another house a couple of hundred yards away. When local police investigated the crime scene later that day, they recovered a handmade rubber gag, with a hole cut through it so the victim could breathe, rubber ear covers to prevent the victim from hearing, as well as large green nylon bags, a rope, and several towels.
Throughout the 1970s, North Korean operatives kidnapped foreigners from the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan; from London, Copenhagen, Oslo, Hong Kong, Macao, Zagreb, Beirut, and several cities in South Korea, China, and Japan. The head of North Korea’s special forces and covert operations division during those years, the man who would have given or approved every single order, was Kim Jong-Il.
* * *
Catherine Hong’s story of her abduction was much the same as the others. She had been working as a tour guide in Macao in 1978 when two men in their thirties hired her. “I took them around town for a few days,” Catherine told Choi. “They paid me well and spent a lot of money. They said they were from Southeast Asia and seemed to be sons from rich families. They spoke English very well. One day they asked me to take them to the coast.” When they arrived at the beach a Thai woman was waiting there. “She said she worked in a nightclub. She was about ten years older than me—I was twenty then. The four of us got in a boat and circled the coast for a while. Then we got farther out into the sea.” The motor skiff took them to a bigger ship, which seemed to be waiting for them. Catherine and the Thai woman were forced aboard. They were brought to Pyongyang first, Catherine said. But she had tried to escape, without luck, and then tried to commit suicide several times. After that the North Koreans took her to a small cottage, took away everything in her room—“everything,” she repeated—so that she couldn’t harm herself, and punished her by limiting her food to a small bowl of rice and one vegetable a day. “I was famished,” Catherine told Choi. “It was then I decided to change. I concentrated on learning Korean. They took it favorably, because a month later I ended up here and have been receiving better treatment.”
Catherine was lucky. The majority of abductees who resisted or didn’t prove useful were sent to concentration camps. Most of the kidnappings were random, the victims picked more out of convenience than any sort of grand plan—although on the rare occasion, as with Shin and Choi or the pianist Paik Kun-Woo and his wife, they were specifically targeted for what their name would bring to the regime. As early as the Korean War the Kim regime had used kidnapping as a political tool. When the war started Kim Il-Sung had issued a memorandum, entitled “On Transporting Intellectuals from South Korea,” giving North Korean soldiers permission to go into private homes and “repatriate” specific individual targets—for the most part intellectuals, journalists, students, and public officials—to work in the farms, factories, and offices of the new People’s Republic. In this way anywhere between seven thousand and eighty-three thousand South Koreans were forcibly relocated to North Korea between 1950 and 1953. The North Koreans even kidnapped fifty-five foreigners, mostly diplomats and journalists, during the war, only to be made to release them afterward, claiming that they had only been trying to “protect” them. When the Korean War ended the North Koreans “failed to repatriate” somewhere between forty thousand and sixty thousand South Korean prisoners of war. Historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager writes that those thousands and thousands of prisoners “were forced to remain in North Korea as virtual slaves. Many of the ROK prisoners were unaware that an armistice had even been signed.” The process slowed down but didn’t stop after the armistice: the Korean Institute for National Unification in Seoul believes a further four thousand South Korean citizens were abducted to the North between 1953 and 2005, “partly because North Korea may have found their knowledge and manpower useful.”
There were less dramatic abductions, too, ones that never involved covert ops, war, or physical assault. There were the South Korean fishermen who ventured a little too close to the Northern Limit Line, the maritime border between the two Koreas, and found themselves “rescued” by the North Korean navy and then paraded on newsreel propaganda broadcasts, celebrated through the streets of Pyongyang like repatriated People’s heroes, before being sent to detainment camps once they had served their publicity purposes, the Workers’ Party claiming they “have chosen to remain in the Workers’ Paradise and not return to the living hell of the capitalist South.” There were the ninety-three thousand ethnic Koreans lured back from Japan with promises of riches and preferential treatment, only to have Kim’s functionaries meet them off the boat, assign them a manual worker’s job and a state-owned house, and send them off to toil for the republic, never again allowing them to return home.
The late 1970s were undoubtedly the Golden Age of North Korea’s practice of kidn
apping. The reason was simple: Kim Jong-Il. The Dear Leader had never had any military training, never studied espionage, never worked in an intelligence agency, never left his country; but he had seen and loved every James Bond film. (He later hinted to Shin Sang-Ok that he believed such Western films were virtually docudramas.) Information gathering, strategic planning, and other tedious espionage practices meant little to Kim Jong-Il. But kidnapping, which his men did throughout the 1970s; assassination, as when his men, after he had taken control of foreign operations in 1974, targeted Park Chung-Hee and carried out the deadly Rangoon bombing of 1983; infiltration, which his men attempted throughout the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea via the coast and the tunnels dug under the DMZ; and terrorism, as demonstrated in the bombing of Kimpo Airport in 1986, which killed five, and the hijacking and bombing of a Korean Air flight in 1987, killing all on board … that was the kind of cloak-and-dagger work Kim seemed to believe a man with his power and ambition must use to further his aims. “Kim Jong-Il loved covert operations,” Hwang Jang-Yop testifies.
“Abduction … was vehemently pursued from the mid-1970s,” adds former North Korean special operations agent Ahn Myong-Jin. “On being designated as successor to Kim Il-Sung in 1974, Kim Jong-Il immediately embarked on taking charge of the Party bureau responsible for South Korean infiltration.… Kim Jong-Il then ordered the bureau to ensure that agents could impersonate the local population to perfection and to bring locals to North Korea as teachers for the agents. Under this order, Japanese, Korean, Arab, Chinese, and European citizens were abducted in an organized manner. I was taught this as an example of Kim Jong-Il’s success in improving infiltration activities while I was at Kim Jong-Il Military University.” Jong-Il had some of the Japanese citizens abducted to become language and “culture” teachers in his spy schools, teaching future covert operatives how to act like genuine Japanese citizens once they had reached enemy territory; others were taken simply so that North Korean spies could use their identities. There were women abducted for their looks and married off to North Korea–based Japanese terrorists as a reward for their work. Those left behind—the families and friends—were also victims. People they loved had suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again, their fates likely never to be known.
The Japanese Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea alleges that citizens of at least twelve countries have been abducted to, and possibly still remain in, North Korea, including nationals from France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Jordan. Between 1978 and 1982 Choi Eun-Hee saw many of them: Catherine Hong and the Jordanian woman but also, later, a female professor from France, who told her she felt sure her government would campaign to get her rescued and repatriated. The hairdresser Kim Jong-Il sent to her house told her many similar tales, of European women seduced by North Korean agents posing as wealthy Chinese and lured to Pyongyang; the hairdresser said he had met the women in houses nearby, where they were now living under guard, “undergoing brainwashing.”
All those people—sleeping, eating, taking walks, coming in and out of the villas on the compound—were like ghosts; and Choi realized that she, too, was becoming a sort of ghost. Was anyone even looking for her? To the outside world, did she even still exist? Or had she simply disappeared forever?
15
Escape from the Chestnut Valley
“Deputy Director,” Shin Sang-Ok asked his instructor as they sat in the projection room watching a movie, “why did you kidnap me? To show me all these films for free?”
The Deputy Director shrugged. “You used to make films, so they probably want you to make movies.”
You used to make films. It surprised Shin how it could still make him flinch. “My movies are expensive to produce,” he answered churlishly.
“Don’t worry about such nonsense—just concentrate on your studies. The Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il has gold mines. He takes the money from them and uses some of it for movies, plays, music, and other artistic endeavors. I wouldn’t worry about money.”
As they spoke, Shin discreetly stuffed his pockets with the small cakes and nuts that were always laid out for the movie screenings. Later that afternoon he would take his daily ramble around the grounds, timing his pace and assessing his endurance. It didn’t matter why Kim Jong-Il had had him kidnapped, or whether he could afford to pay to resurrect his career. Shin wasn’t planning on staying in North Korea long enough to find out.
* * *
His routine had been the same since he had arrived in the Chestnut Valley: two hours of ideological study in the morning, lunch, a nap, then two, sometimes three films chosen specifically by Kim Jong-Il, broken up with a walk around the valley, then dinner and bed. The compound was surrounded by a high concrete wall topped with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. Attendants slept in the house with Shin. Even so, “my determination to escape became stronger every day,” Shin later wrote. No one would tell him where Madame Choi was or even if she was alive. He felt sure she must be dead and felt no desire, as he said, “to leave my fate to their tender mercies.”
His early plans hadn’t come to much. First he thought that if he could persuade them to take him to Kaesong—his instructor kept talking of “sightseeing trips”—and smuggled the small scissors from the manicure kit in the bathroom along with him, he might be able to slash one of the car tires and force them to stay in Kaesong for a few hours, maybe even overnight. He’d noticed the car had no spare tire. Then all he had to do was get away from his minders somehow, “make my way to the Imjin River, then jump into the river and try to swim away.” The Imjin had become known as the River of the Dead, named after the hundreds of bodies that washed down it from the North, especially following famines or purges. The river flowed right through the DMZ, and Shin would have to avoid land mines, barbed wire, and being shot at by soldiers of both sides to make it across. “Looking back, it was an absurd plan,” he said, “but desperation was already beginning to get the better of my common sense.” The only thing that kept him from attempting it was his instructor’s refusal to take him to Kaesong. “It’s still too soon,” the Deputy Director told him whenever Shin prodded. “Just study. Sightseeing will come later.”
Then he thought he could dig a tunnel under the perimeter wall. He found a shovel in a fishing shed by a nearby lake and hid it, but never had the opportunity to sneak out and even start digging. After that he asked for a bicycle—“for exercise,” he said—and was surprised when the request was granted. He planned to slip out in the middle of the night, retrieve the food he had stashed in the cabinet of the radio in his room, ride to the railroad line, and hop a train headed for the Chinese border. That plan had to be abandoned almost as soon as it was conceived, when he discovered that his attendants locked the bike away after sunset. When a color TV was delivered to the villa he snatched some of the plastic shipping materials to make a life preserver, in case his escape eventually involved crossing a wide, rough river; that night he stole to the nearby lake to test his makeshift flotation device and nearly drowned.
He even considered sneaking off during the hustle and bustle of the 9/9 Day festivities. Climbing out a window of the Pyongyang apartment he and his instructor were staying in overnight after the Mass Games, he barely made it outside before one of his attendants flung the front door open. “Where are you going?” she shouted.
“I—I’m going to watch the fireworks,” he stammered, his heart pounding, sweat dripping down his face. She immediately brought him back inside.
“There was no way to escape,” Shin finally had to concede. “There just wasn’t any way.”
* * *
Watching movies should have made the days easier for such a film fanatic as Shin, but if anything they made time seem to go even slower. The North Korean pictures were all so awful, he thought, and they all had the same exact theme, repeated over and over. After every showing the Deputy Director asked him to write a critique, which Shin did from a filmmaker’s point of view. Inevitably he
was asked to rewrite it “from a proletarian point of view.” The screening room, which Shin had expected to be a haven, came to annoy and frustrate him as much as every other room in the house.
As the temperatures dropped he was, paradoxically, spending more and more of his time outdoors. The attendants had provided him with a winter suit, fur-lined hat, and winter boots, and he wanted to test how they withstood long hours in the wind and cold. But he had also become mesmerized by the car that was parked out front.
There was a chauffeur who sat all day in a Mercedes-Benz outside the guesthouse. Every night after dinner, the man went indoors to play cards with the cook and the off-duty attendants, usually from eight until eleven o’clock or so. He never came outside to check on the vehicle. Shin could hear the noises of the card game, laughter mixed with cursing and the clinking of glasses, from where he sat in the dining room. The car was parked slightly to the side of the guesthouse, its nose pointing down the hill toward one of the compound gates, located near the lake Shin walked to and from every day. Every single night the chauffeur parked the car, turned the engine off, and went in for dinner and his game of cards.
And, crucially, he always left the key in the ignition.
As the ownership of private property was against the law in North Korea, only members of the regime—and the people the regime gave cars to as gifts and signs of privilege and influence—were allowed to own automobiles. Accordingly, most people had never seen the inside of a car and very few people knew how to drive one. To become a driver, a socially exalted profession in the DPRK, one must have a neutral or positive songbun and be selected for a one-year course covering theoretical and applied driving practice, basic structure of the vehicle, and basic maintenance, at the end of which a diploma, rather than a license, was awarded. Upon graduation most new drivers were assigned to work as “assistant drivers” to more experienced motorists for three to five years before being assigned their own vehicle. From that day forth, if they did their job competently and renewed their certificate every year, drivers never had to worry about making a living ever again.