A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  * * *

  The hours crawled by, the days filled with “anxiety, planning, and waiting for my chance,” Shin recalled. Almost every night thunderstorms broke the sweltering heat. The bellows of the thunder and the sound of the heavy rain smothered the other noises in the house, and the guards gave up their patrols and huddled under shelter. Even then Shin couldn’t get past the guard dog, but he didn’t plan to. His scheme was both simpler and more daring than his last.

  On one such stormy July night, he crept into the upstairs guest room, where he had noticed that the three radiators were on wheels, and that if one was moved, a panel in the wall behind could also be moved, revealing a small empty space in the wall itself, just big enough for a man to hide in. He pushed aside the radiator in question, removed the panel, and slipped into the space, carefully replacing the panel behind him. From its position behind a desk, the radiator made it difficult to notice any alteration to the panel.

  Shin crouched within the wall, his pockets stuffed with food and supplies he had amassed over the previous weeks. He expected he might have to stay in hiding for three or four days—without stretching his legs or relieving himself in any way—while his captors, thinking he had escaped, set out on a massive manhunt. “Later, when the furor died down,” Shin wrote, “I would leave the house and head toward one of the ports, or the border, and eventually make my way to the Soviet Union.”

  When dinner was served that night and Shin Sang-Ok could not be found, pandemonium broke out. Within a couple of hours officers had arrived to search every corner of the house—but instead of then deserting the property entirely, as Shin had expected, they set up their search headquarters in the study, right across the hall from the room in which he was hiding. Shin was stunned. He had assumed his captors would behave the way he planned—according to the script he had written in his mind—when they found his room empty. Even from his hopeless position Shin still believed he could plan a scene and direct it to his intention.

  Lying scrunched up inside the wall, his back already aching and his throat tight with thirst, Shin listened anxiously as cars screeched to a halt outside the house and men stomped in and out of every room. Walkie-talkies crackled loudly. He heard some of the men knocking on the ceilings and walls to determine if they were hollow. “I could hear men on the roof,” Shin wrote later. “My bedroom and the study became the search headquarters. People were coming and going; orders were given and reports delivered in these rooms. There were drivers in the room I was hiding in. They came by to listen to the radio.” At three in the morning, bursting to pee, Shin crept to the bathroom and relieved himself, waiting for the dogs to bark or the thunder to crack before flushing the toilet.

  On the third day of Shin’s concealment an attendant entered the guest room to clean it. As he approached the desk he saw that the radiator had been moved and that the panel behind it was slightly open; in fact, he could see part of Shin’s body. He shouted immediately. “He’s here! He’s here! The gentleman is hiding in the aide’s room!”

  Moments later, policemen rushed in. A man in his thirties, wearing a gray Mao tunic rather than a police uniform, seemed to be in charge. Once Shin had been dragged out of his hole the man in the Mao tunic sat him down and began inquiring, politely:

  “Why try to escape again?” he asked. “Why cause so much trouble again?”

  “Because I can’t live here,” Shin replied. “I don’t have my wife, my kids, and my family. My friends. They are all in the South. How can I live here all by myself?”

  “But you never requested for your family to be brought to you,” the man said, shrugging. “If you had just asked, it would have been arranged.”

  “How could you bring my family from the South? The government is probably watching them very carefully.”

  “Why can’t you ever believe in the power of the People? You just don’t understand the power of the People…” The man sighed. “You’ve committed an offense and betrayed the state by trying to escape from this country. These are serious offenses. You deserve to be executed.”

  “I’m a South Korean. What crime is it for me to try to go back?”

  “You are a citizen here. Citizens here must obey the law of the land.”

  “I’m not a citizen here,” Shin protested, “I’m still a South Korean—”

  “Ha—nonsense. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the true government of the Korean peninsula and therefore, you are a citizen of North Korea.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Other senior officials came by to take a look at Shin, later discussing his case in one of the downstairs rooms. The Deputy Director appeared as well, “looking at me with the eyes of a viper,” Shin observed, before being asked to leave. When, eventually, Shin was taken down for dinner, he was served a prisoner’s meal consisting of salt soup, a tiny handful of rice, and no meat. More guards and dogs were brought in, and by the next morning barbed wire had been installed outside every window.

  With his spirit destroyed, Shin now slipped into limbo, waiting to be taken away any minute to be executed. Both times he had tried to escape he had genuinely believed he would succeed. “My escapes were like those in a movie,” he reflected years later. “Perhaps I had confused fantasy with reality.… But without at least attempting to escape, I could never have endured the anxiety, the loneliness, and the fear. In such a stark reality, with so much free time, it was only natural that my fantasies and dreams started to merge into reality.” Twenty days after Shin’s hiding place was found, two security officers came to the house and said they were there to take the prisoner “to a place where you will pay for your crime.” They are finally going to kill me, Shin thought as he climbed, handcuffed, in the back of yet another Mercedes, his belongings thrown in the trunk.

  They didn’t kill him. The Mercedes drove for three hours, in the dark, into the heart of nowhere, and deposited him in front of a fortified building.

  Shin had arrived at Prison Number 6.

  * * *

  The detention center had been one thing. Prison Number Six, the “enlightenment center,” was another.

  The Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda, who traveled to Pyongyang to translate the collected works of Kim Il-Sung into Spanish, was arrested and convicted in 1968—on no explicit charges and with no evidence—and then spent six years in Prison Number 6, which he knew as Suriwon Prison, after the nearest town. He wrote, “The conditions of the prison were appalling. No change of clothes in years, nor of food plates.… There are no rights for the prisoner, no visits, parcels or cigarettes or food or opportunity to read a book or newspaper, or write.… Hunger was used as a control.… In my opinion, it is preferable to be beaten, as it is possible to grit one’s teeth and withstand physical beating. To be continuously starving is worse.” A guard told him six thousand or more men and women were held in the prison, “a huge circular place with an enormous courtyard,” at any one time. Lameda could hear some of them wailing in other cells, and added grimly, “You can soon learn to distinguish whether a man is crying from fear, or pain or from madness, in such a place.”

  It was here that Shin Sang-Ok was banished after his second escape attempt. Formally indicted and convicted, he was made to change into prison garb—cotton, secondhand, and unwashed from the previous “renter”—and taken to the small, damp, filthy cell that would be his new home. He had to crawl into it through a flap on his hands and knees. Cockroaches swarmed the toilet bowl.

  As he quickly learned, prison policy forbade him from meeting or exchanging words with other inmates. Chatter, laughter, and singing were forbidden. Prisoners were allowed to wash their clothes but not themselves. The weekly bodily and cavity search was administered more like a ritual humiliation. Even when the prisoners sunned themselves in the yard they were kept in individual wire cages, like in a zoo, with cement sides so they couldn’t speak to or look at one another. The food was little more than “grass and salt” in water, with the odd ball of rice.

&
nbsp; Along with his fellow inmates, Shin was instructed to sit in his cell in a cross-legged position, head down—and not to move again. The slightest flicker of a muscle was met with a beating, the prisoner most commonly being asked to put his hands through the bars on the door and having his fingers smashed violently with a guard’s baton. Defector Hyok Kang, whose father underwent the same treatment, wrote of it, “The prisoners took up their cross-legged position … and had to remain silent and motionless. This was real torture, because while the lice ate you up, all you could do was watch them go about it, since the slightest movement was punished.… My father still bears the marks. Only once a day, the prisoners enjoyed a break during which they were allowed to move. It lasted ten minutes. The prisoners, whose legs were often swollen and puffy, because their blood circulation stopped almost completely in that cross-legged position, could barely get to their feet.” (“The prisoner[s] sat for sixteen hours a day looking at the wardens and the prison bars,” Lameda added. “Prisoners must stay awake throughout the day, the official explanation went, since how could a prisoner continually ponder his guilt if he slept?”)

  This was called the torture position. It was to be Shin’s daily regime for over two and a half years.

  18

  Division 39

  On the outside, in another kind of prison, Choi Eun-Hee had somehow gotten back in Kim Jong-Il’s favor. She didn’t know why, but one day Kim invited her down the newly opened Wonsan Expressway to his beachside resort. “It was a four-lane highway,” Choi remembers, but “there were no guardrails and the people just walked haphazardly in the middle of the road. The tunnels [along the way] were all given names such as ‘Juche,’ ‘Loyalty,’ or ‘Triumphal Return.’ The longest one, they said, was four kilometers long.” Ordinary villages could be seen from the motorway, but there were no exit ramps leading to them. When they arrived at the five-story villa on the beach, Kim Jong-Il was waiting outside beaming, as ever.

  “Mrs. Choi! Welcome. Long time no see. How is your health? Is this your first visit to Wonsan?”

  Jong-Il had other friends over, and the evening was taken up by a long dinner, after which the guests formed groups to drink, shoot some pool, or play mah-jongg or cards. “It was just the same as in any capitalist society,” Choi thought. The next morning Jong-Il had Kang take her to nearby Mount Kumgang, also known as the Diamond Mountain. Choi had never seen it, but it had been celebrated in songs and in art by her people for many centuries, immortalized as one of the most beautiful mountains in the world, its dark rock weathered and carved by nature into dramatic peaks, cliffs, and ravines.

  The visit, however, was a crushing disappointment, unerringly representative of North Korea. There were antiaircraft guns installed on every mountain peak, “so that the bastard American aircraft cannot penetrate our country,” Choi’s guide told her. Tunnels had been blown into the rock face and filled with emergency war supplies and provisions, then closed off with ugly wooden planks. Barbed wire sealed off the beach in case of a water landing. The mountain, frighteningly, looked like it was bleeding. When she approached the wound Choi saw that the “blood” was the word JUCHE, carved in the stone face of the mountain then painted red. “Mottos and slogans had been carved into the base of nearly every boulder and large rock there,” Choi remembered, “all honoring Kim Il-Sung and his father and mother and other family members and the Korean Workers’ Party.” The bright words defaced the mountain wherever she looked.

  “Look at that!” Mr. Kang was shouting. “You have to go up close and stand by it and then you will see the true size of the word. One letter is the length of the car!” Choi had never seen him looking so proud.

  Worst of all, for Choi, was the realization that from the top of one plateau, she could see South Korea. While she fought back tears, her guide obliviously droned on. “When our sworn enemy the Yankee bastards invaded this place, they cruelly beat to death the village chief.… But over there is Height 351, where we fought fiercely against the Yankee bastards and their South Korean puppets for our nation’s liberation. And over here…”

  * * *

  After the beachside resort visit came an unexpected invitation to vote in the rubber-stamp Party Assembly elections, shortly followed by a 5 a.m. call from Kim Jong-Il requesting her to come join a party at the Fish House—a debauched mess of drunken men stumbling around with women she’d never seen before, Kim Jong-Il standing in the middle of it, eyes bloodshot from alcohol and his speech slurred—and then after that, an invitation to visit another of Kim Jong-Il’s resorts, this one by an enormous artificial lake, where Jong-Il terrified his guests by driving his speedboat recklessly around the water “at a very high speed, turning it this way and that, laughing and obviously enjoying himself.” If that weren’t enough to confirm that Choi was back in the Dear Leader’s good graces, she soon found herself once more packed into a Mercedes in the middle of the night and moved to a spectacular new residence, farther north.

  She couldn’t help but gape in wonder. Painted bright white and three times as large as the guesthouse in Tongbuk-Ri, this house had carpets in every room, luxurious furnishings, and every amenity imaginable—including, naturally, a film-screening room. It possessed none of the tackiness of the other houses. “It was beautiful,” Choi remembers. This was the Mount Paekdu Guest House, located at the foot of the mountain of Jong-Il’s official birth, and the most sumptuous of his twenty-four personal villas.

  * * *

  Kim Jong-Il had spent much of the late 1970s securing his lavish lifestyle. It was almost certain now that he was going to take over when his father died. Kim Il-Sung was nearing his seventies and had no clear plan for North Korea’s future. His military attempts at reuniting Korea had so far failed, and the juche economy, strong for a few years, was slowing down. The people adored him. The Supreme Leader, ready to enjoy his old age in leisure, had put his son in charge of most of the day-to-day running of the People’s Republic. It was only fitting, Jong-Il may have reasoned, that his manner of living be upgraded to match his new position.

  Most of Jong-Il’s two dozen resorts were finished between 1979 and 1981, either built new or freshly refurbished at a total estimated cost of $2.5 billion. They were built purely for Kim Jong-Il’s enjoyment and hobbies, of which he had many. According to defector Han Young-Jin, the retreats included a house in East Pyongyang where “deer are fostered as pets”; three in central Pyongyang, including one in which an entire floor was decked out with arcade games, slot machines, and “machines for entertainment”; the beach house in Wonsan, which boasted a full-size cinema, basketball court, and massive swimming pool with two waterslides; a country manor with a bowling alley, roller skating rink, and shooting ranges; and mountain chalets near lakes for Jet Skiing and fishing and game reserves for pheasant hunting. A house in Changsong, near the Chinese border, was where Jong-Il kept his horses; and another home, on a lake in Hamkyong Province, allegedly boasted three stories built below water level, with thick glass walls providing a panoramic view of underwater life. One house near Pyongyang was attached to a mammoth exterior waterslide full of loopy twists and turns worthy of a water park. One smaller house, on a stream in Yonghung, was built solely so that Jong-Il could stop by for the local rainbow trout, which he liked baked in aluminum foil. He even had a luxury villa built near the brand-new Youngbyan nuclear research facility so he could inspect the facilities in comfort.

  Kim’s sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, saw many of his guesthouses and recalled that the clocks inside were all Swiss made, the furniture mostly imported from France and Switzerland, and the room temperature, in every room of every villa, kept at 22 degrees Celsius (71.6 degrees Fahrenheit) at all times, whether Jong-Il was on the premises or not. Before his arrival his favorite perfume was to be sprayed throughout the building. All of the homes were near water—a lake, a river, a reservoir, or the sea—because Jong-Il found being near water made him feel peaceful.

  Jong-Il liked to live in a style commensurate w
ith his oversize surroundings. He traveled by car only if necessary, preferring to take his personal bulletproof train, which in parts of the country ran on its own exclusive tracks. He loved the companionship of dogs and for most of his life kept four shih tzus, who traveled everywhere with him. He gambled and played golf (one of his Pyongyang homes had a three-hole course in the backyard). He kept a stable of racehorses (Orlovs, a Russian breed, were his favorite), a fleet of speedboats, a collection of racing cars, a whole cornucopia of motorcycles, Jet Skis, and golf carts, but, crippled by a lifelong fear of flying, no planes and only one helicopter. He liked to ride them all as fast as he could make them go. He hunted deer in the mountains and seagulls off his yacht. He had his own cruise ship and, from the 1990s, his own ostrich farm. In addition to Fujimoto he employed a multinational team of personal chefs working with ingredients specially flown in from around the world. His cellars were full of the finest, most expensive wines and liquors. He was fussy about his food, discussing menus with his chefs every day and noticing if even one ingredient had changed in a recipe. He loved shark-fin soup, boshintang (dog soup), lobster, fresh pastries, and toro (fatty tuna), always asking Fujimoto, in broken English, for “one more.” He smoked Rothman Royal cigarettes, which he had chosen in 1977 after ordering his overseas embassies to gather samples of every single foreign cigarette brand and fly them to Pyongyang for him to try personally. Once he had chosen the Rothmans he built a factory tasked with creating a local brand for his people with the same taste and called it Paektusan Glory; for himself he spurned the cheap knockoff and kept importing the Rothmans. He spent, according to Hennessy, almost $700,000 on Paradis cognac every year.

  Naturally, a question arises: How could the Leader’s son afford all of this? The DPRK had no private economy, and the state was barely generating enough money for the people to survive, so where was the Dear Leader finding the resources to bankroll his extravagant lifestyle?