A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  The truth was simple, and almost unbelievable: Kim Jong-Il was the head of an international criminal syndicate, one of the most powerful in the world, whose activities served to support him—and only him. In the mid-1970s North Korea had defaulted on its foreign loans, and Moscow and Beijing were beginning to ask questions about how the billions of dollars they were sending the Supreme Leader were being spent. With limited resources and having fallen so far behind industrially that it couldn’t make competitive goods to export, North Korea was quickly becoming so poor it received aid even from countries like Bulgaria and Cuba. Kim Il-Sung, who saw that his people were still housed and fed, did not anticipate the impending crisis. His son, however, saw what was on the horizon; and he understood that soon a time would come when North Korea would have only enough money to support either the people or the regime, but not both. So Jong-Il split the North Korean economy into two columns: one that fed back into the national economy, and one that served to fund only him.

  “His” economy reserved for itself the exclusive use of the most high-performing industries. According to Hwang Jang-Yop, Kim Jong-Il “established a separate economic unit … in the name of managing Party business. [He] selected well-equipped business entities, especially those with significant earning records in foreign currency, and grouped them together. In other words, he took the cream of the crop and set up an independent economic unit [for himself].” Gold mines were first on the list, since gold could so easily be turned into hard, foreign cash; the Mansudae Art group followed, alongside the film studios, for which Kim had big moneymaking ambitions. Then came the export of ginseng, shiitake mushrooms, seafood, silver, and magnesium. Every business or factory with any potential for profit was added to the list and given priority access to electricity, to fuel, and to all first-rate goods. Kim Jong-Il had no interest in sustainability. He sucked every penny of immediate profit out of gold mines, coal mines, and the soil, setting impossible production targets and depleting reserves. When he had asserted his control over all the national economy and found it was still not enough for his appetite, Jong-Il ventured forth into an ingenious new territory: state-sponsored organized crime.

  “Counterfeit cigarettes and medicine (including fake Viagra), drugs, insurance fraud, fake money, trafficking people and endangered species,” The New York Times wrote, “… the Kim regime has done it all.” Time magazine once compared Kim Jong-Il to Tony Soprano, while The New York Times chose Vito Corleone and called the Kims “one of the world’s most sophisticated crime families.”

  In the Pyongyang government, Kim Jong-Il’s office was known as the Third Floor, after the floor which housed the Dear Leader’s offices in the Central Committee office in downtown Pyongyang. The Third Floor was staffed entirely by graduates of the new Kim Jong-Il School of Military Politics, who were so devoted to the young Kim they were known colloquially as the Combatants. Among the departments on the Third Floor, three were most influential: Division 35, Division 38, and Division 39, all of which reported directly to Kim Jong-Il. Division 35 managed and coordinated intelligence collection, producing intelligence briefings for the Dear Leader, and coordinated and planned covert and terrorist operations, such as Shin and Choi’s abductions, at Kim’s behest. Division 38 managed and invested the Kim family funds, taking ownership stakes in legitimate businesses such as hotels and eateries, including a chain of “Pyongyang” North Korean restaurants built in foreign cities throughout Asia and Europe. Division 38, a little like the olive oil business of the Corleone family in the Godfather films, served mostly as a front for Division 39, the largest of the three offices, whose purpose was simple: earn foreign currency for Kim Jong-Il, by any means necessary.

  Discreetly created by Kim as a subunit of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party’s Finance and Accounting Department (one thing dense, bureaucratic Communist governments are good for is hiding sinister activities), Division 39 eventually grew to include some 120 trading companies, employing over fifty thousand North Koreans and accounting for anywhere between 25 percent (according to researchers at the Samsung Economic Research Institute) and 50 percent (according to Hwang Jang-Yop) of North Korea’s total trade and money circulation. Those 120 companies changed names regularly to keep themselves hidden from UN sanctions. A 2010 report by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute traced Division 39’s origins to 1974, and estimated its yearly income as between $500 million and $1 billion a year, stashed away in banks in Macao, Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg.

  Through Division 39 Jong-Il ran a crime syndicate, but with the tools and resources of a sovereign government: soldiers, merchant and military vessels, diplomats, embassy posts, collective farms, and factories. Division 39’s existence was an open secret among the Pyongyang elite, who called it “the keeper of Kim’s cashbox.”

  The drug trade—mostly opium, cocaine, and methamphetamine—was estimated to net Kim revenues of $60 to $70 million per one thousand kilograms of drugs (the South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo estimated that North Korea has sent as much as three thousand kilograms of drugs per year to Eastern Europe alone). In certain North Korean villages, one-third of the available soil was set aside for poppy growing (limiting, crucially, the amount of farmable land for food in a country already low on agricultural resources). Schoolchildren and members of the Party’s youth brigade farmed the poppies, which were then sent to factories run by chemists whose education had been paid for by the state and who turned the raw poppies into opium and heroin. Diplomats were used as drug mules, but certain operations were also outsourced to Chinese triad gangs, whose ships met North Korean army ships for drug drops in the West Sea, as well as the Japanese yakuza and Russian mafia, even the Official Irish Republican Army. The Chosun Ilbo once reported that it was not uncommon for the Third Floor to send “up to 20kg of drugs” to each of their diplomats in selected embassies around the world, ordering “each diplomat to raise US$300,000 to prove their loyalty.” As early as 1977, Venezuela expelled all North Korean diplomats for trafficking drugs, and by the late 1990s North Korean attachés had been arrested in Russia (one with fifty pounds of heroin, two others with thirty-five kilograms of cocaine), Germany and Austria (heroin), Taiwan (also heroin), China (cocaine), Japan (methamphetamine), and Egypt (half a million tabs of the date-rape drug Rohypnol).

  It wasn’t just drugs, though, that made Kim Jong-Il money. North Korean counterfeiters made such good copies of the U.S. $100 bill that the U.S. Secret Service nicknamed them “Supernotes” and even Las Vegas casinos couldn’t recognize the fakes. The American Treasury reportedly redesigned the bill to thwart Kim’s con men, only for Pyongyang to start making near-perfect copies of the new design, too. Division 39 also dabbled in documents and insurance fraud. “For Kim Jong-Il’s birthday, North Korean insurance managers prepared a special gift,” Blaine Harden wrote for The Washington Post in 2009. “They stuffed $20 million in cash into two heavy-duty bags and sent them, via Beijing, to their leader in Pyongyang,” a fortune paid out by some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including Allianz Global and Lloyd’s of London, on spurious claims of factory fires, flood damage, “and other natural disasters.” And of course, in the twenty-first century, trading in nuclear secrets was added to the list of goods and services in Division 39’s inventory, permitting it not only to make even more money but also, in a time of crisis, to threaten to hold the whole world hostage.

  Because it had the might of a state behind it, Division 39’s control, adaptability, and profit margins were high. It made plenty of money, more than enough to finance Jong-Il’s lifestyle and to keep the army generals and Pyongyang elite, whose support the Dear Leader needed, loyal and in line. David Asher, a former head of the U.S. State Department’s Illicit Activities Initiative, said of Division 39 that it “is like an investment bank. It provides the money for the stuff Kim needs. Like any organized-crime syndicate, you’ve got a don, and you’ve got accountants, and it’s a very complicated business, keeping track
of all this money and making sure the boss gets paid. But when members of the organization don’t deliver, they get killed.”

  * * *

  Jong-Il’s villa at the foot of Mount Paekdu was accordingly sumptuous, and his inviting Choi there, whether she realized it, was a sign of his acceptance and trust.

  Ho Hak-Sun went with Choi, to serve as her attendant and cook. She had earned her Party cook’s license just a few days before the move and was as proud of it as anything she had ever earned. The house was brand-new. Choi could still smell the paint and wallpaper paste in some of the rooms.

  While there Choi was assigned an additional attendant, a young woman in her twenties named Kim Myong-Ok. Miss Kim was slim and pretty and freshly indoctrinated. She was also rude and temperamental and acted like a watchdog. She barked out orders and often spied on Choi through keyholes and the cracks of open doors.

  Miss Kim was in charge of Choi’s continuing reeducation. Mr. Kang had come along, but as her schooling intensified, it had been decided Choi would receive supplementary lessons from Miss Kim and from the local section chief. As she came to learn more about the young woman, Choi realized that Miss Kim knew no history before 1945, no geography beyond North Korea’s borders. “Nothing is important except the revolutionary history of Kim Il-Sung,” Miss Kim told her pupil. “If I say that [other] crap doesn’t matter, you accept what I say. My duty is to reeducate you—don’t you forget it.”

  Choi did her best to remain positive. If she was stuck here she might as well learn about the Marxist view of history, she thought. “But much to my surprise, this was not what I would learn. The topic of the lectures was Kim Il-Sung’s ideology on sovereignty and his so-called Juche thought.” Her instructors lectured her from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., then again from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., every day. They made her write down everything they dictated. Choi felt as if her arm was going to fall off from all the writing they made her do. During her lunch break and again before supper she was required to review what she had just learned. In her free time they asked her to read more biographies of the Kims: The Immortal History and At the Foot of Mount Paekdu.

  Miss Kim, like the other teachers, insisted that the South Korean people were starving and revolting against the Yankee imperialists; indeed that the whole world was engulfed in famine, conflict, and injustice, save for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose people were the luckiest on the planet—thanks, of course, to the beloved Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-Sung. Sometimes Choi protested and told Miss Kim that “South Korean industry has developed very rapidly, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.… The true state of these industries is very different from what you believe to be true here in North Korea.” Miss Kim and the others inevitably rebuked her. Allowing any doubt or debate, they explained, was the same as encouraging impure, subversive thoughts. True belief in the People could only be total.

  The education had the opposite of its desired effect, of course. “Far from being indoctrinated,” Choi later wrote, “I had many more doubts about the system.”

  * * *

  Early one morning in late October 1979, Choi was helping Ho Hak-Sun put food away in the kitchen when they heard a scream outside, followed by Miss Kim running into the kitchen.

  “They’re saying Park Chung-Hee is dead! He’s dead!” Miss Kim panted to Hak-Sun.

  Choi froze, frightened. Hak-Sun wiped her hands on her apron. “Where did you hear this?” she asked.

  “I just now heard it on the radio. They say he was shot.” Choi turned on her heel and raced upstairs to her bedroom, jumping on the bed and tuning in to the South Korean station. It was the middle of the day, so the signal was weak and filled with static, but she could make out, at intervals, the announcer repeating, “President Park has been assassinated.” How in the world can this have happened? Choi thought.

  The last year of Park’s dictatorial rule had been turbulent. In spite of Park’s viselike control on government and media, he had almost lost the 1978 election to the opposition. Jimmy Carter had withdrawn his ambassador to Seoul in protest at Park’s oppression of political opponents, and now there were sit-ins and demonstrations in the streets of the capital. On October 16, antigovernment activists had set fire to thirty police stations in Pusan. Three days later students marched through the streets of nearby Masan, quickly joined, in popular uprising, by regular citizens of all ages and backgrounds. Park was about to order the army to fire upon demonstrators when, on October 26, after a day of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and PR work, he sat down for dinner in a Korean Central Intelligence Agency safe house inside the presidential compound. At the table with him was Park’s chief bodyguard and Kim Jae-Kyu, the director of the KCIA. As they dined they argued over how to handle the protests and restore order to the country. Demonstrators, Park said, should be “mowed down with tanks.” At some point Kim Jae-Kyu left the room. When he returned he was holding a Walther PPK semiautomatic pistol. He shot the chief bodyguard in the arm and stomach and Park in the chest and head. Kim’s motive was never certainly established. He had come from the same hometown as Park; they had been classmates at the military academy. He was one of Park’s closest friends. But during his trial, he stood simply and testified, “I shot the heart of Yushin [the name of Park’s 1972 constitution, which made him president for life] like a beast. I did that for democracy in this country. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Choi knew none of this, only that a man she had known had been killed and the home country she hadn’t seen in nearly two years was reduced to chaos. She felt more keenly how brief and unpredictable life was.

  Nobody ever knows their own destiny, she thought.

  19

  The Hunger Strike

  In Prison Number 6, Shin passed the time in remaking all his films.

  “In the torture position, which I had to assume immediately after breakfast,” Shin wrote, “I had to look straight ahead with my hands on my knees.… I calculated that every day, out of the seventeen hours from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, I spent about sixteen hours in this position. In this position, all I did was think.” He reflected on his past and found the usual mistakes: “I had the opportunity to think endlessly about my life, my mistakes, how I could have spent more time with my children.” But mostly, “I still lived with films,” Shin said simply. He found that the only way he could endure was to disappear into the world of film, into creation—to let his mind roam back to a place and time when he was still a film director. In his mind’s eye he rewrote, reshot, and reedited all of his old films, “over and over again,” listing their flaws and picturing how he would fix them if he could. In South Korea he had constantly been hustling, constantly keeping up with costs, bills, and the 250 employees who needed to be kept busy and on salary. Here, for the first time, this most ambitious, restless of men was forced to stop. In the unbearable conditions of the prison, when he sometimes thought he was losing his sanity, this imaginary career was his only comfort. He found an unexpected satisfaction in it. Before being kidnapped he had struggled with the plot for his Sleeping Beauty project, but now “I was able to figure it out so easily,” he said. “I was delighted.”

  In Seoul, wealthy, famous, and free, he had been proud of his films, almost arrogantly so. In the desolation of the prison he found them shallow and insubstantial. “I thought about my movies and decided they had to contain more social responsibility,” he reflected. “The greatest weakness in my films, as I [saw] it, is that they lack the thick scent of life and a vivid reality. This is my frank confession. I became famous unexpectedly at a young age, and since then I’ve been so deeply into film that I haven’t had a moment to look anywhere else. As a result I haven’t had the luxury of having a diverse range of experience and sensing and thinking about the depth of life.” Silently he reclassified all his films into three groups: the satisfactory films, “the ones that needed to be partly remade, and another group of films that should be trashed entirely.” When he was done going through them the
re wasn’t a single film that satisfied him. He was disappointed by the results—“I had thought my movies depicted real life. Now I knew otherwise”—and embarrassed by how he had dismissed peers with a social consciousness and how glib he’d been, in interviews, about the social outlook of his own work. “I had been very proud of myself,” he said. “I now realized that I completely misunderstood the true meaning of life and pain.”

  * * *

  Remaking his films in his head also stoked his desire to leave prison and remake them in real life. As soon as he’d arrived, Shin had requested permission to send a letter of appeal to Kim Jong-Il, “to tell him about my mistakes and my thoughts about the North Korean movie industry.” He had expected to be executed for his repeated escape attempts, and he was smart enough to recognize that Kim wouldn’t have kept him alive if he didn’t, still, have some hope for his usefulness.

  No explicit update on Shin’s request for contact was forthcoming, but every now and then he was pulled out of his cell and taken to another chamber, this one with a writing desk and a chair, and asked to write a letter of “self-criticism” about his crime. “I purposely wrote slowly to pass the time,” Shin explained. “It took me a week to write the fifteen pages, which I submitted. In the letter, I thanked Kim Jong-Il for his benevolence and apologized for my escape attempts.” The letter was soon returned to him and he was told to write a second, better draft; this one took him a month. (“The longer the piece of self-criticism, the better,” wrote Hyok Kang of his own experience. “Ten pages are better than five. So you have to season your contrition with commentaries, digressions, expressions filled with political jargon, useless words, synonyms, and all kinds of repetitions. Emphasis is the most important ingredient in this bitter dish, in which adverbs (basically … resolutely … truly … firmly) act as a kind of sweetener.… And as the icing on the cake you need a grandiloquent, solemn oath in which you declare that you will never again bound into such monumental errors unworthy of a good socialist member of society. Then you add the date and sign.”)