A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  Shin had always dreamed of making a film about the great Mongol conqueror, who in the thirteenth century had built the largest contiguous empire in history. He was surprised to find out that Kim Jong-Il had had the same ambition, and for almost as long as he had. The two of them bonded over their frustration at Khan’s cinematic portrayals. The Mongol’s life had been depicted on cinema screens five different times by then, but Khan had never been played by an East Asian actor. His most famous portrayals had been by Omar Sharif, an Egyptian, in 1965; and a decade before that by John Wayne, in billionaire producer Howard Hughes’s CinemaScope Hollywood epic The Conqueror (tagline: “I fight! I love! I conquer!… like a barbarian!”). The Hughes film used Navajo Indians for its Mongols, was a humiliating flop, and contributed to the bankruptcy of its studio, the legendary RKO. Shot in Utah in high summer, just a year after extensive aboveground nuclear weapons testing had been carried out at a site 130 miles upwind, The Conqueror also quite possibly contributed to the deaths by cancer of 50 of its 220 cast and crew members, including director Dick Powell (blood cancer, died 1963) and all three of its stars: Agnes Moorehead (uterine cancer, 1974), Susan Hayward (brain cancer, 1975), and John Wayne (stomach cancer, 1979). Howard Hughes never produced another picture.

  Shin Sang-Ok and Kim Jong-Il had both seen the John Wayne film, even if they might not have heard of the controversy that surrounded it, and they agreed that the Mongol emperor, one of the most iconic figures in Asian history, deserved better treatment. And of course, Jong-Il said, Khan’s life story lent itself particularly well to ideological treatment: Was he not, after all, the founder of a great empire, who had united the Asian people behind him?

  * * *

  The Genghis Khan envisioned by director Shin and producer Kim would be expensive. Shin estimated the budget at $16 million, by far the costliest North Korean film ever made. (By way of comparison, the first Star Wars picture, in 1977, had cost $11 million.) A plan was agreed upon: under Shin Film Vienna’s Austrian license, Shin would seek coproduction funds to make the blockbuster, which would be a landmark in North Korean film history. It would require a PR offensive. Pulgasari, the studio’s upcoming monster epic, would certainly help to impress Westerners, but Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee would be required to do the rest. For the first time, Shin and Choi were approved to travel together to the other side of the Iron Curtain, to Vienna via Germany. Kim Jong-Il, it seemed, fully believed Shin and Madame Choi had been successfully indoctrinated, and also showed how little he understood capitalism. “He trusted us one hundred percent,” Shin said, because he thought the price of their loyalty had been met. “He thought with the house, the money, and the studio, that there would be no reason to escape. That is the weak point of growing up in a socialist country: it is easy to fool oneself.”

  This was the moment they had been waiting for and working toward for eight years: an opportunity to escape. Failure would mean either prison, with no chance of release, or death.

  30

  Vienna

  Shin and Choi spent the first months of 1986 preparing for their escape attempt. As they thought about finally leaving North Korea, they realized how much of a life they had unwittingly built in Pyongyang and how much they cared about some of the people they had come to know. They gave their staff final instructions—“things we wanted them to know as movie people”—finished their films, and, so as not to invite suspicion, continued to oversee the construction of the new house and studio that Kim Jong-Il had given them. As the days passed Choi found herself tearing up and choking on her words at unexpected times, often when, in the middle of speaking to an actor or wardrobe mistress, it dawned on her that it might be the last time she would ever exchange words with that person. In particular, she was saddened at the thought of parting from Ho Hak-Sun, the kind woman who had shared her home for over eight years. Ho had done everything she could to console Choi in the early years, and had celebrated Shin’s return into Choi’s life. Choi thought of her as a sister, the only person in North Korea other than Catherine Hong with whom she had felt such a bond. And yet she could not show the gratitude she felt or her sorrow at leaving her behind.

  On January 29, 1986, at exactly 9:10 a.m., Choi and Shin left their villa in Pyongyang. They had packed only what they needed for a six-week journey abroad. They would, officially, be attending the Berlin Film Festival and from there going directly to Vienna to set up the Shin Film Europe branch. They made sure to leave their rooms looking as if they would return.

  They walked out of the villa, the driver carrying their bags to the car trunk. As they got in the Mercedes, Ho Hak-Sun waved good-bye.

  “Have a nice trip,” she said.

  “Stay healthy,” Choi replied, hoping this was good-bye but unable to say so. She felt especially conflicted because she knew that if their escape was successful, Hak-Sun, along with everyone else who had been put in charge of their supervision, would be punished: demoted, sent to the countryside or to a prison camp, maybe even tortured or put to death. Choi had never met a person so devoted to Kim Il-Sung’s cause as Hak-Sun, but her devotion would mean nothing to the men she worshipped. The kindhearted, hardworking woman had come so close to her humble dreams—a Kim Il-Sung watch, full retirement rations—but she would now lose them because of her, Choi Eun-Hee, who had lived in luxury and sported a Kim Il-Sung watch on her wrist. Choi could scarcely bear the guilt. Shin, who knew Choe Ik-Gyu would also suffer if they managed to escape, had a calmer conscience. He had never liked the arrogant, narrow-minded bulldog. “If we were gone, Choe would be in trouble,” Shin wrote several years later. “It could not be helped.” The ink almost shrugs on the page.

  Their plane took off at ten. “The Song of General Kim Il-Sung” drifted from the cabin loudspeakers as the aircraft gained altitude.

  Bright traces of blood on the crags of Jangbaek still gleam,

  Still the Amnok carries along signs of blood in its stream.

  Still do those hallowed traces shine resplendently

  Over Korea, ever flourishing and free.

  So dear to all our hearts is our General’s glorious name!

  Our own beloved Kim Il-Sung of undying fame!

  Shin looked out the window as the plane banked stiffly on its side, groaning, and pointed northwest. Down below, the North Korean plains were dry and dark brown, the color of burned bread. Somewhere down there were the villas in which they’d been held captive, the prisons where Shin had suffered and gone cold and hungry. Off the shore in the distance, the Korea Bay sparkled blue in the spring sunshine.

  Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

  Who is the patriot whose fame shall ever last?

  He severed the chains of the masses, brought them to liberty,

  The Sun of Korea, democratic and free.

  So dear to all our hearts is our General’s glorious name!

  Our own beloved Kim Il-Sung of undying fame!

  Shin took a deep breath and squeezed Choi’s hand.

  * * *

  For the next two months every passing day took its toll on their nerves. In Budapest Shin met with the Hungarian National Film Studios, where the film would be partly shot, to finalize the budget for Genghis Khan, and he met with an Austrian producer, Helmut Pandler, interested in investing in Shin Film’s Viennese arm. When February 16 rolled around, he and Choi made sure to write and send “home” a letter wishing Kim Jong-Il a very happy birthday. The same day, they flew to Berlin for the film festival, where Shin took meetings to try and license Pulgasari to Western distributors.

  West Berlin was where everything changed. Their dozen bodyguards became “very tense, from the time we crossed the checkpoint from East to West Berlin,” and instead of having their own hotel room, Shin and Choi were assigned a room in a suite shared with their watchdogs, who, as on their previous visit to Berlin, shadowed them at every turn and watched them sleep. They had no privacy. What if they never had a second alone in Vienna either?

 
Anxiously they returned to Budapest, for more work on a film they never planned to make, and finally, on March 12, Shin and Choi were driven to Vienna. They had to go by car, inefficiently, because their minders had no visas to Austria, and visas were not required at the land border for passage from Hungary. It was Shin and Choi’s first stroke of good luck. Along the way it had been decided that a group of fourteen would draw unwelcome attention at the road check, so only three of the North Korean bodyguards would accompany them.

  Shin and Choi’s second break came at the hotel check-in.

  * * *

  Opened in 1964, the Intercontinental Hotel Wien was one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious hotels. Overlooking the Stadtpark, the city’s major public park—home to the Kursalon, where Johann Strauss gave his first concert, in 1868—it was Vienna’s first, and for eleven years only, international hotel.

  On Wednesday, March 12, 1986, Shin Sang-Ok, Choi Eun-Hee, and three North Korean bodyguards walked into the Intercontinental’s grandiose, old-world lobby. Husband and wife were anxious as they filled out the registry form and handed over their passports to reception to be copied and held overnight, as required by Austrian law, but they tried hard not to show it. When they learned that the North Koreans hadn’t booked a suite in advance, and that there were no connecting rooms available, the couple fought back expressions of excitement. Unlike in Berlin, Shin and Choi would not be sharing with their guards.

  It was a promising and particularly fitting development, considering their surroundings. The Intercontinental, the most luxurious hotel in a city that had become a crossroads between East and West, was well known for housing defectors. As the hotel of choice for diplomats and foreign dignitaries from both sides of the Iron Curtain, it witnessed defections regularly. “To say it was routine would be an exaggeration,” said former general manager John Edmaier, “but at least once, twice a month.” Someone would run into the hotel, often through the back doors, and tell an employee that they needed help; hotel staff would put them in a room; and then, Edmaier said, “we would call the [American] embassy, and embassy men would come and take them away.” Sometimes a defection was more dramatic. A few months before Shin and Choi’s visit, a group of Czech “tourists” had stayed at the hotel, and on the day of departure one of them had dashed off the bus, crisscrossed through the Stadtpark to lose pursuers, then cut back and burst through the hotel’s kitchen doors, screaming for help.

  Shin and Choi signed in, thanked the receptionist for their key, and, shadowed by their guards, walked to the elevators, determined to carry out their own desperate, unpredictable plan.

  * * *

  Vienna had been carpet-bombed in the last few months of World War II. During peace talks, the ruined city was divided, like Berlin to the north, into four occupation zones ruled over by the various Allied forces: the USA, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom, with the city center jointly patrolled by all four. In 1955 Austria, accepted by all not as a guilty party in the world war but as Hitler’s “first victim,” was given its independence, under one condition, insisted upon by Moscow: that Austria commit to remaining permanently neutral, a buffer between East and West.

  And so it did. But as a result, the country—and its capital, Vienna, in particular—became a hotbed of spy craft, secret trading, and double-dealing. There were more intelligence agents in Vienna during the Cold War than in any other capital in the world. The CIA and the KGB competed fiercely for knowledge from informers. The pockets of the great powers were so full in the 1950s, and those of the Austrian people so empty, that within a few months every cook, dishwasher, valet, taxi driver, cabaret dancer, and room service waiter in the city was eligible to be recruited by one of the espionage agencies. Then came the Eastern European refugees, desperate for passage to the West. They filled every hotel room and occupied every small private room to rent. And they, too, sold everything they knew: if possible for a visa, but more often than not for little more than a bite of food or a bottle of cheap alcohol. The great city was crawling with sleeper agents and turncoats. By the fountains of the Maria-Theresien Platz, in the shadows by the Staatsoperhaus, and in the quiet of the Karlskirche, hundreds of people blackmailed, betrayed, and sabotaged one another daily.

  Shin and Choi were about to join the ranks of those vying for their freedom. Over the previous three years Shin and Choi had laid the groundwork for their eventual escape attempt: gaining Kim Jong-Il’s trust, lulling their watchdogs’ attention, and occasionally pulling rank to ascertain exactly how much slack they would have under Kim’s patronage. It was uncommon for North Koreans to challenge authority, and they tended to recoil when someone confidently exercised it. Shin and Choi were, after all, Kim Jong-Il’s prized filmmaking advisers, to be given everything they asked and obeyed without question.

  The Viennese part of the plan was, superficially at least, simple. Among their film meetings, Shin and Choi had scheduled a meeting with Akira Enoki, a Japanese journalist friend from the old days. An independent thinker, Enoki had risen through the ranks of Kyodo News, Japan’s biggest news-wire agency. He had been in tight situations before and would be quick on his feet. The lunch, Shin and Choi boasted to their bodyguards, would be another PR coup for Kim Jong-Il, an interview that would convince the capitalist world that they were living and working for Kim of their own free will. But the Japanese press was harder to convince, they said, and arriving with three North Korean guards might reinforce the theory that they had been kidnapped and were constantly surveilled. With this explanation, Shin and Choi convinced their three minders, for the first time, not to ride in the same car with them or even to sit in the same room when they were conducting the interview. The North Koreans agreed to follow in a separate car, wait for them outside the restaurant—watching every exit—and then follow them back to the hotel.

  When checking in to the Intercontinental, Choi had noticed that the young receptionist was Japanese. The night preceding their decisive lunch, Shin called down to the front desk and asked for the Japanese employee to come upstairs. When the young man knocked on the door Shin quickly pulled him inside, whispered to him that he was seeking asylum in the United States, slipped a note into his hand, and pushed him back out. The note said, in English: “We are Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee, husband and wife. We want to take refuge in the U.S. Embassy.” And below that, in Japanese: “We are not diplomats, but we have diplomatic passports. Please report to the Austrian police that we illegally possess these diplomatic passports and have us arrested and escorted to the police station. We are staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in room 911.” The English was Plan A—a forewarning to the American embassy to be expecting them. The Japanese was Plan B. Shin then called Enoki, the journalist, and, trying his best not to raise the suspicion of the minders listening in, asked him to meet them outside the hotel tomorrow at half past noon exactly, with a taxi waiting.

  The next morning Shin invited their bodyguards over to their room for a friendly breakfast. The Intercontinental’s rooms were small—mercifully, too small for a bodyguard to drag a desk inside and sit all night keeping watch over the sleeping couple—and they chatted and ate in cramped, artificial geniality. Then Shin had himself driven to the Bank of America, which held the Shin Film account, its current balance approximately $2.2 million, and picked up some blank international checks that could be used to make withdrawals later.

  At twelve thirty Shin and Choi, their minders at a respectable distance, stepped out of the Intercontinental and found Enoki-san standing by an idling taxi. As Enoki tried to introduce himself to Choi, whom he had never met before, Shin shoved them both into the taxi, talking rapidly, his anxiety taking over. The Austrian taxi driver asked for a destination. Shin, with Enoki translating, told him to drive around the city center for a while. Their North Korean minders, suddenly realizing what was happening, dashed to the sidewalk and tried to wave down a taxi.

  As quickly as he could, Shin explained the situation to Enoki, t
o whom he had not been able to say a thing beforehand for fear of being overheard: he told the Japanese journalist that they had been kidnapped, that they were trying to escape, that they wanted to go to the U.S. embassy and were using meeting him as an excuse. The press conferences about voluntarily defecting had been lies; they could not bear to live in North Korea a day longer. As he spoke, Choi, sitting in the front seat, looked in the rearview mirror and spotted a white taxi following them. She made out, besides the Austrian driver, three Asian faces staring and pointing behind the windshield.

  “Don’t look back,” she said tersely. “Something isn’t right.”

  Shin and Enoki did just that, turning and looking over their shoulders. For a while Shin was quiet. “Go around the park,” he finally told the driver. Slowly they went around the quiet road lining the park. As other cars overtook them the white taxi, moving equally slowly, stayed behind them.

  As Shin and Choi were racking their brains for a next move, their car pulled back onto the main road and a couple of cars slipped behind them, creating a buffer between them and the white taxi used by the North Koreans. Then, by pure luck, they were the last car to pass through the next intersection before the light turned red, leaving the white taxi behind. This was their chance. “We have to do it now,” Shin pleaded. “Please help us.”

  Before Enoki could say anything the taxi’s radio crackled and the dispatcher’s voice asked the driver which way they were headed, so he could tell the other taxi in their “convoy.” Enoki-san was no stranger to drama; eight years earlier, while serving as Kyodo News’s bureau chief in war-torn Beirut, he had been one of two people accidentally shot in the head by the first secretary of the Japanese embassy; the other had died, but Enoki had survived. Now, without answering Shin, or indeed without translating the dispatcher’s question for him, Enoki pulled a fistful of money out of his pocket and leaned over the front seat to shove it in the driver’s hand. “Tell him we went the opposite direction,” he told the Austrian. The driver took the money and did just that. Shin and Choi, tingling with anticipation, excitedly shouted out, “U.S. Embassy!” The driver made a sharp turn.