“We were always filthy and insects would suck our blood. Talking was prohibited. You sat all day in the same position. There was a video camera and guards: if you moved, it was a big disaster. If you stretched your legs, the guards made you do sit-ups. Sometimes people passed out. We received some spoonfuls of corn skins with a few beans, and a little cabbage. The cooks stomped on the food with their feet. Of 150 prisoners, 35 died in a single month from starvation and an epidemic. The prisoners were mainly political: those who had tried to escape to South Korea and China, and those who had contact with foreigners—like you,” the woman said, looking hard at Gersony.
Gersony gulped.
Then there was the laborer on a farm of 18,000 chambas (6,000 hectares).
“How many chambas were cultivated?” Gersony asked.
“Ten thousand were for rice, and five hundred for corn.”
“Why so little corn?”
“People steal the immature ears.”
“What about the remaining 7,500 chambas?” Gersony continued to probe.
“That’s the uncultivated part.”
“You mean virgin forest?”
“No, I mean it was the uncultivated part,” the tractor mechanic insisted.
“What? Uncultivated? You mean there is crop rotation?” Gersony persisted.
“No! It’s the opium.”
A lot of the best material came by accident, by journalistic-style questioning.
The mechanic explained to Gersony that at the end of May, “outsiders” would come to harvest the “uncultivated” areas.
“Outsiders?” Gersony asked.
“The clean people.”
Who?
“Trusted party members.”
“They had a language all their own,” Gersony explains. “ ‘Big noses,’ ‘uncultivated,’ ‘outsiders,’ ‘clean people.’ It really was like 1984.”
* * *
—
Gersony furiously typed up a thick stack of such stories in his hotel room in Yanji, which served as his base for roaming the border area. As one interviewee after another told him about “muddied” license plates and how the “big noses” were forever being deceived, he realized that he had never worked in a place where the recollections were so specific and meticulous. In the course of these conversations he uncovered one- and two-source scraps about revolts and mass executions with hundreds killed at a time, mainly by firing squads: 10 percent of the officers of the Sixth Corps in Chongjin were dispatched this way. This was all before the World Food Programme had come on the scene to feed the army.
He continued interviewing even though he already knew he had a gold mine. As usual, he ate one meal a day: spaghetti Bolognese with a glass of orange juice, one of the only non-Korean dishes on the hotel menu. (He was not one for exotic food.) He continued to worry about the many North Korean agents in the border zone where his hotel and meetings were located.
Then, near the end of ten weeks of interviewing refugees and traders in the ten-mile border zone—part of Chinese Manchuria but patrolled by North Korean agents—Gersony began to get a bad feeling. He had just interviewed two weepy old women who told him about how they had to harvest wild edible plants in order to survive. They hadn’t added much to his knowledge base, and the next day he saw one of them talking to two men wearing suits and ties at the drive-in entrance to the hotel. Next, a bizarre man insisted on talking to him about the contraband trade. A day after that, he received a letter from one of the women that provided a phone number for him to call and warning him of a negative portrayal of North Korea. He handed the letter to one of his NGO translators in a basement tearoom. The translator shrugged it off, telling Gersony that the woman was merely trying to get money out of him. Finally, he was informed by the hotel desk clerk that a man from the Chinese internal security bureau was looking for him.
It was all a bit shady and perhaps coincidental, yet he worried that he was being set up. It was hard not to think that there wasn’t a thread running through it all, even though he was consciously aware of his tendency toward paranoia, especially in such lonely circumstances. He couldn’t help but think about Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent in Karachi, Pakistan, who only a few months earlier, in February 2002, had been set up through a series of seemingly fishy yet innocuous little occurrences, resulting in his kidnapping and beheading by al-Qaeda. The comparison was certainly a far stretch, yet Gersony was in a panic. He was getting old, with three kids. His nerves, never good, weren’t what they used to be.
He had a contingency plan with Cindy for just such a situation. He called her with a local SIM card. “Thick glasses” meant that he was being watched. “Hiccup” meant that he was worried about a disruption in his plans. “Eyes red and inflamed” was the most serious signal: it meant she should call USAID and the State Department immediately, and alert the embassy and consulate to a potentially serious security problem. Over the phone, he told her that his “eyes were red and inflamed” from all the pollution. Cindy did manage to get in touch with a middle-level bureaucrat, who decided inexplicably not to do anything. So Gersony called his most senior Christian NGO contact, who asked him, “Would you be willing to leave China now?”
He left all his clothes and laundry littered about the room, packed his toiletries and his heavy stack of typed notes in his red Kipling shoulder bag, and walked out of the lobby near midnight—there wasn’t even a clerk at the desk—and headed in the blackness to the far corner of a parking lot. Waiting there was a car and driver, who took him to another parking lot not far away, where he slipped into the freezing back of a truck and wrapped himself in a carpet that happened to be inside. The truck rode through the mountains and plains all night while he read by flashlight The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. He was let off at a regional airport, where he flew to Beijing and then out of China.
* * *
—
After kissing the floor of his home and hugging his wife and three children, Gersony holed up for several days in September 2002 sorting out and writing up his notes (he never wrote a formal report on North Korea). He delivered an eight-hour brief, divided over two days, to Andrew Natsios and Natsios’s powerful policy adviser Patrick Cronin. Cronin, a modest, intensely serious guy with a light sense of humor always at the ready, was the one who had months before opened all the doors for Gersony to the hermit kingdom of North Korea experts around Washington. Natsios and Cronin now wanted to squeeze every detail out of Gersony. “They wouldn’t let me alone with questions,” Gersony says.
Cronin remembers the briefing well:
“It was utterly enthralling. Every sentence was an impactful gut punch as Gersony described the misery of daily life in North Korea. It was like a vivid documentary of a whole subject unknown to the world, since nobody in the intelligence community collected human intelligence the way that Gersony did. He gave voice to the voiceless.”
“I want it all reduced to two pages, and I want it by tomorrow!” Natsios sternly ordered Gersony.
Gersony meekly complied, breaking his rule to never write executive summaries.
Natsios gave Gersony’s two pages to his oldest friend and Republican buddy from the Massachusetts legislature, Andy Card, President George W. Bush’s chief of staff. Card promptly gave it to Bush. Natsios had just jumped the whole bureaucratic system of cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries: he went “out of channels,” in Washington terminology. But nobody was pissed off. As soon as everyone heard that the president had read the two-page summary of Gersony’s briefing, they all wanted the same brief.
So Gersony made the usual rounds, armed with maps and doughnuts to hand out. He had learned by this time that people wouldn’t sit for hours without maps to look at and something to munch on. But he had a rule: never use PowerPoint, which was a visual crutch in place of an authentic narrative.
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“You’ve done it again, another Gersony report with a major impact on foreign policy,” Elliott Abrams, now the humanitarian point man on the National Security Council, announced to Gersony.
After briefing Abrams, Gersony next briefed Carl Ford, the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research; Mike Green, a director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council; Jim Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs; and Kelly’s sidekick, David Asher, who was crucial on this issue. Asher, co-chair of the State Department and National Security Council working group on North Korea, was a brilliant, mile-a-minute talker and goal-oriented bomb thrower, who ran over some mealy-mouthed desk officers who represented the passive State Department bureaucracy at its worst. Asher, as they said, was “off the reservation.” In small doses, mind you, someone like him was absolutely crucial to making the system work. When Gersony asked him a week after briefing him and Kelly about the effect of his report, Asher said with an ecstatic look on his face, “There’s flames going up everywhere!” It was through Gersony that USAID came to dominate the interagency process on humanitarian issues regarding North Korea.
At a September deputies’ meeting, where the number two and number three persons at each major Washington bureaucracy meet to plan the nuts-and-bolts of foreign policy, the issue of the North Korea report came up. Ambassador Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs and the number three person at Colin Powell’s State Department, said: “I know the gentleman who did the study. I’ve worked with him for years. If that is what the researcher says is going on, it’s happening. There’s no doubt in our minds on its validity.”
Grossman’s vouching for Gersony was over a decade in the making. Gersony had first briefed him on Mozambique in 1988,3 and over the years, as the situation in each place turned out as Gersony had said it would, Grossman gradually became impressed.
Next Gersony saw Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. Gersony hadn’t seen Wolfowitz for eighteen years, when he had briefed him on South China Sea piracy in 1984. Wolfowitz was visibly older now, and more self-confident, no longer accompanied by overbearing Foreign Service officers proffering advice as he had been back then.
In October 2002, Wolfowitz assembled a dozen officials in addition to military staff aides at a long table in the Pentagon. “Okay, let’s hear it,” he ordered Gersony.
There were no interruptions throughout the brief. But early on Gersony was disconcerted by loud snoring. Peter Rodman, the late assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, had fallen into a deep sleep, and would not wake up until the end of the brief. Wolfowitz leaned over and said to Gersony, “I apologize. He was up all night planning for Iraq.”
Finally, Gersony briefed two dozen people of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council (NIC). It would be about the sixth time he had done so in the course of his career, brought in often by David Gordon, the national intelligence officer for transnational issues and later the NIC’s vice chairman. The people at the CIA listened in awed silence to Gersony. Some in the room thought he was a regional expert on North Korea because of how deeply and obsessively he had gone into the subject. The intelligence officers also liked the fact that Gersony always revealed the status of the information he was providing: sourced by several individuals, or a scrap based on one source. Above all, as Gordon explains, “with Gersony it was always clear that he was in the humanitarian community, but not exactly of it, and therefore was able to smartly extract ideas and information from the humanitarian world and incorporate them into his overall analysis. Gersony rarely thought in good guy/bad guy terms,” Gordon goes on. “He didn’t start from any general set of assumptions, but was completely empirical, going wherever the evidence might lead him. It was because he obviously had no agenda that he was so effective in influencing government.”
* * *
—
It was Thanksgiving before Gersony finished delivering all of his briefs on North Korea to the upper levels of the Washington bureaucracy. As a consequence, the United States announced that it was suspending its share of food aid to North Korea through the U.N. World Food Programme for six months. Natsios told a congressional committee, “We are going to insist on the same standards for monitoring and distribution [of food] that we use everywhere else in the world….We’re drawing the line now with the North Koreans.”4
World Food Programme and other NGO officials complained, saying there was “no hard evidence” that aid was being diverted to the North Korean military.5 Some NGO officials claimed that, in any case, the North Korean military preferred local rice over the WFP rations. But this was sort of a non-denial denial, since the whole North Korean economy had seized up at this time, and thus there was very little local rice to begin with. Others claimed that providing a week’s advance notice before inspections was necessary to prevent attacks against U.N. personnel at the inspection sites.
Finally, high politics intervened. As a conciliatory gesture toward the new South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, who desired better relations with North Korea, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a press conference that U.S. aid through the U.N. World Food Programme “would resume” at “35 to 75 percent” of the previous year’s totals.6 The 35 percent figure was meant to satisfy the Washington hardliners on North Korea and the 75 percent figure to satisfy the accommodationists. It was a cynical diplomatic sleight of hand. (Later on, the United States would agree to provide North Korea with several hundred thousand tons of food a year, provided the North Korean regime sign ten provisions for distributing the food, all designed to make sure the aid got to those most in need. The North Koreans agreed to the provisions, then violated them, so that the aid was stopped.)7
“I had no dog in this fight,” Gersony says. “But I believed that whatever we did, we should do it with our eyes wide open.”
The intelligence reports and newspaper accounts kept coming in. They never wavered, with world-renowned area specialists such as Nicholas Eberstadt and Andrei Lankov providing support for Gersony’s documentation about North Korea in the 1990s.8 More independent reports kept backing up Gersony’s claims about the diversion of food aid, opium production, and other North Korean iniquities as told to him firsthand by the refugees themselves who had experienced it all.9
CHAPTER 17
Nepal
2003
A Room with a View
In January 2003, while Washington was consumed with the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, Joe Williams sent Bob Gersony an email from Kathmandu, Nepal. It was the northern Uganda assignment all over again. But this time, instead of the Lord’s Resistance Army that Joe—always thinking ahead—wanted investigated, it was the Nepalese Maoists. The Maoists openly identified with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, with Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, with the Indian Naxalites, and with the Peruvian Shining Path. Western analysts were terrified of a group modeling itself after so many mass murderers. Yet they knew next to nothing firsthand about these Maoists. Gersony would have to construct a narrative history from scratch.
Andrew Natsios got wind of Joe Williams’s request to Gersony and was enthusiastic. “Are we headed for another Khmer Rouge scenario?” Natsios asked Gersony. “Let’s put this to rest, or let me know the degree of likelihood. If the answer is yes, the administration’s got a big problem, and we should deal with this early, while there’s still time.”
Gersony said that he would like to do the assignment in cooperation with Mercy Corps, a Portland, Oregon–based relief charity whose work he respected and whose directors he knew. This would allow him to escape the bureaucratic clutches of the regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, who could deny him permission to travel in the Nepalese countryside.
In this new assignment, Gersony would not expose a human rights problem nor propose a strategy for development. Rather, he would try to answer
a big question, one that pertained to both human rights and development and that had perplexed senior policymakers: Were or were not the Nepalese Maoists like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge? He would do it by amassing a meticulously detailed report that, even more than the one he had written about northern Uganda, would turn a traditional country study into a form of literature all its own.
Immediately, he realized that his assignment involved nothing abstract. For the only way to find out if the Maoists were indeed the next Khmer Rouge was to travel around the affected area itself and methodically ask lots of people questions. Of course, this was the modus vivendi of all his assignments. But rather than collect facts as in the past, this assignment involved making a judgment call about a future likelihood, whether or not it led to U.S. action. It was an intimidating mandate because of the possibility of a colossal mistake. It was a binary call. He neurotically believed that his whole reputation could go down the drain if he got this one wrong.
First he went to the CIA, to see two people he deeply respected at the National Intelligence Council, David Gordon and Paul Pillar. They prepared him with a list of questions to answer about the Nepalese Maoists, which helped organize his research. Unlike other members of the humanitarian community, Gersony did not consider the CIA an enemy. “You’d be defeating the humanitarian purpose if you did not consult with the CIA,” Gersony explains. “Since whenever I’d come back from the field—from Mozambique, from the North Korean border, from wherever—the White House would always cross-check everything I reported with the CIA before acting on my recommendations.”
* * *
—
Gersony arrived in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu February 19, 2003, on his fifty-eighth birthday.
The U.S. ambassador to Nepal, Mike Malinowski, a real meat-and-potatoes South Asia hand and Foreign Service lifer, had a list of questions similar to the CIA’s. Joe Williams summed it up at an embassy meeting: “We need a CAT scan of the Maoists. Few go into their area of influence and few come out. We have no real information, even though Kathmandu is inundated with Western PhD folks specializing in conflict resolution and mitigation.”
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