Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (108 page)

Q. Are you helping the South Korean army?

A. “Yes, a little. After all, I was in for twenty-four years.”

Ahn Myung-jin had served in a special spy force with military ranks whose mission was to infiltrate into South Korea. With his thick forearms, Ahn looked strong. And after I had heard his story late in June of 1994, just a few days before Kim Il-sung’s death, I reflected that he could represent both the wildest dreams and the deepest fears harbored by Kim Jong-il.

From 1979 to 1987, Ahn told me, he had studied at Wonsan Foreign Language Institution. When I noted that I had visited Wonsan, an east coast port, during my 1979 visit, he replied curtly, “That was in better times.” At the school, he said, “I specialized in English but the course wasn’t very good. There is one of those foreign language institutions in each province. You go to language school right after four years of elementary school and spend eight years of middle and high school there. Future spies are selected from among the graduates.

“From 1987 to May 1993 I attended the university-level Kim Jong-il Political-Military Academy in Pyongyang. The term of study there is five years and six months. They basically teach espionage, terror and other undercover tactics there, including how to kidnap important government officials and
lure potential defectors from South Korea and, in the event of war, how to get into South Korea ahead of the People’s Army and destroy the important institutions.”

The junior member of the team that bombed the South Korean airliner in 1987, Kim Hyon-hui, who had posed as a Japanese traveler, had survived a suicide attempt with a poison capsule after capture (her senior colleague died) and ultimately told her South Korean captors the details of the mission. “Kim Hyon-hui had gone earlier to the same school, when it was called Kumsong Political-Military University,” Ahn said. “There are two tracks. She went through the one-year espionage course. The six-year program is for people who will be involved in the war effort.” Ahn boasted that she “didn’t do a tenth of-what I did. Compared with what we had to do, her work was very light.”

He was passionate as he elaborated on the superiority of his training: “Because Kim Hyon-hui had only one year of training, she would not have been the one in charge of an order given by Kim Jong-il. She wouldn’t pull the trigger, or kidnap someone. Kim Hyon-hui was in the Department of External Information, concerned with Japan. She wasn’t being trained to infiltrate but just to
become
Japanese. I was in the Strategic Division of the Party Central Committee’s Espionage Department, of which the academy was a part and where we needed military training. She only got input and didn’t learn how to output information. I would inspect important sites that might be ordered blown up and study the interiors to see where the explosives could be placed. As for swimming, I had to swim 10 kilometers; she only had to make four kilometers. I practiced scuba diving and all kinds of shooting—long distance, short-range, moving objects.

“We studied the geography ofSouth Korea. I knew it by heart. And I knew how to act like a normal South Korean. [My interpreter, Rhee Soo-mi, noted that Ahn indeed did not speak with so obvious a Northern accent as other Northerners she had helped me interview.] I could use the local currency and so on. I wasn’t surprised by South Korea when I came here.”

Q. Had you studied the “Orange Tribe” (as a species of trendy young Seoulites was dubbed in the mid-’90s)?

A. “We learned all about the people who live here, from the Orange Tribe to beggars. [In spy training] people are classified demographically by occupation and age group. We used audiovisual aids and studied dialects.”

Q. Were you trusted to know anything whatsoever about South Korea?

A. “I read all the dailies published in South Korea. We also knew that South Korea was a much freer country with much higher living standards.”

Q. If they let you know that, how did they keep you loyal?

A. “Actually they changed the system after the Kim Hyon-hui case. She hadn’t been taught what I was taught about South Korea. She was taught
about Western capabilities but she thought South Koreans didn’t live as well as North Koreans. When she was taken to Seoul and saw the South Korean living standards, she betrayed the regime. So they decided it was better to teach the reality to avoid such surprises.”

Q. But how did they keep you loyal?

A. “First you should not imagine that we were ordinary North Koreans. Our living standards were up to those of the higher class in South Korea. We would do our best to conduct espionage in South Korea. In the past, though, if spies failed they would commit suicide. What the regime doesn’t know is that the current crop would not commit suicide in case of failure but surrender, since we had learned that defectors live pretty well here.”

Q. Tell me about your family background and your attitudes toward the regime as you grew up.

A. “My family was part of the elite. All who attended the academy were selected for good family background, meaning no history of association with South Korea.

“I was a fanatical believer in the ideology. Every true rejection of ideology has a practical reason. In my case, I had wanted since my childhood to be a diplomat, and I was supposed to go to the External Information Department, the one that Kim Hyon-hui was in. But in my senior year at the foreign language school, I got into a fight with a soldier and that ruined my chances to go to the External Information Department and become a diplomat. Diplomats from my background are in fact spies who spy on other countries, not on other North Korean diplomats. Instead I had to go to the Central Party Espionage Department’s Strategic Division.

“At the Kim Jong-il Political-Military Academy my ideology began to change. Ideological change combined with the damage to my career made me turn against the regime. I always knew about the discrepancies in the North Korean regime and felt dissatisfaction, but the main point that made me defect was this: If you’re in the Strategic Department you can no longer meet your parents or other family members. You live like the upper class but you’re isolated all your life.”

Q. Why isolated?

A. “Three reasons. First, we had been exposed to the realities of capitalist countries and the regime was afraid we might influence others who had not. Second, they also feared that ordinary people would see our much more opulent lifestyle and resent it. Finally, many trainees were killed in training, which could cause problems with parents—it was thought best they not know what we were doing.”

Q. But wouldn’t the first reason have applied also to ordinary diplomats, who weren’t isolated?

A. “Diplomats know, but they don’t have the detailed knowledge of South Korean society that I was taught. Anyhow, diplomats who graduate from the academy are also isolated.”

Q. So you had expected isolation anyhow?

A. “Yes. But if I had become a diplomat the isolation wouldn’t have been so extreme—I would have had occasional chances to meeet my family. Also, the work-wouldn’t have been so strenuous.”

Q. You were isolated from women?

A. “When I was at the language school I had friends who were girls, but the instant I entered the academy I was isolated from them. Once I reached twenty-eight or twenty-nine I would be given ten to fifteen days to get a woman. I would write to request my parents to propose a bride for me, then I’d go marry her and bring her back. In the agency there are a couple of women, but they are in great demand.”

Q. Any other reasons for your disappointment besides the isolated life?

A. “In the Strategic Division, there was lots of strenuous training. And I would have to kill people even though I didn’t want to.”

Q. You disliked your assignment in Strategic? (I waited for him to mention any moral repugnance or sense of injustice.)

A. “Yes. While I was growing up my parents always taught me to be good. In the Strategic Department they teach you to hurt or kill others to protect yourself. It bothered me.”

Q. Did you have a moral objection or was it more a matter ofconvenience?

A. “It cannot be only a matter of convenience. I just couldn’t stand doing over and over all my life things I didn’t want to do.”

Q. What was your opinion of your unit’s basic mission of destroying South Korea?

A. “That it was possible and necessary in order for there to be reunification on Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s terms.”

Q. The end justifies the means?

A. “Yes.”

Q. (I told him about the chemical warfare colonel who wanted to wipe out the whole South Korean population.) Is there a lot of such thinking in North Korea, that the end justifies the means?

A. “No one ought to say we should kill all the 40 million civilians in South Korea. I was taught we should not kill all the South Koreans, but if they opposed our regime then we would kill them.”

Q. Have you met Lee Chong-guk (the man who had issued the chemical warfare warning), the only defector I’ve met who didn’t describe any personal problem as part of his motivation for defecting?

A. “Most of those who escaped from North Korea are people who couldn’t stand their low living standards. I also am surprised by Lee Chong-guk. Could it be possible to defect with no reason?

“In my case, if you asked for the one big reason I defected I would answer: Being exposed to unlimiited outside information I realized that if reunification came it would be by North Korean collapse or absorption into South Korea. I would become unemployed and because of my status as a spy my parents would be in danger.” Q. Do you think any of the defectors is an agent provocateur? A. “I don’t think so. That’s not the way they infiltrate spies into South Korea.”

Q. Tell me more about the spy trainee lifestyle.

A. “Rations for us were different. I got high-quality rice, 900 grams a day eggs, chocolate, butter, drinks. At the academy I lived in a dorm, four people to a room equipped with air conditioning, television, video, refrigerator. After graduation and before I defected I was in an accommodation of that same standard.

“I graduated May 20, 1993, then defected on September 4. In the interim I spent one month practicing infiltration by water—swimming, scuba practice. The second month I studied
taekwondo;
the third month, wireless telecommunications plus reality training in a facility resembling South Korea.

“A big tunnel, 12 meters high, 30 meters wide and 8 kilometers long, in the same area as the KJIPMA contains a 100 by 50 meter scale model of Seoul and, separately, approximately one-fourth-scale mockups of some of the more important institutions. I remember seeing the Blue House, the police department, the Agency for National Security Planning, the Kyobo Building, the Shilla Hotel, Lotte and Shinsegye department stores, as well as small cafes. When you walked through the streets you felt you were there: discos, South Korean–made cars, South Korean products inside the buildings. The scale model of all of Seoul has all the important buildings in Seoul, and the sub-way entrances. Next to each building is a brochure showing its whole interior.

“In the tunnel they broadcast all the programs from South Korean television and radio. It was my work to watch and listen. Even during practice sessions we had transistor radios attached to our belts and continually listened. In the tunnel you get 700,000 to 800,000 South Korean
won
in fifteen days and you have to use it up. The tunnel has its own economy. You live there fifteen days or one month a year for training and during that time you buy products.”

(I nearly gasped in wonderment as Ahn described that elaborate facility set up to train spies in conspicuous consumption while much of the rest of the population went hungry. To me it remains an unforgettable image.)

“I’ve been in there three times. It’s like a holiday. But there aren’t any girls in the discos. Men demonstrate how the hostesses pour drinks.

If women were inside the tunnel it would be too much like South Korean society and there would be trouble. But we were instructed in how to interact with South Korean women.

“Training in the tunnel was to enable us to meet other spies, kidnap important officials and so on. Fifty South Koreans have been kidnapped. The people who teach you South Korean customs and dialect in the tunnels were kidnapped from South Korea. The authorities wanted to bring important figures for that, but it’s hard, so those were ordinary citizens. One was a university student who was kidnapped while camping in a tent with friends during vacation in a coastal area. Basically the whole practice drill is so that we can adapt ourselves to South Korean ways during peacetime missions to the South.