Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (116 page)

Nevertheless, Kim explained, it had been necessary that pride before foreigners give way to begging for food. “Previously, only our foreign service
people cried for help but now all people do so,” he said. “Thus, all of us tell foreigners about this shortage or that shortage, and take them to the worst place for them to see. In the past, foreign visitors were taken to the best show places and people were taught to say that they were living well. But now, faced with the economic isolation forced on us by our enemy, we need foreign aid and so we present sad pictures to foreign visitors.”

There were, of course, no sad pictures of Kim’s own table to be presented. Throughout the period of the famine, Kim had been dining like the king he was, according to a Japanese who claimed to have been his personal sushi chef since 1988. Kim kept a 10,000-bottle wine cellar and liked shark’s fin soup several times a week, Kenji Fujimoto (that’s a pseudonym) told the Japanese weekly magazine
Shukan Post.
“His banquets often started at midnight and lasted until morning. The longest lasted for four days.”

All this still leaves us without a final solution to the mystery of the thirty-nine counties—most of-which, according to the World Food Program’s Web site, remained closed to the agency. I suspect that most of the theories related above—-with the exception of my worst-case scenario involving a genocidal plot to starve to death immediately the people suspected of lack of loyalty to the regime—are partially correct.
²⁰
But a full answer probably-would have to emphasize national pride and the East Asian concept of face. “The nature of North Korean society is not to admit that things do not function properly,” the World Food Program’s Jean-Jacques Graisse said. His Foreign Ministry contact, a vice-minister, had told him that national pride was behind much of the denial of access. The official “admitted I had seen only 50 percent of the problem,” he said.

Another aid worker, who requested anonymity, told me she had spoken with an anguished North Korean official who told her: “Our country’s not Africa! We used to assist some African countries!” The aid worker added: “They believe it’s just a natural disaster, not a structural problem, and therefore it is not fair to compare them with Africa. Extending the argument, they’re probably afraid that if we take note of these places [in the off-limits thirty-nine counties], the only medium of communication is the oxcart.”

After all, even where that aid worker had been permitted to visit, soldiers walking around “don’t even carrry a stick, much less a gun. They’re in the fields, or repairing the truck. The cities look like car repair shops.” Even in the fancy Pyongyang guest house where she and some other visiting aid workers had stayed, there was no running-water. Relatively privileged women had to manage to stay presentable despite lack of water. They used a lot of foundation makeup, she told me. Female aid workers were experiencing
gynecological problems due to lack of water. Just imagine, she said, what conditions must be in the thirty-nine counties.

Then again, Kim Jong-il’s boast to his Chongryon visitors about well-fed armaments workers in a remote village suggested one last, if fanciful, theory. Maybe counties populated by invisible people, living and working underground with their machinery
²¹
like H. G. Wells’s Morlocks, were so well off at the expense of citizens above ground that they had no need of foreign aid—much less of monitors to see to its proper delivery.

Interviewing North Korean defectors, it did not take me long to realize that quite a few of them had practiced an occupation that would have been rare earlier. They had been traders, in some cases entrepreneurs. They had often earned very large incomes from buying, selling, bartering, deal-making. Trading companies had been set up in response to Kim Jong-il’s demand for foreign currency. The companies had multiplied. Not only high-level government and party organizations but military, agricultural and industrial units at lower levels, as well, had their own trading subsidiaries.

Trading is a challenging occupation even for those who are trained for it. North Korea’s new traders had no training in business. Most had only military or police experience. Some traders who ended up defecting did so because, ultimately, they had failed at their new jobs. But many had succeeded.

The new occupation attracted people from the highest to the lowest levels of society. Kang Myong-do grew up as a member of the Pyongyang elite. His father headed the capital’s construction department and his mother taught party history at the Potonggang district party headquarters. Kang majored in French at Pyongyang Foreign Languages University, graduating in 1979, and joined the staff of the League of Socialist Working Youth, guiding foreign V.I.P. visitors. I asked him if he knew the crude nickname of the league’s
top boss, Choe Yong-hae. He did not—the age gap was considerable and the two men were not on intimate terms—but he did tell me that Choe was reputed to like women.

In 1982, Kang went to work in party headquarters’ Room 39, which was in charge of foreign exchange schemes. He became a party member the following year. In 1984, Kang—described by other defectors who knew him in Pyongyang as the playboy type—married a mansion “volunteer,” a waitress at the Majolli palace in Hamhung, against his parents’ opposition. They soon split up. He got in some sort of scrape around that time. “I was on the losing side in a power struggle in the KPA between the military and political officers, siding with the military officers,” was the way he described it to South Korean reporters. He was sent off to the No. 18 Revolutionary Work Class to have his thinking corrected. Most elite officials eventually got sent to such a camp, Kang said. The drill was mainly study of the leaders’ history. The usual term was two to three years but a friendly member of the bodyguard service recommended Kang’s release after one and a half years. Although he had a fairly soft life in that revolutionary work camp for the elite, next door was a camp for ordinary detainees and they did hard labor. Kang said he began to dislike Kim Jong-il during his stay. After his release he moved to a rural area as vice director of the local party management department.

Kang married a daughter of the former and future prime minister Kang Song-san in 1992. She also had been married once, during her father’s first term as premier, to another graduate of the Foreign Languages University someone Kang knew. When her father was demoted and sent off to be governor of North Hamgyong Province, her husband started treating her cruelly, Kang Myong-do said, and her father urged her to divorce that man. Kang and his bride-to-be met on a blind date, a
son.
Kang Myong-do’s uncle had been a schoolmate of Governor Kang’s at Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, so there was no opposition from either family—although someone did mention as a drawback his having gone to revolutionary work class.

His father-in-law arranged for Kang to become a cadre in the Presidential Palace Accounting Department, “but outside the North I was known as the vice-president of Neng-Ra 888 Trading Company,” he said. He seemed well cast in the role, pleasant and charming while displaying an authoritative manner.

“This Neng-Ra 888 Trading Company is a nominal company, an alias for the department,” Kang said. “It took care of everything for Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, including their clothing and food. It would import televisions, refrigerators, suit fabrics, spices, soy sauce, beer and whiskey all from Japan. Kim Jong-il likes Kikkoman and other Japanese brands. The department also owned a factory and a farm exclusively producing snacks and cookies and pastries for Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, as well as meat— mutton, beef, pork—for their bodyguards. Inside the department was a special
division called ‘Presents.’ Anyone who attended a political event involving Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il always received a present—usually a bag, some sort of luggage.”

Using startup capital of $600,000 provided by the state, Kang imported Japanese cars through the Chongjin and Rajin ports and then exported them across the Tumen River to China, which lacked a seaport convenient to the more remote parts of its northeastern region, the former Manchuria. He specialized in high-end Toyota Crowns, three to four years old, which he could buy by the hundreds for around $3,000 each and then sell in China for $8,000 to $12,000. He gave port officials cigarettes to ensure smooth passage. When Beijing asked Pyongyang to halt the imports in 1993 due to oversupply Kang simply switched from legal exports to smuggling. He made $600,000 profit dealing in cars, he said, and used those proceeds to import petroleum, earning him an achievement award from Kim Il-sung.

Taking home about $2,000 a month, Kang was rich by North Korean standards. (A Kim Il-sung University professor’s salary was only the equivalent of around $10 a month.) He was living well, in a six-room home on Pyongyang’s Changkwang Avenue, and frequented the Koryo Hotel. When groups of officials got together for drinking and carousing, he said, they always made it a point to include one trading company official like him because they needed his dollars. In the company of his impecunious pals, Kang—despite his newlywed status—-was dating actresses, buying them clothing and lingerie.

“Personally, this was the greatest time of my life,” he said. “Many times people came to me to ask favors. Their family members were sick or something. I gave them $100 or $200—it was nothing to me. In North Korea there’s always a big shortage of beer, liquor and cigarettes. The presents I gave were a big deal to the recipients. Even a high official in North Korea couldn’t have the kind of lifestyle I led—if they did, government officials would always report on them. A couple of times I gave money to my father-in-law, who went to the foreign goods store to buy a rice cooker, a massage machine and snacks for his grandson.” Kang Song-san, who by then was prime minister again, was able to boast: “I’ve been to a foreign goods store for the first time, thanks to my son-in-law.”

In May 1994, Kang went to Beijing, and got into trouble. “There were two reasons for my business trip to China,” he said. “One was to come to an agreement about a fertilizer plant joint venture with China. With China we usually traded bags, pollack, automobiles and steel. But as trade increased, the Chinese proposed a joint venture with North Korea. They proposed building a composite fertilizer plant in Hoeryong. The second reason I went was to collect overdue payments from the Chinese automobile merchants.”

Kang had not received permission from the North Korean authorities to go as far beyond the border area as Beijing, and once he got there he stayed
for such a long time that they feared he was preparing to defect. “I didn’t intend to defect at all,” he said. “It was accidental. While I was trading with the Japanese, one guy said he was going to Beijing. I wanted to meet that Japanese. He was old, so it was hard for him to go to the North Korean border to meet me. I stayed in Beijing twenty-five days, waiting for the guy. I was heading back to the border, when I called a friend and he said to be careful because there were forty people out to catch me.” The search party had been sent from Pyongyang to make sure the prime minister’s son-in-law would not defect. “I knew if I got sent back to Pyongyang I wouldn’t be able to leave again and would have a hard life,” he said. “If I could have gone back voluntarily it would have been no problem. But if I had gone back after they sent men to capture me, it would have been like they caught me and forced me to return.” So he boarded a plane and escaped.
¹

Kim Myong-chol, former bodyguard for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, ended his hitch in the bodyguard service in 1985 and went to work for a laser arms factory at Kim Il-sung’s home village, Mangyongdae. There his job was to trade, to accumulate foreign currency. He exported seafood to Japan in exchange for yen. The proceeds were to go to the party for use by the top leaders. I told him I was surprised to find that around 15 percent of the defectors I had met had done similar work. “We got more access to outside information,” he said, explaining why traders might be more likely than others to defect.

“Because of my job I had lots of foreign currency and foreign products,” Kim Myong-chol said. “Lots of higher-ups pressed me to bribe them. In 1992, I had a success and accumulated a lot of foreign exchange. There were around 1,900 people working for me, exporting clams, fish, sea cucumbers and red fish roe. To boost morale in view of the food situation, I inported three tons of sugar from China and distributed it to those workers. That caused a problem. The party said that whatever I got from business must be given to the party. I couldn’t put up with it.

“I decided that with my ability I could make a good living in China. So I went to China. I went over the Tumen first, walked across the ice in winter. I wanted to get into business in China. I wasn’t in great danger. I just didn’t like where the system was heading. I believed that I’d done something good for my workers but the party was criticizing me. I ran away before I could be punished. I would have had to go to a reeducation camp for a year. Then my career would be ruined. I wouldn’t be able to get a good job. I left for China January 29, 1993, but I found I couldn’t be a legal resident and couldn’t go into business there. Now I work for Donghwa Bank in South Korea.”