Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (30 page)

Casting about during that period for anything that could arrest the negative trend in its fortunes, Pyongyang noted the positive results of the “ping-pong diplomacy” that China had begun in 1971 by hosting an American table tennis team. Talks with Henry Kissinger and a visit by President Richard Nixon had followed, ultimately leading to diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington.
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Preparing to host the world table tennis tournament in April of
1979,
Pyongyang decided to try some ping-pong diplomacy of its own. It agreed to receive the first large contingent of Americans to visit the North since the Korean War. North Korean officials believed that the Americans, simply by visiting Pyongyang, would confer de facto recognition on the Kim Il-sung regime. The United States and North Korea previously had concluded only the 1953 ceasefire agreement. After more than a quarter-century there was no peace treaty, much less diplomatic relations.

The North hoped to persuade the American visitors, and through them the American public, of the regime’s peaceful intentions. It would do this partly by showing how much it had built and therefore how much it stood to lose in the case of war. It hoped also to show the bad effects of Korean division on families, and drive home the regime’s argument that American troops in the South unjustly caused and maintained the division. A third objective was to portray North Korea as independent, not a satellite of either the Soviet Union or China, posing no threat to American interests if only the Americans would avoid threatening North Korean interests.

The longer-term goal was to hold talks with the U.S. government, persuading Washington to go through with the stalled troop withdrawals—and eventually, no doubt, to remove entirely the American commitment to South Korean security, including the nuclear “umbrella.” If Kim Il-sung could get that far, he could then hope that Washington would react with equanimity in case the peninsula should be reunited—-whether completely under his rule or, for a time at least, according to his publicly proposed formula: a confederation in which the North and South would coexist.

In April 1978, the State Department confirmed that the U.S. chapter of the International Table Tennis Federation had applied for approval to send a team to Pyongyang for the tournament. A Pyongyang operative in Tokyo then told me that Kim Il-sung himself would be on hand for the ceremonial functions of the tournament, and that the Great Leader just might chat with members of the American delegation. Pyongyang clearly hoped that, among the American players, coaches, interpreters and hangers-on, there would be someone delegated by Washington to deal with political issues.
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Washington remained unwilling to budge from its firm insistence that any rapprochement with North Korea must not bypass South Korea. As a demonstration of flexibility, Pyongyang in January of 1979 responded with its own twist on a South Korean proposal to reopen the North-South dialogue that had petered out in 1973. North Korea refused to talk on a government-to-government basis. Instead it insisted on its longstanding formula calling for talks between nongovernmental delegations representing the two Koreas’ political parties and “social organizations.” Nevertheless, its moves to appear responsive seemed to place the diplomatic ball back in the South’s court (especially in the minds of non-Koreans who had yet to suspect
that Kim’s I-win-you-lose philosophy still had no room for a genuine live-and-let-live relationship with the South).

The South, going through a period of unusually intense domestic political strife, was aware that the Northern formula for talks would provide diverse viewpoints only on the Southern side. The monolithic Northern regime by that time allowed no dissent at home and certainly would allow no real diversity of views among its delegates, whatever their supposed organizational affiliations. Northern delegates, the Southerners believed, would merely exploit political differences among Southerners in a divide-and-conquer pattern.

Thus, despite wide grins on the North Koreans’ faces and a few points for Pyongyang in its propaganda contest with Seoul, the preliminary talks at Panmunjom in the DMZ fizzled out in mutual distrust, recrimination and nitpicking. So did parallel meetings to consider forming a joint North-and-South Korean table tennis team to compete in the tournament.
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Working as a newspaper correspondent covering Korea, I was eager to be included in the press delegation accompanying the American team to Pyongyang. The view among Tokyo-based correspondents was that the only way one could hope to get into North Korea was through a persistent campaign of cables to Pyongyang, to a quasi-diplomatic body that specialized in dealing with the West. Those cables to the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, I was advised, should be supplemented by appeals to influential members of the pro-Pyongyang Korean community in Japan. I followed this program, emphasizing my open-mindedness. The North Koreans at the time were trying to persuade Washington that they had moderated their approach to South Korea, and I made note of my awareness of that effort.

The regional paper I worked for,
The Baltimore Sun,
at great expense maintained eight foreign news bureaus as well as a large Washington bureau. Circulating in Maryland and adjacent Washington, it enjoyed a fine reputation among diplomats and other internationalists. As a sales pitch, one of my predecessors as Tokyo bureau chief had taught reporter/news assistant Hideko Takayama that whenever she telephoned someone unfamiliar with the paper to ask for an appointment she should explain that
The Sun
was “read daily by the President of the United States.” That claim had been more or less true at the time the former bureau chief taught Takayama her line, and she had continued to use it up to my time when she called North Korean and other prospective news sources who might lack detailed knowledge of the U.S. media. No one had thought to reexamine the procedure, even though other presidents had taken their turns in the Oval Office and it was possible the incumbent might have failed somehow to develop the same reading habit.

I myself was not above boasting to Pyongyang’s representatives in Japan that the paper was to political coverage what
The Wall Street Journal
was to economics.

Anyhow, the campaign worked. Along with correspondents for the
Journal
and a few other news organizations, I received my invitation to appear at the North Korean embassy in Beijing for a visa and thence to travel to Pyongyang.

Not the first American journalist to reach North Korea, but close enough that I felt a little bit like Neil Armstrong arriving on the moon, I stepped off a Soviet-built plane at Pyongyang’s airport. Peering intently at everything I saw, I was determined to miss nothing. Pyongyang re-warded me by providing much that was unfamiliar, starting with the crowds of schoolchildren who stood in ranks along the road from the airport to cheer the latest arrivals for the table tennis tournament.

Although at that time I knew very little of what I have written in this volume—and was indeed, I believe, pretty open-minded regarding what I would see—I had of course come armed-with some general impressions based on background interviews and reading. And I was set to filter whatever I might hear through the skepticism that American journalists of my generation had learned to apply to official claims made by any government anywhere in the world—especially our own. The North Koreans, for their part, were intent on turning skeptics into believers.

North Korean papers and broadcasts were full of stories about the sporting events that I had theoretically come to cover, and my hosts made no secret of their opinion that I should show at least some interest in them myself. One day I did go to the matches and saw a pair of North Korean women competing against Korean-Americans who were playing for the U.S. team. Thirteen other matches were in progress at the same time, with North Korean competitors involved in some of them, but the North Korean spectators glued their eyes to this one match. Prosperous-looking Pyongyang people, mostly men in business suits and neckties, crowded the grandstand, cheering thunderously for the home team against the Korean-Americans, especially when the referee ruled for North Korea on a disputed point.

Pyongyang’s heroine of the moment was Li Song-suk, who won the women’s singles world championship. The Great Leader, the papers said, had given his personal attention to her training, and that had been the secret of her success. However, the buzz among the other teams in Pyongyang was that the Chinese—-who had long dominated world table tennis—-were not above taking a dive as a re-ward to their hosts. Perpetually seeking political autonomy by playing its two giant communist neighbors off against each other, North Korea since the mid-’70s had been leaning toward the Chinese.
Pyongyang had supported Chinese charges of Vietnamese aggression in Cambodia (but had conspicuously avoided comment on China’s war with Vietnam) while urging nonaligned nations to keep their distance from the Soviet Union.

Reunification—to be preceded by American troop withdrawal, of course— was a constant theme wherever I went in North Korea. “Whenever the Great Leader visited us, he told us we should produce more tractors so that we could supply tractors to the southern part of the country when we reunify” said an official of a tractor plant that was on our sightseeing itinerary.

One day I accompanied some other visiting reporters to scenic Mount Kumgang in the southeastern part of North Korea, near the South Korean border. When we got there, we learned that the authorities had arranged for a group of Koreans to talk to us as we viewed the scenery. They were there to tell us of their families, divided since the Korean War, and their dream of reunifying the country. They were so poised and prosperous looking that I thought they might be actors, but I had no reason to doubt that national division was a matter of great anguish to the families actually affected, on both sides.
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I talked with Ko Young-il, a Korean-American who had signed on to travel to Pyongyang as interpreter for the American team in hopes of meeting his mother, five sisters and brother, whom he had not seen since the Korean War. Late in 1950, Chinese and UN troops fought over the North Korean county where they lived. In the confusion of battle Ko, then nine years old, found himself separated from his family and started to follow the UN troops south. About five miles from the county seat he met his father, and the two headed for their small town to search for the others in the family. When they got close they saw that the town was already burning, so they climbed up into some hills and looked for American troops. No one could tell them where his mother and siblings were. “Since then,” Ko said, “we never met them, we never heard anything from them. That’s it.”

Ko lived in Seoul until 1972, when he took his family to the United States to seek “a better future for ourselves and our children.” He had become the owner of an auto-body repair shop and a billiard hall in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C He still held South Korean citizenship, and had needed the approval of the Seoul government to travel to Pyongyang. Ko was preparing to reunite with his family, figuring he must have a lot of nephews and nieces he had never met. He was eager. “Since I left America I can’t sleep,” he said. But at the same time he was nervous. For one thing, he worried about how his family members would receive him. Perhaps they would see him and ask, “Why are you here?” With greater cause, perhaps, he worried that the Northern regime might put pressure on his family
because of him—might “blackmail” them, as he put it—and use the reunion for propaganda.

I had no trouble imagining this as the sort of situation that official propagandists would play for all it was worth. Sure enough, when Ko did meet his family, the Pyongyang newspaper account quoted him as saying he would really like to stay in North Korea except that his father would not be able to join the rest of them. “Someday when we reunify the country we can live together,” he was quoted as saying. As presented, the quoted remark implied that North Korea was a highly appealing place to live—the usual formula.

Two days later Pak Kyong-sik, a team leader in a hothouse on the outskirts of Pyongyang, told me that his family had seen a newspaper account of the reunion and “we sat and talked until late at night.” Pak said his brother had been separated from the rest of the family in the Korean War, going to South Korea. “Many years have passed, but I still haven’t had any opportunity to see my brother. I live with my parents, who worry a lot about whether my brother is alive or dead.” Pak told me that although he was leading “this happy life”—the requisite note lauding Kim Il-sung’s paradise—“I’m always eager to meet my brother.”

On my first full day in Pyongyang, April 24, my guide told me I would be having lunch with someone. I asked with whom, and he replied, “We’ll see.” We went to a large private dining room in my hotel, where I was introduced to a man named Pak, a council member of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. This society, rather than the Foreign Ministry dealt with countries that had not recognized Pyongyang diplomatically and vice versa. Over a lavish meal consisting of Chinese, Korean and Western courses, Mr. Pak and I talked for an hour and a half. We began with a lengthy chat about the weather and went on to a discussion of U.S.-Korean relations. My guide interpreted well, although he was stumped at one point by the English word “pragmatism.” In this conversation a couple of things struck me. One was that Pak did not know much about the United States. He said he understood that Americans eat turkey on our independence day.

Another thing that struck me was that Pak bluntly contradicted me only once. That was when I was speaking about the pros and cons of South Korea in the eyes of Americans. I told him that, despite what was then a lack of democracy as we understood democracy, South Korea offered its citizens a certain kind of freedom that Americans could identify with: freedom to make nonpolitical choices, to be upwardly mobile economically and socially. Pak snapped: “That’s not true!” And he said it with a fervid conviction that contrasted with the man-of-the-world demeanor he otherwise displayed that day. In the remainder of the conversation, while he could be ironic and a bit
playful about American words and deeds, he never acknowledged anything positive about South Korea. My telling him that Americans could identify to an extent with South Korea seemed only to have reinforced his evident belief that the South was playing the flunkey role, trying to become a Western-style society—a contemptible trend, in his view of Korean cultural legitimacy.