Escape from North Korea (18 page)

It might have been out of some perverse sense of competition with the South that Pyongyang made the decision not to return thousands of South Korean POWs after the war. The Geneva Convention
of 1949 mandated the immediate return of POWs after hostilities ended, but the United States insisted that the POWs who had been captured by U.N. forces have a choice: They could decide whether to stay in South Korea or return to North Korea. After months of negotiation, North Korea reluctantly agreed to the American demand. To Pyongyang's embarrassment, some forty-nine thousand North Korean POWs held in the South chose not to return. They were released into South Korean society.

Then, as now, Pyongyang maintained that the South Korean POWs who stayed in North Korea after the war did so by choice. The record, as compiled by American and South Korean experts, proves otherwise. A few South Korean POWs may have decided to stay, but the overwhelming majority had no choice. In many cases, they did not even know that the war had ended.

Exhibit A is a classified study the United States Department of Defense compiled in 1993.
⁵
According to the Pentagon report, which is now declassified, thousands of South Korean POWs died in the Soviet gulag along with many American POWs. The Pentagon researchers found that after the end of the war, American and South Korean POWs were transferred from North Korea to prison camps in the Soviet Union. The transfers took place under a secret program approved by Stalin.

The Pentagon study was conducted with the cooperation of the new Russian government, which facilitated interviews with former Soviet military officers and others who had firsthand knowledge of what happened to the South Korean POWs. The report cited many eyewitness accounts. These accounts were so broad, so numerous, and so convincing, the report's authors argued, that it was impossible to dismiss them.

Among the interviewees was a former Soviet general officer, Khan San-kho,
⁶
who provided information on South Korean POWs. Lieutenant-General Khan, a Soviet citizen who was ethnically Korean, had been seconded to the North Korean People's Army
during the Korean War. General Khan told the American investigators that he had assisted in the transfer of thousands of South Korean POWs to prison camps in the Soviet Union after the war.
⁷

The South Korean POWs were distributed among three to four hundred Soviet prison camps, the general said. Most of the POWs were sent to camps in Siberia or the Soviet Far East, but some were shipped off to Central Asia. The South Korean POWs were put to work in mines or built roads and airfields. Most did not survive long, he said.

Another source of information for the Pentagon researchers was Zygmunt Nagorski, a Polish-born American journalist. Nagorski reported the transport of thousands of South Korean POWs to Soviet prison camps in a 1953 article for
Esquire
magazine.
⁸
His sources were two agents of the Soviet Interior Ministry and an employee of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Like General Khan, Nagorski said that the mortality rate among the POWs was high.

Other South Korean POWs were detained in North Korea. There is a larger body of evidence about what happened to them, thanks to North Korean defectors who have provided information about their fate. Information has also come from the small number of former POWs and their North Korean family members who have escaped to South Korea since the mid-1990s. According to these sources, the South Korean POWs detained in North Korea were interned in prison camps until the late 1950s or even into the 1960s. The POWs did not know the war had ended or that there had been an exchange of POWs between North and South. No one ever asked them whether they wanted to go home.

Many South Korean POWs died in the North Korean prison camps. Those who survived were eventually released, but the conditions of their new lives were hardly better than the conditions they'd known in prison. Most were assigned to one of the groups sent to labor in coal or copper mines in desolate areas of the northeastern provinces, the region sometimes called Korea's Siberia. It was undesirable work,
difficult and dangerous. The mines were so remote that escape was impossible even if the former POWs had the physical stamina and local knowledge to try.

The former POWs were given citizen ID cards, and one could say that, in some ways, they blended in with ordinary North Korean society. Many were forced into marriages with war widows or war orphans—women tainted by family associations with South Koreans and who were otherwise unmarriageable. Lee Yeon-soon, the daughter of a former POW, said her father had been assigned a wife and was married in a mass wedding. The authorities simply matched up names and told people they were husband and wife,
⁹
said Lee, who is now living in Seoul. As former POWs, the South Koreans remained under close surveillance by the government.

The establishment of diplomatic ties between Seoul and Beijing in 1992 made it easier for South Koreans to travel to China. It opened up the Chinese side of the Sino-North Korean border to South Korean visitors, including those seeking intelligence on North Korea. By the mid-1990s, the flow of refugees from North Korea to China was accelerating. The refugees were a deep well of information about North Korea's closed society, including South Korea's missing POWs.

A small group of senior officials in the government of South Korean President Kim Young-sam saw an opportunity to rescue POWs and decided to act. They authorized and funded a secret network dedicated to gathering information about the POWs captive in North Korea; the goal was to bring them home. The network was composed of about twenty South Korean civilians, including Mr. Jung, and fifty Chinese associates. At least one member of Kim Young-sam's cabinet was aware of the program. It's unclear whether the president himself knew of its existence.

Mr. Jung and the other South Koreans on the rescue team posed as Chinese-Korean traders. They moved back and forth across the border, looking for goods to buy in North Korea and resell in China.
The business deals were real, but they were a smokescreen for the most important commodity the agents were seeking: information on the whereabouts of the POWs. They also gathered information in northeast China, where they sought out North Koreans who had come across the border as well as Chinese citizens who had visited North Korea. They carefully pumped them for information about POWs.

If the South Korean agents heard a rumor about a POW who was said to be living in a certain part of the country, they would concoct a reason to go there on business. When the right moment presented itself, they would approach the POW and, if he was receptive, offer to help him escape to China and then South Korea. They would develop an extraction plan. They might ask the POW to figure out on his own how to get to a designated meeting place in China—then they would supply him with enough cash to do so. POWs sometimes refused to leave without their North Korean families. If so, Mr. Jung and his team would also help relatives reach South Korea, but their first priority was always the POW himself.

China was the base of operation for Mr. Jung and his colleagues. He wore many guises there. Sometimes he would pose as a Chinese border guard. With his Chinese-language skills and a uniform he had purchased on the black market, he was able to help more than one POW or family member get out of a tight situation. In at least one instance, he hired a counterfeiter to print a fake South Korean passport for a POW, whom he then put on a plane to Seoul. He and his network also developed their own branch of the underground railroad to ferry POWs across China to safety in Southeast Asian countries. From there, the POWs would go on to South Korea.

The South Korean officials who authorized the POW rescue program entrusted oversight of the operations to an intermediary, the man who introduced me to Mr. Jung in the Seoul hotel. This intermediary was a young, energetic South Korean who traveled the world on business. He had no official position, but he was well
connected with the South Korean defense and intelligence establishment, and he had done favors for the government in the past. He would go to China on “business” to meet with Mr. Jung, or Mr. Jung would fly out of China and consult with the intermediary in another Asian city.

In Seoul, the intermediary interacted with a handful of government officials. The South Korean government would provide pertinent information, offer operational guidance, and supply funding. If the extraction team in China identified the location in North Korea of a possible POW and wanted to approach him, the intermediary would take that information to his government contacts. The officials would try to verify the man's identity, using military and other records. This identity-checking was important. No one wanted to aid in the escape of an imposter or, worst of all, a North Korean sleeper agent.

If the information checked out and the man was confirmed to be a former South Korean soldier, the officials would put the intermediary or another trusted source in touch with the POW's family in South Korea. The family might be asked to supply a family photograph, which would be passed along to Mr. Jung and his associates in China. A member of the extraction team would then take the photo into North Korea and show it to the POW as a way of gaining his confidence. North Korean society is built on deceit and suspicion, and the South Korean agent would need to prove his bona fides; producing a family photo would help demonstrate that an agent really was who he said he was, not an operative of the North Korean regime seeking to entrap the POW.

The intermediary also would coordinate with his government contacts in Seoul to plan the final stage of the rescue. The South Korean government might arrange for the coast guard or a vessel from another government agency to be in the vicinity when the ship on which a POW was traveling was scheduled to enter South Korean waters. If the rescue team had guided the POW out of China to a neighboring Southeast Asian country, the South Korean government
might authorize its ambassador to work with that country's government on obtaining an exit permit for the POW.

The government officials left most of the operational details to the intermediary and the China-based extraction team. The South Korean government could not be caught running illegal people-smuggling operations on Chinese or other foreign soil. It needed plausible deniability in case a member of the rescue team was arrested. Mr. Jung and his colleagues understood that they would be on their own if they were arrested.

The rescue team scored its first success in 1994, when Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho became the first South Korean prisoner of war to return home in forty years. The South Korean government never took public responsibility for Cho Chang-ho's escape, but it was widely assumed that it had played a hand in his rescue. In 1994, the new underground railroad was not yet up and running. It was highly implausible that Cho Chang-ho could have organized his escape on his own, without help from the South Korean government, especially in the mere sixteen days Cho spent in China.

Cho Chang-ho's homecoming captured the heart of the South Korean people. He became known as the fallen soldier who returned. It also highlighted the plight of the POWs who by now, after four decades of captivity in the North, were mostly forgotten in South Korea.

When the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Cho Chang-ho was a freshman at what is now known as Yonsei University. Yonsei is one of South Korea's most prestigious institutions of higher education, and the young Cho Chang-ho had a promising future ahead of him. But the war intervened, and he interrupted his studies to join the army, where he served as a second lieutenant in an artillery battalion. In September 1951, Chinese troops fighting alongside North Korean forces captured Cho. He spent twelve years and six months in prison camps before finally being released in the early 1960s. He was sent to work in a North Korean coal mine.

When the armistice was signed in 1953, Cho Chang-ho's name did not appear on the list of prisoners held by the North Koreans. In 1977, South Korea's Ministry of National Defense changed his official status from “missing in action” to “killed in action.” His name was enshrined with the names of other war dead at the National Cemetery. In the minds of his government and family, he had passed away.

In 1994, he returned from the dead.

On October 3, 1994, Lieutenant Cho, now sixty-four years old, escaped from North Korea to China by paddling across the Yalu River on a wooden raft. Sixteen days later, Mr. Jung and his team arranged for Lieutenant Cho to board a Chinese fishing boat that smuggled black-market goods from South Korea to China. Back in Seoul, the officials who were being kept apprised of Cho's escape thought that the fishing-boat plan to extract him from China was too risky, so they refused to pay for it. Mr. Jung and the intermediary decided to go through with their plan anyway. They approached the Cho family, who agreed to pay for the boat.

The fishing boat carrying Lieutenant Cho sailed into South Korean waters in the predawn hours of Sunday, October 23, 1994. Mr. Jung had alerted the intermediary that Lieutenant Cho was en route, and the intermediary in turn informed his government contacts, who, despite their earlier skepticism about the fishing-boat plan, agreed to cooperate. The officials arranged for a patrol vessel belonging to the South Korean fisheries service to be in the area, seemingly by chance. When the Chinese fishing boat, by prearrangement, flashed a distress signal, the South Korean patrol boat responded quickly. Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho climbed aboard. The rescue took place in the Yellow Sea off South Korea's western coast.

In the days that followed, the news of Cho Chang-ho's miraculous homecoming was on the lips of every South Korean. Television networks broadcast interviews with the pajama-clad former soldier from his hospital bed in Seoul. He was filmed with his older sister
and younger brother, who were sitting by his bedside alternately weeping and smiling. He was asked about his new family in North Korea, where he had one daughter and two sons. He was interviewed about what he wanted to do when he got out of the hospital. Visit his childhood church, he said.