Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (169 page)

21. If Your Brain Is Properly Oiled.

1.
Cho Gap-jae, “Interview of Former High-level Official” (see chap. 9, n. 37).

2.
“The average North Korean lives an incredibly simple and hardworking life but also has a secure and cheerful existence, and the comradeship between these highly collectivised people is moving to behold” (Andrew Holloway
A Year in Pyongyang
[published in 2002 on the Internet Web site of Aidan Foster-Carter, http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html], chapter 3, p. 6).

3.
“The claim of the Pyongyang regime to have attained the goal of 8 million–ton grain production is belied by the prevalence of pellagra victims caused largely by malnutrition throughout North Korea. A shortage of food grains that forces the North Korean population to eat large quantities of maize with little intake of animal protein makes North Koreans vulnerable to the disease” (Lee Won-joon, “Changes in North Korea’s Agricultural and Fishery Policies,”
Vantage Point
[July 1979]: pp. 7, 9). Researchers in the American South found in 1937 that the missing substance in the diets of pellagra victims is not protein, per se, but the vitamin niacin, which is “plentiful in red meat, fish, poultry, green leafy vegetables and, as it happens, brewer’s yeast” (Howard Markel, “The New Yorker Who Changed the Diet of the South,
” New York Times,
August 12, 2003, p. D5).

4.
Testimony of Kang Myong-do (see chap. 1, n. 7).

5.
This interview took place August 20, 1992, in Honolulu. Recall the story of Chong Ki-hae, the returnee from Japan whose new life in the North Korean “motherland” we chronicled in chapter 6. A reduction in the grain ration came in the early 1970s, Chong told me, confirming that part of Professor An’s timeline. The cuts were described as “patriot rice” but explained as having been mandated by poor harvests. Farm districts had not been able to meet their harvest quotas, although they had
reported
having met or exceeded them, Chong told me.

6.
I interviewed him on February 8, 1994, in Seoul. Ko told me he had been born on February 13, 1961, in Kimchaek City, an industrial city in North Hamgyong Province.

7.
According to high-level defector Hwang Jang-yop, “As Kim Jong-il began to rise to power, North Korean leaders began to insist that the anti-Japanese partisan struggle led by Kim Il-sung took place over a wide area spanning Northeast China and the Korean peninsula rather than only in Northeast China
under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party. North Korean leaders claimed that proof of this could be found all over North Korea in the form of ‘slogan trees’—trees on which Kim Il-sung wrote anti-Japanese slogans such as Down with Japanese imperialism’ and ‘Long live Korean independence.’ The idea probably came from stories told by independence fighters who recalled that while hiding in the forest they had stripped the bark off the trees to write slogans such as ‘Long live Korean independence.’ But strangely no such slogan trees
’were
discovered in Northeast China, the main stage of the partisan struggle. The trees
’were
discovered only in North Korea, and over 10,000 of them at that. Back then, the partisan fighters most probably sent only one or two spies to the Korean peninsula at a time. And they would not have sent spies to northern Korea just to strip the bark off trees and
’write
slogans on them. The spies would have been busy avoiding the watchful eyes of the Japanese police as they engaged in secretive intelligence work, so where on earth would they have found the time to strip the bark off trees and make the ink to
’write
slogans on the trees with brushes?” This fabrication “was probably done through the Party History Center, a bureau in the central party under the personal supervision of Kim Jong-il,”
’wrote
Hwang. He acknowledged that he himself from 1987 had been in a supervisory position over the Party History Center. However, he said, “I did not involve myself in the Research Center projects. My duties stopped at reviewing the documents and offering my opinion on current issues. Once I quietly asked a member of the Research Center, ‘You say more than 700 slogan trees were discovered on the Moranbong in Pyongyang. But when we were schooling in Pyongyang we often climbed the Moranbong to have lunch, and we never saw any markings on the trees. Isn’t the sudden discovery of hundreds of slogan trees going a bit too far?’ To which the official answered, ‘The slogan trees on Monanbong are different. The partisans did not strip the bark off them to write slogans with brushes but carved markings on them with knives as means of communicating with one another.’ I was too flabbergasted to question him any further.” Knowing that there were only about 60 Koreans in the Eighty-eighth Special Brigade, Hwang wrote, “helps us deduce the size of the armed rebellion against Japanese rule. So how could so many people have climbed Moranbong and left communication signals on hundreds of trees?” (Hwang Jang-yop,
Problems of Human Rights [I]
[see chap. 2, n. 1]).

8.
I interviewed him on February 15, 1994, in Seoul.

9.
See “Summing Up of the 1970s,” p. 16: “As north Korea declares the attainment of the goals with no statistical backing, its agricultural situation is hard to figure out. A clue to answering the agricultural question came when President Kim addressed a meeting of county-level responsible secretaries of the Party in October 1979. He was quoted as having said: The Juche farming method is faced with a limit and we should cultivate more land to produce more grains.”

10.
I interviewed him on November 1, 1993. He told me he had been born on July 14, 1953, and had defected on May 2, 1991.

11.
I interviewed him on February 17, 1994, in Seoul.

22. Logging In and Logging Out.

1.
See, for example, Giles Whittell, “Kim Sells Workers to Gulags in Debt Deal” (London: The Times, Aug. 6, 2001).

2.
See Anatoly Medetsky “North Korea Seeks Closer Ties with Russian Far East,” Vladivostok-datelined dispatch from the Associated Press, April
4,
2002; “North Korea Opens New Air Route to Russian Far East,” Seoul-datelined Reuters dispatch, April 5, 2002; “North Koreans in Russian Far East,” Khabarovsk-datelined article in
JoongAng Ilbo,
July 23, 2002.

23. Do You Remember That Time?

No notes.

24. Pickled Plum in a Lunch Box.

1.
Hwang Jang-yop on July 3, 2003, told South Korea’s National Assembly that he had heard about the testing directly from Kim Jong-il and Kim’s aides. See “S. Korea Clears Top Defector for U.S. Visit,” Reuters dispatch from Seoul, July 18, 2003. For an extensive chronology of the first nuclear crisis see “IAEA-North Korea: Nuclear Safeguards and Inspections” (Monterey Calif.: Monterey Institute of International Studies, Center for Nuclear Studies, 2002), http://cns. miis.edu/research/korea/nuc/iaea7789.htm.

2.
I heard this pungent description from Katsumi Sato, the editor of
Gendai Korea.

3.
Testimony of Kang Myong-do (see chap. 2, n.7). When I interviewed Kang after his remarks had been published in
JoongAng Ilbo,
I asked him how he had known about the nuclear program. He replied that a Yongbyon official had told him. “We knew each other for about ten years. He’s a close friend of my elder brother. Lots of high officials didn’t know for sure about the nuclear program, but we were always curious. So I just casually asked him. I guess he never thought I’d defect.” At the time I spoke with Kang, his assertions were getting little support from the South Korean and U.S. governments. There seemed to be a tendency both in Seoul and in Washington to play down the sophistication and productivity of the North Korean nuclear program. The fear seemed to be that acknowledgment that the North was well along in its program, with a number of nuclear weapons probably completed, would force a major policy reappraisal. “The South Koreans were afraid I’d say it again,” Kang told me. “In fact, I believe totally in what I said.” Kang indicated that he and his information had received something of a cold shoulder from the Americans— because, he presumed, Washington had not thought it politic to come out and say that North Korea already had a functioning nuclear weapons program. Before defecting to South Korea he had made contact with U.S. officials, he said. “I went to the U.S. Embassy in Germany and turned over a letter I had written to President Bill Clinton, offering policy recommendations on the nuclear issue. But I had to wait a couple of days before someone in the U.S. government came to talk with me. Since the Americans were in talks with Pyongyang at the time, I thought maybe they were sending me back to North Korea. The U.S. wanted to say that the North did not have nuclear weapons at that time. I know that the Americans know better, know that there are in fact nuclear weapons in North Korea.”

4.
See “Nuclear Jitters,
” Newsweek,
April 29, 1991.

5.
Defector Ahn Hyuk, a former table tennis champion, noted in an interview that Kanemaru was taken to Kim Il-sung’s most lavish villa, Hamneun Majeonho,
near the seaside. “There are a couple of buildings there, one for Kim Il-sung and one for his guest. About an hour before Kanemaru awoke each day, Kim Il-sung would go to the front of his building and walk around, waiting. Kanemaru was really snowed by Kim’s eagerness.” (Ahn asserted that Kanemaru was not the only foreign visitor of whom Kim made a fool. Billy Graham, the American evangelical preacher, “also succumbed to all that pampering. Kim Il-sung probably was being kind to him in order to get some Christian donations funneled to North Korea.”) Kim Il-sung around that time was publishing his memoirs, laced with accounts of Japanese bad behavior. He recalled, for example, that when Koreans in 1930s .Manchuria, faced with Japanese “punitive” campaigns, fled to the hills, even a baby’s cry could give them away to the enemy. One woman hugged her baby too hard to keep it from crying; when the enemy withdrew, she found it was dead. “To avoid such accidents, some women used to dose their babies with opium to keep them fast asleep. Unable to endure the ceaseless atrocities perpetrated by the ‘punitive’ troops, some women even gave their beloved babies to strangers. … Bourgeois humanists may mock the maternal love of communists, asking how a woman could be so cruel towards her baby or be so irresponsible with its life. But they must not hold these women responsible for the deaths of their infants. If they knew how many bitter tears were shed as these women buried the soft bodies of their babies in dry leaves and left their babies in the care of strangers, they would condemn and hate the Japanese imperialist who sent their human butchers to Jiandao. The crime of trampling upon the maternal love of this country’s women was committed by none other than the fiends of Japanese militarism. If she is to make amends for her past, Japan must repent of these crimes. … In demanding evidence of their past crimes, the rulers of Japan continue to mock the memory of millions of Koreans who were slaughtered by their army”
(With the Century,
vol. 3 [see chap. 2, n. 2], pp. 14–15).

6.
While hardliners such as that official may have continued to hope for a quick collapse of the Kim regime, many other South Koreans had replaced that wish with caution born of observing the rocky road Germany had been treading. There seemed to be more South Koreans who would be happy enough to see a military government take over in North Korea and emulate the period of rapid economic development that the South had experienced under its own military government. That could bring the North more into the world that the South knew and reduce the ultimate burden to the South whenever the two might merge.

7.
Japanese officials in two of those agencies confirmed that Americans briefed them but declined to comment on details including dates and who the briefers were.

8.
Address by Korea University Professor (later South Korean foreign minister) Han Sung-joo at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Tokyo, May 12, 1992.

9.
See Don Oberdorfer,
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1997), pp. 260–271. Oberdorfer, a former
Washington Post
diplomatic correspondent, offers in chapters 11, 12 and 13 a detailed account of diplomacy concerning the North’s nuclear weapons, based on his interviews with participants and documents he obtained by invoking the Freedom of Information Act. A more recent work by three participants is Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman and Robert L. Gallucci,
Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis
(Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).

25. I Die, You Die.

1.
“Seven N.K. Defectors Go Missing Over Two-Year Period: Daily,” Yonhap news agency, February 15, 2002, FBIS document i.d. 0grscgs02ah5r9.

26. Yen for the Motherland.

1.
The interview was conducted in April 1989.

27. Winds of Temptation May Blow.

1.
Bradley K. Martin, “Why South Korea Favors Propping Up the North,”
Global Finance
(July 1992): pp.
44–47.

2.
Korea Times
(Seoul), November 26, 1992, p. 9, citing a report by Korea Trade Promotion Corp. (KOTRA). North Korea does not release trade statistics. The KOTRA figures are compilations of two-way trade data from sixty-one countries. North Korea’s global exports dropped 24.8 percent and imports 9.9 percent for 1991, according to a KOTRA report cited in
Korea Times
for November 20, 1992, p. 9.