All Monsters Must Die (15 page)

It is known that people from a number of countries, including Romania and Thailand, have been abducted and taken to North Korea. During her time in the country, Madame met people who had been kidnapped from Jordan, Japan, and France. South Korea insists that 480 of its citizens are being held in North Korea against their will.

IN 2002, HITOMI
SOGA
was allowed to return to Japan. She was nineteen years old when she and her mother were kidnapped in 1978. They were taken on board a boat and ferried to Nampo and then on to Pyongyang. She married Charles Robert Jenkins, an American commander who willingly crossed the border at the demilitarized zone (
DMZ
).

During the first half of the 1960s, a total of four American soldiers sought happiness in the North, where they all became players in a large-scale theatre of propaganda. At least one of them had the threat of martial law hanging over his head at the time of his defection. Joe Dresnok, the only one who still lives in North Korea, appeared in the British documentary
Crossing the Line
in 2007.

North Korea heralded the arrival of the four military defectors: Dresnok, Charles Jenkins, Larry Abshier, and Jerry Parrish. Brochures about these “Fortune's Favourites”
were printed along with photographs of the men picnicking by the river with local beauties, bottles of wine, and teeming picnic baskets. Their clothing was suspiciously similar. North Korean tailors must have projected their own idea of what American men would wear on a Sunday outing: uniform-like turquoise suits, straw hats, shirts with wide collars and giant buttons, all presumably made of Vinalon.

The soldiers were presented like trophies: they appeared at mass meetings, and relayed messages via the loudspeakers that were broadcast across the border. These siren songs from paradise were aimed at the understimulated American troops on the south side who were waiting for action; in the Communist country, everyone was given free food and shelter and unlimited access to women.

But the four Americans were idle, even if they were supplied with steady food rations and alcohol, despite what was happening in the rest of the country. Dresnok describes a largely carefree existence: studying Kim Il-sung's writings, playing cards, drinking
soju
, and taking fishing trips by the river.

According to Charles Jenkins, it wasn't as idyllic as all that. Until 1972, the men lived in a one-room apartment without running water. They got on each other's nerves, and Dresnok was a brutal fellow who often gave Jenkins a good hiding. When they were separated in 1972, the situation improved. Dresnok and Jenkins started teaching English, but Jenkins, who was from North Carolina, spoke with a deep Southern accent. When it was apparent that future spies had parroted Jenkins's thick regional dialect, he was fired.

ONLY WHEN KIM
JONG-IL
became the minister of propaganda did the state find a use for these men, who would have been called “hillbillies” back home. Around the time of Madame's kidnapping, the propaganda minister started production on the
TV
series
Unsung Heroes
. The destinies of the four soldiers were only revealed to the United States in 1996, when the
CIA
acquired a copy of
Unsung Heroes
and analyzed the voices of the actors.

THE TV SERIES
takes place during the Korean War. At its centre is a North Korean agent who stymies the South Korean and American imperialists. Donning aviators and a moustache, Joe Dresnok faithfully embodies the role of the cruel camp commander and lead interrogator Arthur Cockstud. The others were typecast in their roles but had a chance to refine them over the course of the series: Jerry Parrish played a freedom-loving Irishman who hated the Brits; Larry Abshier was the American stooge; and the poisonous spider — Jenkins's character, with his pronounced forehead, wingnuts for ears, and large hat — was the sly American architect of evil behind the war.

Playing the roles of evil American imperialists, they all became film stars in North Korea. Today, people who meet Joe Dresnok on the streets of Pyongyang still call him Arthur. When a copy of
Unsung Heroes
was screened in South Korea, the theme song “Welcome Happiness” became a minor hit. In 2005 when South Korea's minister of culture visited North Korea, he started to sing the theme song during a dinner. A popular move in North Korea. Less so in the South.

WE'RE HALFWAY TO
Kaesong and are about to make a pit stop. The bus driver doesn't go to the trouble of pulling into a parking lot; he just pulls up at the side of the road. We automatically look left and right before we cross the highway to get to the rest stop, but it's completely unnecessary.

The café barely has anything to purchase, and the stench of urine in the washroom is stupefying. When we get back on the bus we sit right at the front to film the rest of the journey south. In the beginning we had discreetly used our camera; now we've changed tactics. Mr. Song is surprisingly lax about this. When we pass military posts, he asks us to turn it off; otherwise, he doesn't seem to care much. He says that he's never seen a tourist with such a big camera.

Soon we get back to the topic of hairstyles. Now what did that article say? What punishment did you get for having an incorrect hairstyle?

* * *

WE LEAVE OUR
baggage at the hotel in Kaesong, which is encircled by a sturdy wall. But the wall doesn't keep out the sound of the many loudspeakers projecting revolutionary music and disciplinary speeches. These speakers are everywhere. Trucks carrying large speakers travel the countryside so that the field workers can get their dose of instruction and warnings. And as if this wasn't enough, in every home a mounted, wired speaker turns on automatically at fixed times. You can turn the volume down, but you can't shut it off. If strangers are on their way to the neighbourhood, local citizens are given instructions on how to behave. Inspectors make rounds to ensure that the home speakers are installed properly and that no one has cut any of the wires. All of the radios in North Korea, except the illegal ones, are manufactured domestically and can receive only the din of transmissions from the state channel.

Kaesong is an unusual city both because we tourists are allowed to visit and because of the economic exchange with South Korea that has been in development for the past few years. Hyundai and a number of other corporations have been allowed to establish factories to produce shoes, watches, clothes, ginseng, and precious stones. Even the electricity in this city comes from the South. But for the moment, our simple hotel doesn't have electricity, nor is there any hot water. And the beds are like those found in traditional Korean hostels: thin mattresses that you roll out on the floor.

This industrial zone was established after North Korea received a huge donation of money from South Korean businesses, mainly Hyundai. These companies are, of course, interested in the cheap labour the country has to offer. Only citizens approved by the regime are allowed to work in the zone. After a while they are replaced. Their salary is paid to the North Korean state, which in turn pays a share to the workers.

When we found ourselves on the south side of the border a year ago, in June 2007, we saw South Korean trucks transporting sand, waiting to go through the strict border control. They were all issued with small red tattered flags as a mark of courtesy — or perhaps to assimilate them into the North Korean landscape.

IN THEIR BOOK
The Hidden People of North Korea,
Ralph Hassig and Oh Kongdan emphasize the changes that were made to the economy after the country's catastrophic famine. The authors mean that people broke the rules in order to survive; or rather, those who broke the rules were the ones who survived. Previously, North Koreans were paid in coupons — based on their status in society — that could be redeemed for food. But the system stopped working in the mid-1990s and people were forced to scavenge.

Different systems, official and unofficial, exist side by side and overlap in North Korea. To simplify, there are four general frameworks:

1. The official planned economy.
   
2. A number of enclosed free-trade zones to which international investors have been invited.
   
3. Small-scale local markets that were previously illegal but have become authorized. These markets — even if they are controlled by the state — have meant a great change.
   
4. The Kim clan's personal economy, which includes gold mines, heroin and amphetamine production, and the production of counterfeit currency, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals like Viagra.
   

The smuggling carried out by North Korean diplomats — which seems to be part of the unofficial job description — is also part of this economy. In 1977, diplomats at the North Korean embassy in Stockholm were deported for engaging in large-scale alcohol and hash smuggling operations. A picture in
Dagens Nyheter
showed a police officer with a confiscated magnum of Dewar's White Label on a serving stand. The diplomats were apparently not smuggling for reasons of personal gain. The proceeds were used to buy full-page ads in the daily newspapers. This was the only way Kim Il-sung's propaganda speeches could find their way into print in the major Western newspapers.

All of these lucrative operations furnish the top echelon with further riches. Bureau 39 in the North Korean Workers' Party organizes the extraction of everything valuable and desirable in the country, like ginseng, precious metals, matsutake, and sea urchins, for the benefit of the elite. Bureau 39 also organizes the manufacturing of narcotics, pharmaceuticals, and counterfeit money. Beyond funding the clan's luxurious lifestyle, it is likely that the bureau's income supports the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

What's remarkable is that the products that come from the country's underground factories outshine the originals. The drugs and pharmaceuticals are considered very potent. And the counterfeit hundred-dollar bills are so well made that the
FBI
has been forced to admit that they are virtually impossible to distinguish from the originals. In 1996, the U.S. government decided to modify the dollar to counteract the North Korean counterfeit industry. It was the first time since 1928 that the United States Department of the Treasury had been forced to change the banknote. They began using an ink that changed colour in the light, and introduced a new safety thread and a new watermark. It took just two years for the North Koreans to figure out how to copy these new banknotes. Shortly thereafter, new forged hundred-dollar bills were in circulation in casinos in Macao and Las Vegas. Again, changes were made. The Americans invested in a wildly expensive printing press, which they thought would make it unprofitable for the North Koreans to continue counterfeiting, given the investment it would demand. But again they were wrong. New North Korean U.S. dollars were soon out in the market.

In an interview with the
New York Times
,
one civil servant at the U.S. Treasury Department dejectedly stated that there is perhaps one way the North Korean hundred-dollar bills can be distinguished from the originals: they are better made.

THE SITUATION IN
the industrial zone outside of Kaesong has become more difficult since Lee “The Bulldozer” Myung-bak became president of South Korea in February 2008. To show its displeasure, North Korea tore up signed contracts in protest of the new South Korean government's animosity toward them.

South Koreans are normally denied entry to North Korea except in purpose-built, fenced-off holiday facilities. In Kumgangsan — the Diamond Mountains — in North Korea's Kangwon Province, South Koreans spent a few seasons vacationing at “Hyundai's holiday gulag,” with its fresh air and newly built golf course, the largest in Asia. They handed over their cell phones, and cameras were stripped of their powerful zoom lenses. Guests played golf during the day and sang karaoke at night. But exactly two months prior to our visit, a fifty-three-year-old South Korean woman happened to find her way out of the designated area and was shot dead by the North Korean military. Since then, the tourist facilities have been empty.

* * *

THE BUS TAKES
us through Kaesong's wide streets. We pass a number of military posts and then we are out in the countryside. The sun is low over the landscape. We drive on a narrow road built for tanks. It is made of concrete slabs and cuts through fields where rice, corn, lettuce, and potatoes are being cultivated. Women squat to wash their clothes in a clear stream. It's the weekend, but the worker brigades don't have the day off. Young men holding reaping hooks march in line next to the cornfields, on an elevated path.

Goats gambol in the lush grass, and water buffalo with rings in their noses shut their eyes against the setting sun, dreamily chewing cud. We could be anywhere in East Asia if not for the young girl on a bicycle wearing a red scarf and carrying a backpack with a red flag. She appears to be illuminated by the warm evening light, and she triggers the memory of another image: a Chinese propaganda picture from the Cultural Revolution.

This is most likely one of the most fertile areas in North Korea. Many parts of the country have wretched terrain — mountainous regions where not much can be farmed and which were hardest hit by the famine in the mid-1990s.

A RETIRED COLONEL
has joined us on the bus for this excursion. He's wearing a brownish-green decorated uniform and bulky cap bearing a red stripe. The driver stops for some geese on the road. The colonel steps forward, opens the door, and gives their owner a telling off. She looks back at him fearfully, while trying to drive her animals with a cane. The colonel is furious and goes on ranting at the woman, though he seems to be directing his ire just as much at the waddling, unfazed geese.

THE EVENING FOG
is starting to rise when we reach our destination: an observation tower in the
DMZ
. We look around at the rolling, verdant landscape. The tiger has significant symbolic value in Korea, and perhaps the notion that a few Siberian tigers have survived in the
DMZ
is an expression of the enduring dream that the Korean spirit will reunite North and South. The demilitarized zone is like a wildlife reservation — a sanctuary for a number of rare birds, an unusual breed of wild goat, Amur leopards, lynx, and a few Asian black bears. No tigers have been spotted, but tracks such as claw marks and carrion have been found.