North Korea Undercover (12 page)

Despite all this, I did meet one North Korean entrepreneur, but not in North Korea.

Meet Jimmy the Gold-Smuggler. He’s a tinychap, only 5 foot 2 inches tall, but he carries with him his own personal high voltage charge. Jimmy – not his real name – is lithe and vivid and, as the North Korean regime found out to their cost, as hard to control as an electric eel. He was the runt of the litter, far smaller than his two brothers who ended up in the army. When he was
little, his big brothers would save his bacon when he got into a scrap. His family were ordinary folk, his father a factory worker off sick because of bronchitis, his mother working on a farm, but they were doing better than most because the two oldest sons were in the army. They were not rebels, but regime conformists, who did their best to stay alive while doing pretty much exactly what they were told. Jimmy was the black sheep.

The family lived in the forgotten far north-east corner of Korea in the town of Saebyol in North Hamgyong province, only an hours walk from China. The border isformed by the Tumen river running down from its source, the sacred Mount Baekdu – where regime legend has it that Kim Jong Il was born – to the East Sea or Sea of Japan. Up in the hills, the Tumen divides China and North Korea and then close to the sea forms the border between North Korea and Russia for its last 11 miles. The Russian name of the river is Tumannaya, which means foggy. In the dead of winter, the surface of the river freezes over, making it so easy to cross all you have to do is run. In the late autumn and early spring, the ice is weak, and great care must be taken because the current is strong and drowning a serious possibility.

Jimmy had a friend, let’s call him Mark, a smuggler who was making a small fortune bringing in second-hand clothes from China. Around 1997, when the famine was at its height, Mark told Jimmy that North Korea was much poorer than China. The famine had shattered much of Jimmy’s belief in the system. He’d seen dead babies, dead old people, dead middle-aged people lying slumped in the street, at railway stations or just by the doorstep of their homes. Never many bodies in one place, he said, just one or two.

At fifteen, Jimmy got the itch to travel and one moonless night
in late November, around two o’clock in the morning, when the guards were, he hoped, asleep, he found himself face-down, crawling across ice not even as thick asyour finger, the only sounds the creaking of the ice as it took his weight and the barking of dogs from China. The Tumen here, far away from the sea, was around 100 metres across, and most of the surface was hard ice. But the middle section, around 10 metres across, was perilously thin. Jimmy described a trick the smugglers used: they took two sticks, maybe 5 feet long each, and crawled forward, one in each hand, using them to spread their weight and get some traction on the ice. One stick at a time, Jimmy crawled on. To be fair, at 5 foot 2 and not an ounce of fat on him, he would stand a far better chance at crossing thin ice than you or I.

He made it. On the other side, Jimmy gorged himself with five or six bowls of white rice at one sitting. Everything Mark had told him about China turned out to be true: the food was abundant, you could eat meat and white rice every day, luxuries you only had on feast days back home, the electricity worked, you could watch whatever you wanted on telly, you could go to karaoke bars and party all night long.

Jimmy returned with 40 kilos of second-hand clothes on his back – the bag he used was the same size as he was. They smuggled second-hand ‘sports clothes’, T-shirts, trousers – they were not allowed to wear jeans in North Korea then – into the North. Jimmy reckoned that, if the average wage was 500 won a month, he made around 2,000 won, worth roughly £200 ($170), around four months’ pay in one run across the border. He could have been shot by the border guards or captured and then executed, but he loved the buzz.

He did his best to keep his family in the dark about what he was
up to. But the regime s spell over him was entirely broken. Jimmy was determined to go back, and did so, again and again. Each trip, his profits grew. And then, trouble. He was on the Chinese side of the river, working his way from village to village, trying to keep away from the Chinese border guards and the police until he could get to the town where he could get hold of more second-hand clothes, when he was caught. He spent a week in a police cell in China. They fed him properly, three times a day, and then he was sent back to North Korea. He was only sixteen, and categorized as a simple ‘border-crosser’, not a political defector, and after a roughish time, they let him go.

His family were angry with him, and they beat him up a little, but that didn’t dent his conviction that there was something profoundly wrong about North Korea. Pretty soon he was on his way back into China. Not long after, Jimmy realized that smuggling second-hand clothes from China to North Korea was never going to make him a rich man. Instead, he switched to smuggling a commodity out of North Korea, where there were no real markets, into China. That commodity was gold. Jimmy explained that in the north of North Korea there was plenty of gold. Miners would sell you nuggets for a fraction of the price he could obtain in China; if you looked in the right place, you could find some yourself, just lying in streams or on the surface of the earth. His trade built up, he got to know ‘fences’ on the Chinese side who would give him a good price for his gold. He also realized that with gold – far less bulky than second-hand clothes – he could swim across the river when it wasn’t frozen, tripling his potential profits. Boats were never an option. They would be spotted by the border guards and destroyed. The more often he crossed the border, the richer he became. His biggest shipment had been 900 grams of raw gold
nuggets worth around 150,000 won (£15,000, $17,000) and everything worked brilliantly. And then he got too greedy.

Inside North Korea, someone betrayed him, and he was trapped by the police and caught with his biggest cache of gold yet: 3 kilos, worth 500,000 won (£50,000,$65,000). Had he been eighteen when he was arrested with 3 kilos of North Korean gold, he would have been executed, he said, but because he was a minor he just got fifteen years in prison, hard labour.

He ended up in Prison Camp 12, also known as the Chongori Re-Education Centre. His camp was for common criminals, not part of the political gulag. But conditions sound grim. Everyone who enters the camp is greeted by a big black metal gate, and when it opens up a big sign behind it says, ‘Escape is suicide!’

Jimmy admitted he had a hard time, but back then, around the turn of the millennium, Prison Camp 12 was not one of those nightmare camps you hear about where guards kill people for fun. People, he said, just died from malnutrition. He was hungry for a whole year. They gave the prisoners three thimbles of corn a day or some salty soup, sometimes with bits of cabbage. The food was so bad that even a pig would have turned his nose up. If anyone managed to catch a rat, they were the luckiest person alive because it was at least meat. Some people ate grass, others bits of corn in cowshit.

His mother got him out after a year, bribing the doctors and the guards, claiming he had tuberculosis. It cost his mum around £400, a kings ransom in North Korea. The authorities are nervous of anyone with TB. With a prison population on the edge of starvation, dozens can die with one outbreak, and that can be bad for production targets. Corruption has grown more common, by all accounts, since the famine. Money can only buy so much: if
someone is in serious trouble with the Bowibu, then no amount of money can save them.

Since Jimmy was banged up inside Prison Camp 12 – around the year 2000 – conditions have reportedly got far worse. It’s become the main prison camp for would-be ‘border-crossers’, people who jump the border to make money, not necessarily to defect for good. But since the famine, when everything went to pot, crossing the border has been treated more severely. The One Free Korea website reports hard labour is much heavier at Prison Camp 12 than at other ordinary re-education centres, and torture and beatings are routine. The website says that anybody who has crossed the border is automatically sentenced to up to three years of forced labour at Prison Camp 12, under instructions that they are to be punished as traitors. This marks a change from Jimmy’s period of captivity, when ‘simple defectors’ – not gold-smugglers – got a few months in prison and then were freed.

One defector who had a hair’s-breadth escape from Prison Camp 12 said: ‘Chongori is a living hell. Yodok [the notorious Camp 15] is a much better place.’ If the physical beatings don’t finish them off, inmates of Prison Camp 12 are doomed to die of malnutrition.
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The website’s information squares with the general clamp-down against defectors running to China, which has taken place in the last five years. Similarly, numbers of successful defections to South Korea have fallen by half. It fits that the authorities are not just stepping up border patrols, but making life far tougher on those who try to defect.

Another inmate of Prison Camp 12, Lee Jun Ha, wrote a diary
of his experience, published by the Daily NK website.
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It’s a haunting read, and it backs up details of Jimmy’s story. Lee recalled that, when he entered the camp, he saw a large metal entrance gate: ‘To the right, written in large black letters were two frightening warnings: “Those caught trying to escape will be shot!” and “Escape is suicide!”’

Lee continued: ‘Off to the left I saw a group of inmates with sanitation tags on their arms haphazardly loading logs on to a big truck labelled “Independence #82”. Or I thought they were logs, anyway. As I looked closer I realized they were corpses. My heart rose into my throat and I went stiff. Only one thought came to me, “I’m a dead man.”’

Jimmy’s ‘sick letter’ trick only worked for a while, though. After a spell, the authorities want you back in prison. To deal with that problem, Jimmy went on the run, and while on the run it made sense to get back to the only job he knew well: smuggling gold to China. He got caught three times, and he managed to escape three times.

The first time, he was fingered by someone in China. The military caught him but it was too late at night to take him to a proper cell, so one of the soldiers handcuffed him to the post of a bunk bed and then crashed out, fast asleep. Using the skills he learnt as a key-cutter in Prison Camp 12, Jimmy unpicked the lock of the handcuffs and was out of the barracks before you could say ‘Kim Jong Il’. The second time he got nicked was in North Korea. He was locked in an office with iron bars over the windows, while
the authorities went looking for further evidence against him. While they were away, he used a poker from the fireplace stove to jemmy open the bars of the windows and – remember he is the smallest fully grown man I’ve ever met – wriggled out through the gap to freedom. The third time was the most unlucky. He got caught close to his home town, and that made everything more difficult. Elsewhere in North Korea he could grease palms, but in his home area the authorities knew he had previous. Execution or an eternity in Prison Camp 12 were the only options. He’d been locked in a room. There was no way out. Or so he thought, at first. He studied the doorframe and noticed there was a significant gap between it and the door. Through that gap he realized that the door was not properly locked but held on a latch. He searched the room and found a length of wire – and he was out.

The risks of continuing the smuggling lark were just too great. By this time he’d met and fallen in love with a woman who had become his wife, let’s call her Grace. She was reluctant to leave, being, he explained, much more brainwashed than he was, but she didn’t want to split with him, so the two of them dared to try and make it across to China, one last time.

It was March 2003, and the once-frozen river had thawed since the winter, although chunks of ice as big as boulders still flowed downstream. Grace was very scared, so to reduce her distress he swam across the river carrying her on his shoulders. It was an extraordinary feat, because the river at that crossing point was 120 metres wide, the water freezing and he is such a tiny man. Once on the Chinese bank, he collapsed and passed out for an hour.

Although Jimmy had known what life was like outside the North, for Grace it was a great shock, and after a few days she wanted to go back, even though she could see life was better in
China. He won the argument, knowing that to go back would mean certain death. Jimmy had saved up a lot of money and he had plenty of contacts in China, so within twenty days he and Grace managed to get to Vietnam, where they waited three months for an opportunity to be sent to South Korea, and then spent another three months in an immigration centre. Once there, the terror of being caught and sent back was gone, and Grace settled into her new life well.

After working a couple of years in South Korea, he was the victim of a confidence trickster and lost a lot of his money. It broke his confidence because he didn’t know that conmen would take advantage of people like him. Upset and at a loss, a relative suggested that he and Grace come to Britain.

The Gold-Smuggler turned Harry Houdini of North Korea now makes his living as a fishmonger in New Malden, in southwest London, just off the A3.

Jimmy’s thrived in Britain, and is making so much money that he can afford to send back £1,000 every six months or so. He wires the money to a broker in China, who takes a cut. The cash, most commonly in Chinese yuan, is smuggled across the river to another broker on the North Korean side. The smuggling is often done by border guards, the brokers their relatives or friends. The brokers, Chinese and North Korean, together take a slice of around 30 per cent, so Jimmy’s mum ends up with £700 – not bad for the black sheep of the family. They live so close to the border that she has a Chinese phone. She rings once, and he phones her back. They talk on the phone to make sure that the money has come, that they haven’t been cheated, and chat about simple, family things. They last spoke two months before we met. Kwon, my translator, had his computer out and together we looked at his old home town on
Google Earth. The sight of it made him homesick. He’d go back tomorrow, if they would let him do so in peace. Which, of course, they won’t. When he sees North Koreans weeping over Kim Jong Un on the television, he thinks they are stupid and naive. I asked him whether he thought the tears of joy were genuine. He said yes, because they have only ever lived inside the North Korean bubble. On Kim Three, Jimmy said that he hoped he dies, either the West knock him down or someone inside the North overthrows him, the quicker, the better. And at that, rebellious as ever, he broke into a grin.