North Korea Undercover (17 page)

The passengers were long dead.

The corpse train spread the contagion of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to North Korea. Kim Il Sung, the father of the halfnation, was denounced by Mao’s Red Guards as a ‘fat counter-revolutionary pig’.
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Kim did not challenge his massive neighbour to the north directly. Rather, he created his own version of Mao’s murderous paranoia, purging
North Koreaof all ‘unclean’, ‘impure’ or foreign elements. The logic was simple: the purer the nation, the safer Kim’s grip on power.

But the purge didn’t just kill current enemies. It looked back-wards in time for potential treason, too. In dictatorships like North Korea, history can kill. The old Soviet joke understood the danger from the past: ‘Trouble is you never know what’s going to happen yesterday.’
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The crocodile’s tail of yesterday’s history becoming today’s treason was probably no more lethal than in North Korea at the time of the Summer of Love.

That wasn’t good news for two life long Communists who had come to North Korea to help the struggle continue by translating the works of Kim Il Sung. Ali Lameda was a Venezuelan poet living in exile in East Berlin in 1965 when he first made contact with the North Koreans. The notion that beguiled Ali was that North Korea was socialism’s shining city on a hill, one of the vanguards of world revolution. He arrived in Pyongyang in the middle of 1966, taking charge of the Spanish section of the Department of Foreign Publications. There, he met the Grand Old Man himself, Kim Il Sung, and also Park Hun Choi, a senior government minister.

Ali translated Kim’s works and regime propaganda, already in English, into Spanish. His colleague was Jacques Sedillot, a Frenchman, also known as Manuel Cedillo, more than sixty years old, who had fought for the Left in Spain and Algeria. He translated the regime’s English into French. Ali described him: ‘A magnificent man, truly internationalist, honest and courageous.’ The two became firm friends.

The Venezuelan was treated handsomely, boasting a special apartment at the Pyongyang International Hotel and a car and driver. His German girlfriend, Elvira Tanzer, came with him to Pyongyang: ‘I went because I was so in love with him/she later said. But the curious anomie of North Korea set in, like dismal drizzle. Ali noted that his driver was changed weekly, so he could never establish afriendly relationship with any of them. Ali explained: ‘We felt stifled ... [an] over whelming feeling of isolation... However much my sympathy lay with the great work of national construction of the Korean people, I could never communicate.’
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Ali wrote to his friends and family abroad, sharing his sense of frustration at this enforced isolation. Innocently expecting his private correspondence to remainprivate, he condemned North Korea’s abject poverty and suggested that this was not the Communism he had dreamed of.

The work was deeply frustrating. Ali and Jacques set about translating the regime’s fairy tale. But the fables of Kim Il Sung, the child prodigy, were blackly farcical. Things came to a head when Jacques was dispatched to France to recruit more translators. Instead of carrying out his instructions to the letter, Jacques, who had after all been a colonel in the Republican Army against Franco’s Fascists, undertook an opinion poll, asking around 250 people what they thought of North Korean propaganda. Ali summarized Jacques’ report: ‘Propaganda which says that, at 14, Kim Il Sung was the leader of the Communist Party, had launched a revolution and directed an army – a child leadinga Communist Party revolution in a country
without a Communist Party, beating the Japanese army, and so on, it seems very hard to believe.’

Jacques’ report also touched on Kim Il Sung directly, reflecting an opinion from a French source who made an unflattering comparison between the modesty of the Nicaraguan revolutionary hero Augusto Cesar Sandino and the Great Leader. Alis reaction was sensible:‘ When he showed it to me, I told him what a good report it was, a first-class piece of work, but, as regards Kim Il Sung, he should, I suggested, obliterate that.’ The Frenchman stuck to his guns, arguing that the Koreans should change their propaganda.

Michael Harrold, a somewhat eccentric British sub-editorwho spent seven years in Pyongyang from 1987, bemoaned the absurd quality of the propaganda he had to deal with:‘ I got one across my desk today – “The Yankee soldiers took out their bayonets and sliced through the womens breasts like bean curd!”’
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The precise trigger for the disaster that befell Ali and Jacques is not quite clear. Izidor Urian, Ceausescu’s translator, told me that he had met Ali. The former Romanian diplomat explained that on a tour of the Museum of Korean History, Ali had walked past statues of past Korean emperors, about which his guides said ‘absolutely nothing’. When they came to a statue of Kim Il Sung, Ali asked: ‘And which emperor is this?’ ‘This,’ said Izidor, ‘was the starting point of his tragedy.’

Ali wrote that in September 1967 the two translators went to a banquet thrown for employees of the Department of Foreign Publications. Ali made veiled jokes tilting at Kim Il Sung. Jacques, a quieter man, was probably more discreet but the Koreans knew about his report questioning
the vanity and absurdity of the propaganda. Three days later, there was knock at Ali’s door. Two police officers and seven plainclothes men from ‘Public Security’, the Bowibu, told Ali that he was an enemy of the Korean people – no formal charges were mentioned – and led him away. His girlfriend, Elvira, was left alone, forbidden to leave the city. That same night, Jacques was also arrested. He was accused of being a French imperialist spy, the blackest possible insult for a life long Communist and veteran of the civil wars in Spain and Algeria. Ali wrote of the charge against his friend: ‘It was grotesque for it to be said that he was a spy, an “agent of French imperialism”.’ Later, their boss, the Korean director of the Translation Department, was also picked up.

Ali found himself in a damp, cold cell 7 feet long by 3 wide in the Interior Ministry prison, and the long, endless nightmare began. He was interrogated for twelve hours at a stretch, the formula remaining the same.

Confess, they said.

‘Confess what?’

You know what there is to confess. Talk.

‘But if it is you who are accusing me, youtell me.’

The sounds of the prison were bleak beyond the saying of it. People coughing up blood, random howls, screams. ‘You can soon learn to distinguish whether a manis crying from fear, or pain or from madness.’

He was not routinely tortured like the others. On one occasion, a guard, furious that he had not showed sufficient deference, gave him a beating, kicking him with his boots and hitting him on the soles of his bare feet. To persuade him to confess, they used hunger as a weapon. Better to be beaten, Ali wrote, as it is possible to grind one’s teeth and withst and
physical pain; to becontinuously starving is worse. When they did feed him, the meal was a hunk of dirty bread, weighing about 250 grams, and a bowl of water with a few chunks of vegetable in it. The metal dishes the food was served on were always filthy, the same ones the prisoners had been using for years, never washed. No change of clothes. To his knowledge, theonly medicines used to treat prisoners were terramycin, an anti-bacterial drug, and cooking oil.

‘Young prison guards newly assigned to the camp often expressed their amazement at such conditions,’ wrote Ali. ‘I was nottortured, if by this one means the systematic infliction of pain but, if terrible hunger and continual nastiness come underthis definition, then I was.’

When Ali was released one year later, he had lost 22 kilos (501b, or more than 4 stone). He was covered in sores, seeping blood. After two months under house arrest, they told him that he would be free to leave the country, but that Elvira had to go first. He was allowed tosee her off at the airport and returned to pack his bags. They were playing with him.

At five o’clock in the evening, the police returned, more brutal than before. He asked why they were arresting him for a second time. ‘You know why,’ they told him. Ali concluded they had installed a microphone in their apartment and had recorded his conversations with Elvira. ‘What did they expect me to say to her, when I returned from a year’s detention in such a bad physical condition?’

His literary work had been confiscated on the orders of the Party Central Committee; it was described as ‘bourgeois filth’. His second arrest, Ali wrote, ‘after believing I was at last to be released, was one of the worst moments I was forced toendure.’ Then came his trial. It was a joke,
but not a funny one. He asked fora lawyer of his choice and that the tribunal should be held in the open, but such demands were dismissed as‘bourgeois’. Ali was provided with a so-called ‘defence counsel’. The only peoplepresent apart from the judges were two uniformed policemen and a young interpreter. The trial lasted for one day, from nineo’clock in the morning till five in the afternoon. He was suffering from fever and was given nothing to eat all day. Like his interrogators, the judges demanded that he confess his guilt. The tribunal did not make any specific accusations – there were no formal charges – but the accused had to accuse himself before the tribunal.

‘Thus,’ wrote Ali,‘there was no necessity for the tribunal to produce any evidence. I had no right to defend myself, I could only admitguilt.’

Ali did not oblige, but insisted that he had committed no crimes, that he had only come to Korea as a servant of the government. When he tried to ask questions, he was abruptly interrupted and told that he had no right to defend himself.

The prosecutor informed him that he had been in Korea to sabotage, spy and introduce infiltrators, that he was working for the CIA.

Ali said that was absurd.

The prosecutor read from the Penal Code, which emphasized the gravity of his crime and demanded the maximum penalty for the crimes he had committed: death. Ali’s defence counsel chipped in, making a lengthy eulogy to Kim Il Sung, and asked for twenty years for his client. The tribunal retired for five minutes and came back, granting Ali’s defence brief his wish: two decades with forced labour. Ali was handcuffed to the bars of a Black Maria for three hours. The temperature outside was way below freezing. Opposite him in the van, sitting on
a seat, was a guard who spent the journey loading and unloading his gun.

Outside, the howling of wolves.

The mountain country of North Korea in winter is beyond cold. Temperatures regularly drop below –20 degrees Celsius. Ali was dumped in a filthy cell, where heslept on the bare floor, with no blanket or mattress. He stayed there, constantly handcuffed, fearing his wrists would break with the strain.

After three weeks, he was taken to the main camp around ten o’clock at night, and placed in a cell which had no heating apart from for five minutes at night when apipe burbled with hot water. The windows were iced up. His feet froze, and stayed frozen for six weeks. His toes became hideously swollen, all his toenails fell out and he could only hobble because of the sores and ulcers on his feet.

His main source of information was the prison screws, who let drop that he had been put in a punishment cell, which should not really have happened, but since he was a foreigner, and it was the first time a foreigner had ever been held at the camp, there was no isolation cell in which to hold him. As a foreigner, he was not to be allowed to come into contact with the other prisoners.

The prison regime was always the same: the prisoner must sit cross-legged, perfectly still, for sixteen hours, from six o’clock in the morning until ten at night. He must be rock steady, immobile, looking straight ahead towards the bars of his cell. The bars were iron rods thatran from ceiling down to the floor. Between the cells was a corridor along which the guards patrolled. The prisoners had to stay awake all day. The official explanation was that a prisoner should be constantly examining his conscience. A prisoner must not stretch his legs. If he did so, he was beaten. Ali found this last rule unbearable. He lost
all feeling in his left leg, and hefeared that he would end up paralysed.

The cold, the filth, the hunger and the loneliness were beyond words. Barefoot, afflicted by lice, diarrhoea and fevers, knowing nothing of what was happening outside the bars that imprisoned him, Ali found himself living a Kafka story. To survive, he wrote poetry inside his head and recalled Oscar Wilde’s
The Ballad of Beading Gaol.

I never saw sad men who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

We prisoners called the sky.

Worst of all, Ali feared that no one in the outside world had any idea where he was. It was a 1960s version of the oubliette, the medieval torture by which prisoners were dropped into a hole and forgotten.

Once, he came across a French prisoner, a man who said that he was a French journalist who lived at 2, Rue d’Alembert, Paris, that his name was‘Pierre...’ but the stranger had spoken too much, and the guard smashed his rifle butt into him, so the surnameremains unknown.
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In Paris, I knocked on the door of the building. No one knew of a Pierre who vanished forty years ago.

From chatting to the screws and snatched conversations with other prisoners, Ali started to work out how many camps there were. He concluded that the gulag contained some 150,000 souls spread around some twenty camps.

Ali is long dead, but I
managed to track down his nephew, Carlos David, an artist who lives in Paris. Sitting in his tiny flat in Alfortville, decorated with a 1973 posterin Spanish, ‘Free The Poet Ali Lameda’, Carlos told me how word some how got back to Venezuela that Ali was locked up in North Korea. Elvira is the most likely source, but I have so far failed to trace her. Carlos’s father, Carlos Diaz Sosa, Ali’s brother-in-law, was a Venezuelan journalist turned diplomat. He used his contacts in Communist embassies to put the word out. For years, they heard nothing. Every entreaty was met with no response. They had no idea whether Ali was still alive. Then in 1973, North Korea started the long road towards becoming a member of the United Nations, and its Foreign Minister, looking around for votes, asked the Venezuelan legation in New York for their vote. The Venezuelans asked: What about Ali Lameda? The Foreign Minister asked: ‘Is that a rock on the railway track?’ The Venezuelans nodded. The Foreign Ministersaid he had no idea of the case, but would report back. Eventually, word came back from Pyongyang that Ali Lamedawas alive, and then pressure from Caracas grew. Carlos Diaz Sosa asked the Cubans to intercede but, it seems, Castro did not lift a finger, thanks to a doctrinal dispute between the Cuban and Venezuelan Communist Parties. Everytime the Venezuelans threw a diplomatic reception and heard that the North Koreans would be attending, in capitalslike Warsaw and Prague, Carlos Diaz Sosa flew in from London, where he was based, and presented the North Koreans with letters for Kim Il Sung and the imprisoned poet.