North Korea Undercover (21 page)

In January 2013, Sophie Schmidt went with her father, Google founder Eric Schmidt, and former New Mexico governor and UN ambassador Bill Richardson, to Pyongyang. Sophie wrote:

Our trip was a mixture of highly-staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments. We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders . . . Ordinary North Koreans live in a near-total information bubble without any true frame of reference . . . The best description we could come up with is that it’s like
The Truman Show
, on a national scale. At the Kim Il-sung University e-Library, there was one problem: no one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. Moredisturbing: when our group walked in – a noisy bunch, with media in tow – not one of them looked up from theirdesks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have beenfigurines.
⁴

Sophie and I may both be entirely wrong and the people reading at the Grand Study House and Kim Il Sung University were not
faking it. But after a few days in North Korea you become soused to questioning the evidence of your own eyes that what you see feels fake.

One day, after a particularly arduous stretch of bumpety-bump on the long empty motorway, we had an impromptu toilet stop. We tumbled out of the bus desperate for a couple of minutes of terra firma. With nothing to see for miles our minders didn’t follow us, for once. After a few moments of fresh air, we were summoned back on to the bus. As I walked past Mr Hyun, I could see he was hunched over, engrossed like a little boy, reading something. I peered over and was surprised to see it was a comic book. But this was not Superman, Batman or Incredible Hulk. It was cartoon images of North Korean soldiers bayoneting, blowing up or otherwise killing the American-bastards. I realized then that Mr Hyun was more of a believer than I had thought. In his own free time he was choosing to read the regime’s cartoon propaganda and by the looks of things thoroughly enjoying it. Later that same day as we zipped past endless fields I saw a woman on a chair reading a book. Nothing remarkable about it except that the image stood out. Everywhere in the West, people read: books, magazines, Kindles, newspapers. Yet over there I only saw one person reading a book. But then what are you going to read? World literature? Books on economics or philosophy? Not likely.

Marxism-Leninism back in 1945, Jucheism from the late1950s, Kimilsungism from the 1980s, and now a hideous mutation of all three have squatted like a great toad on the North Korean mind. Dictatorships survive by enforcing ignorance, by keeping people under-educated. Gaddafi did this by making it virtually impossible for ordinary Libyans to learn English. But it strikes me that this process has been taken to a far deeper level in the DPRK.

Are North Koreans brainwashed? And if they are, how deep does the brainwashing go?

Mark Fitzpatrick is a witty American who has spent far too much of his life, first in the State Department and now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, thinking about stopping nuclear Armageddon, triggered by the men from Pyongyang. His day job has scarred him. He does have a touch of the Dr Strangelove about him. He told me: ‘It certainly would appear that the North Koreans, are brainwashed. When you talk to North Koreans, you can have a normal conversation and think I’m really dealing with a human being and then all of a sudden they go into this robotic recitation of North Korean policy and you wanna shake them and say, “Come on, get real.”’

The Korean civil war made the term ‘brainwashing’ fashionable. Thought reform has a long history, perhaps starting with the Spanish Inquisition, perhaps before; refined and darkened by Stalin’s secret police, the horror of mental enslavement brilliantly told in Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon.
But brainwashing per se was introduced to a wider public by Richard Condon in his 1959 novel
The Manchurian Candidate
, about a returning American ex-prisoner of war who seeks high office in the United States but is in fact controlled by the Communists, a story retold for Israeli TV viewers as
Hatufim
, which was itself picked up by US TV and retold as
Homeland.
The motor of the plot of all three is: can we trust a warrior who has been held in captivity by the enemy? Or does he still belong to them?

On brainwashing, the odd circularity of life breaks in: the world’s great expert on the subject is a man called Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism:

A Study of ‘Brainwashing in China.
⁵
I was introduced to Lifton’s work by Bruce Hines while I was investigating Scientology. Hines was at one time an auditor – Scientology’s word for confessor – who used to minister to Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Alley and Tom Cruise. But he saw the light, and got out.

Lifton, an American military psychiatrist, spent the1950s interviewing Allied ex-prisoners who had been captured during the Korean war and held in North Korea, and then Chinese and European victims of Chairman Mao’s totalitarian state. He explains that the term ‘brainwashing’ was first used by the American journalist Edward Hunter as a translation of the colloquialism
hsi nao
(literally, ‘wash brain’), which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use after the Communist takeover.

Later, Lifton set out three defining characteristics of a cult: first, ‘All cults have a charismatic leader, who himself or herself increasingly becomes the object of worship, and in many cases, the dispenser of immortality. Spiritual ideas of a general kind give way to this deification of the leader.’ Secondly, in cults there is some kind of ‘thought reform,’ popularly known as brainwashing. Thirdly, ‘There is a pattern of manipulation and exploitation from above, by leaders and ruling coteries, and idealism from below, on the part of supplicants and recruits.’ To sum up Lifton’s definers for a cult: one, the Leader is God; two, brainwashing; three, harm. On two out of three, it’s a no-brainer: North Korea is a cult. And brainwashing?

Lifton sets out eight tests for brainwashing.
⁶
Test number one is
‘Milieu Control’ or constriction, throttling of information. Lifton writes: ‘The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside(all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also – in his penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell’s
1984
.’ The most basic consequence of this information control, says Lifton, ‘is the disruption of balance between self and outside world’.

Lifton’s seven other tests for brainwashing are ‘Mystical Manipulation’ – a sense that the group ideology is beyond rational analysis; ‘The Demand for Purity’ – that the in-group is pure, and outsiders are impure; ‘The Cult of Confession’ – that self-criticism is a public good; ‘The Sacred Science’ – that the group’s ideology is holy; ‘Loading the Language’ – that words mean what the group’s leaders want them to mean; ‘Doctrine over Person’ – that the individual has no rights; and ‘The Dispensing of Existence’ – that the masses must be willing to surrender life for the good of the whole. The professor sums up his eight tests: ‘The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform or “brainwashing”.’

Quite a few people are highly sceptical that such a thing as brainwashing really exists. They cite legal precedents in the courts in the United States, which rule out ‘brainwashing’ as a defence. That may be sensible in a democracy, but it does not quite mean that the
term has no use at all. Some prefer using the phrase ‘thought reform’, such as Jonathan Mirsky, one of the great experts on China, who called it ‘The Auschwitz of the Mind’. I have yet to meet a North Korean defector who objected to the word ‘brainwashing’. I talked to two defectors who have endedup in London’s Korea Town, New Malden, just off the A3, and asked them about their lives and whether they felt they had been brainwashed.

I asked Mary Lou whether she ever had any doubts about North Korea when she lived there, and she said she never had an inkling. She only realized how bad North Korea was when she left it, and then convinced her parents to escape as well. She told me a story about when she was in high school; there was this good-looking, strapping young boy who was also extremely smart, perfect all round. All the girls were crazy about him, and when he went into the army all the girls cried, because they were sad to see him go. That was the last she saw of him, until many years later when she noticed him at a train station among the homeless beggars. He had lost all his weight and was only a few days from death. He had lost so much weight in the army because of the lack of food, they had sent him home, but his family couldn’t look after him either. So he eventually left home, and ended up there. She bought him a sweet with what little money she had, but he wouldn’t take it because he
felt embarrassed, especially because she had known him in his prime. She popped it in his mouth anyway, but he couldn’t even control his saliva and was dribbling. He couldn’t even move to stop her, or wipe himself. She said the homeless man next to him was also barebones, with a cut on his leg next to the knee that had become infected, and flies had laid their eggs in there. He had a little stick and was flicking the larvae that were coming out. Even seeing all this, Mary Lou said, she never thought there was anything wrong with North Korea, and that this friend was just down on his luck. It’s only looking back now that she realizes how awful it was.

‘Mary Lou’ still has a brother inside the North – hence her transparently un-Korean name. She’s in her mid-thirties, an attractive, feisty woman, lively, casually dressed with a hint of bling. She was born in an area called Shinpo Shi, which is in the middle of the eastern coast. Their house was a small two-floor apartment in a block of flats. Outside Pyongyang the flats are generally only about five storeys high because there are no elevators, or, if there are, they don’t work.

In 1997, at the height of the famine, her family moved by train to the sacred Mount Baekdu, where Kim Jong Il was born, according to the official scripture, although that, of course, is a fiction. ‘The train was packed, people sitting on top of each other. The journey from the east coast up to a town close to the Chinese border should have taken only eight hours, but it took ten days. It was very slow. There were so many power failures. I would see people falling asleep, I would try and slap them, and discovered they were dead.’

How many died? ‘I don’t know. All the ordinary people died. Anyone who had energy left tried to escape to China. I saw dozens of people at stations and in market places, starving. You became used to it. So many dead it wasn’t even an event... to see a corpse became unremarkable. Sometimes, at the railway stations, the railway workers would kick the people out... you could see them outside the apartment blocks... they would die from exposure... lying under plastic bags... in a corner away from the wind... you would see heaps of the dead.’

Mary Lou didn’t escape because she had planned it or wanted to,
but she was coerced into it by human traffickers. In 1998she had gone to an area called Hyesan-shi, which borders China, to sell stuff at the market. On her way, all her bags were stolen. She said theft was rife because everyone was struggling. She met a friend at Hyesan-shi, who had also had all her things stolen. They had nothing to sell, no money and no way to get back home. After three days of being stuck in Hyesan, a North Korean guy came up to them and asked them to come with him to China for a day, promising that they would make more money in a day working at a Chinese farm than they would have made selling all their things. Seeing as they had no choice they decided to give it a go.

At the border, Mary Lou noticed that the land on the North Korean side of the river was barren, but on the Chinese side, full of trees. The smuggler knew where to go. They crossed the river in the dead of night, no moon shining, and the water up to her chest. How cold was it? ‘I was so scared I didn’t notice.’ She reckoned the smuggler might have paid off the guards.

I asked what her first impressions of China were. ‘In North Korea, at night the only lights you see are the ones that shine on the statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. I looked back, it was very dark. Ahead, I saw neon lights, red, blue. I thought it was for a show, but there were lights in every house, even tiny little villages had electricity.’

They got in a car and were driven deeper into China, further and further away from the border. They spent a night at a house, changed cars at various points, and everyone was really nice to them, saying they would get work, and that they would take them back to North Korea when they were done, never realizing that as they were changing cars, they were being handed off or sold on to other buyers.

Slowly it dawned on her that she wasn’t just going to work on a farm. True enough, Mary Lou had been sold off to a farmer, a lonely ethnic Korean, the majority population in the borderlands. He’d bought her, lock, stock and barrel. ‘When I went to the house of the man who bought me, I saw a whole stack of potatoes leaning against an outhouse. The spuds were shrivelled. They had frozen, then thawed, they were half rotten, but in North Korea they were good food. I was startled and said: “Why are potatoes outside? I could make potato cakes.”’

The man explained: ‘We don’t eat that. That’s for the pigs.’

‘My pride was hurt. Not just the pig food, but also the fact that I had been duped into being sold off in the first place. He wasn’t a bad man, this first husband, but I was twenty-one and you have dreams about the kind of man you want to marry. He was twenty-seven and already he was looking down on me. One day my father-in-law said something rude about Kim Jong Il, and I cried. I wanted to go back to North Korea.’