North Korea Undercover (22 page)

This last sentence suggests that Mary Lou had been profoundly brainwashed, her mind-set so narrow and forcibly blinkered that she preferred to return to North Korea than eat. But her ignorance of China, and the distance she had already travelled, made it impossible for her to go back. Slowly, she adapted, and slowly it began to sink in that everything she had learnt in her entire life so far had been a cruel lie.

Eventually, Mary Lou had to leave China, because she was ratted out and caught by the police. Although she was meant to be deported back to North Korea, her husband paid them off and got her released. Because she didn’t have the right permits or paperwork, she and her husband decided to go to a bigger city, where it would be harder for them to be discovered. They did, but even
there, there was a danger of being caught. So her husband eventually decided to let her leave China and go to South Korea. She left in 2002, got to Seoul, found herself a new husband, like her a North Korean refugee, and had two kids. She decided to come to Britain because she felt her children were being discriminated against in South Korea – a common complaint made by Koreans from the North. She now lives in New Malden, drives an Audi estate, and her children’s English is getting better than their Korean.

Mary Lou had last spoken to her brother, who is still inside the North, via a Chinese mobile phone the previous month. He travels up to a place very close to the Chinese border, where the signal from the Chinese phone masts can reach inside North Korea, and they have a conversation. She also sends him money.

‘I wire the broker in China £3,000. My brother “Richard” gets £1,500 in Chinese yuan in the North.’ This is a small fortune in North Korea, and perversely makes the decision for him and his family to escape that much harder. The remaining£1,500 is split between the Chinese middleman and the North Korean broker, who smuggles the cash across and gets it to Richard and organizes the phone call. The deal takes place in a house close by the Chinese border, up a mountain where the phone signal is good. ‘Without the phone call,’ she said, ‘I can’t be sure that Richard gets the money.’

The sad thing is that much of the time on the phone they spend arguing: ‘I always try and convince him to leave. It would only cost between £5,000 and£7,000 for him, his wife and the baby to get out. But he feels betrayed by the rest of his family. He has no idea what it is like outside. Our brother went into the army, placed him in a good position, but the rest of us have fled, so that is a cause of frustration and upset for him.’

Does Richard have any idea how poor North Korea is? ‘He knows that North Korea is struggling because of America but he is not really aware. We argue. I say: “North Korea is poor,” he says: “Don’t talk like that . . .”’

Do you think your brother is brainwashed?

‘Yes. Anyone who is aware get sout . . .’

Is it like locked-in syndrome? ‘Yes – because no one can say anything. Everyone has been trained by the government to spy on each another. If there were three of us talking, one would be spying. I always worry that the phone is being listened in to . . . Sometimes the signal breaks or the phone crackles . . . We worry that they’re spying on us . . .’

Would she ever go back?

‘If I could go home without the government killing me and keep my money, then I would go back. I still dream about North Korea.

‘I have nightmares, too . . .’

What kind of nightmares?

‘It’s always about the train journey during the famine. The people in the nightmare, their faces are formless. But they are starving, pinched, filthy. I notice they’ve fallen over, lying slumped on the floor. I tell a train guard . . . The bodies are covered with hessian sacks and taken away, and then the power is cut.’

Sam – obviously not his real name – picks up the defector’s narrative. He was born in the early 1970s in Kil Joo, near the East Sea, not far from the area where they carry out nuclear tests. His father was in the military, a worker-peasant, a kind of North Korean version of Mao’s Red Guards. His mother was a primary school teacher, one brother, one sister. They lived in a house on the edge of the city. There was an outside loo, no hot water, a pump in the basement.

‘To understand North Korean society is difficult. You cannot compare it to here,’ he tells me. He’s sporting a pinstriped suit, sipping on a can of Coke. ‘For example, we had pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the house. Everyone had the same pictures. You had to take care of the pictures, to look after them.’

The regime propaganda bolsters this up, telling mind-warping stories in which loyal citizens prefer to lose all their possessions in a fire so long as they save the pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

‘Of course, I was brainwashed,’ says Sam. ‘From when you are born until when you die, you are told what to think. A third of the lessons you get at school are about the legends of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. You learn never to question it and no one would everd are to mock it.’

The idea of school without mockery defeated me. He told me a story of what happened at his high school to illustrate his theme: ‘There were two guys, seventeen, rivals. One borrowed a book from the other about Kim Il Sung’s exploits, fighting the Japanese. He scribbles on it, gives it back, and that’s the end of it. Every two or three months, ideology thought police come round to people’s houses. They see the scribbles on the book about the Great Leader, and the whole family goes to the gulag. Later, the secret came out, and the guy who did it brags about it. He got away with it. No one ratted him up. Those kind of incidents happened all the time. I heard one story of a gang of kids fighting in front of a statue of Kim Il Sung. This thirteen-year-old throws a bottle and the Great Leader’s ear falls off. It’s plaster, painted bronze, and the whole family goes to the gulag.’

How do you know that for sure? ‘There’s a network of rumours, someone will have seen them taken away in trucks.’ My translator
Kwon and I told Sam about the problems we had had with two North Koreans who met us, and then declined to make any criticism of the country at all, even saying that the health system in North Korea was just like the NHS. As bad as Casualty can be on a Friday night in any British hospital, I found that statement incredible.

‘Even though their bodies are here in London, their minds are still in North Korea. They have nightmares, they are afraid to speak.’

Do you have nightmares? Sam said he didn’t, but I didn’t quite believe him.

He spent eight years in the army where, he says, he was constantly brainwashed. Sam was stationed at the DMZ for much of his time in uniform. I asked him about power supply: ‘Power only works 24/7 in the Mausoleum and for the electrified fence at the DMZ’ – for the dead, and the dead-to-come.

Soldiers in the army, back in the day, used to be well fed, said Sam. But once the famine hit, even in the army people suffered: one third could get by, one third starved, one third went AWOL, to go back home, just because they wanted a good meal. Sam’s job was to go around the whole of North Korea, tracking down the runaways, and bringing them back to the DMZ. Such was the degree of social compliance inside North Korea that pretty much all he had to do was have a word with the soldier’ sparents and the runaway would meekly return with him.

Did he feel guilty ? He explained that at first, at the very start of the famine years, deserters would be sent to the gulag, but as time went by the punishment became weaker. The reason they were going AWOL was hunger. Parents asked him to punish their sons quietly, hush-hush: ‘I was part of a regiment, not the secret police.

I would go from place to place and bring the boys back one by one. Parents would encourage them to go back . . .’

It wasn’t a difficult job, but something happened to the wall inside his head, the wall which had blocked out doubts. Not the bricks, but the mortar started to flake; in his walled-off mind, first one crack, then another. They began to spread.

‘Sometimes, the parents of the soldiers would plead with me. Through my job I got to speak to a lot of people, and that is how my doubts grew. On buses everywhere, it says: “North Korea is the people’s nation!” It isn’t a people’s nation. That was a lie. I saw the high-ups living a better life. Before, I had never questioned it: they lived that life because they deserved to live in that position, but later I did realize that it was wrong. In Pyongyang I met a woman diplomat, home for a spell, but she normally worked in the embassy in Holland: a superb job, access to the West, to money, to everything. This woman had no pity for the hungry begging for rice. When someone came to ask her for some food or money, she almost spat at them. I felt this was wrong.

‘My doubts grew. But inside North Korea, there is no frame of reference. We don’t know what to compare anything to . . . someone who knows, say, white and red will be able to say that’s red and white but if you don’t know the difference . . . you could see that people were dying . . . I wanted to leave to find the other perspective . . . as soon as I left North Korea, I saw straight away.’

The final straw was unbelievably painful for him; a life-shattering event.

‘In the summer of 1999 something happened to my niece, “Janey”. She was three, a toddler, but because of the famine she was the size of a one-year-old. Janey found some dried raw corn, and stuffed herself. The dried corn makes you very dehydrated so she
drank too much water and her tummy expanded like a drum and she ruptured her stomach. She was a tiny kid but her stomach expanded to the size of a basketball. She looked like a bird hit by a car . . . She died. I can still see the blue veins on her tummy.’

When people came to pay their respects, they couldn’t look: ‘It was so gruesome . . .’

We were sitting in the back of the travel agency Kwon’s parents own in New Malden. Outside, the traffic went about its business, people from Wimbledon popping in to see their mum in Surbiton, going to the local tip, to the movies. Inside, as bleak a tragedy as you ever did hear.

After a long silence, Sam continued his story: ‘The death of my niece broke something inside my head. I was determined to get out. But it took me five more years to overcome my doubts. We all knew the risks, the border guards might shoot you, trouble for your family. In the summer of 2005 my job, picking up AWOL soldiers, had taken me to the far north-east, near the border with China. I rounded up seven deserters, sent them back to the DMZ, and moved closer to the Tumen river. It was August, and there was a full moon. I had to wait for three days, until clouds came, blanketing out the moon. The river is fast and deep, but not that broad up in the mountains. The problem is that in summer the level is down, so you have to crawl over 500 yards of pebbles before you get to the river proper, and the sound carries at night. If the guard shear the pebbles move, they could shoot you. I thought to myself: Do or die! I’m going to die in the gulag or die fighting . . .’

To demonstrate his pebble-crossing technique, he took off his chalk-striped jacket and laid it on the floor. He moved it ahead of him, fully at arm’s length, then wriggled his body forward so that
it rested on the jacket, then the process started again, all the while keeping his body as low as can be.

‘To move across 500 yards of pebbles, it took me three and a half hours. The river was only 100 feet wide but the current was quite strong. It took me only half an hour to cross, if that.’

It was quiet on the Chinese side. ‘Just across this river was a completely different world. I went to an apple orchard, I’d never seen one before. In North Korea an apple is eaten when it is very small.’

Did you eat one?

‘I ate six.’

Sam had made it across the river but he still wasn’t safe. He hid at night, he had no money, only army uniform. But after a couple of days he met a Korean Chinese, who helped him find his feet in China, and then he was on his way to freedom.

‘The brainwashing,’ said Sam, ‘works by blocking out your mind from thinking. My brain was not wired to think critically of the regime. Only after I left North Korea, after I have seen how other cultures work, only now do I know what was wrong. People left back there may somehow sense something is wrong but they don’t know for sure.’

All of the defectors from North Korea I’ve interviewed at length – four in South Korea, three in London – told me that they were brainwashed when they were brought upin North Korea. On Lifton’s test number one, ‘Milieu Control’, all seven said information was constricted; they didn’t know what the rest of the world was truly like until they left. On the second test, ‘Mystical Manipulation’, most, if not all, remembered feeling awe and veneration for the Kim dynasty, especially at school; the third test, ‘The Demand for Purity’ – positive, too, but this was something I did not press people on much, knowing the facts of the regime’s
propaganda; the fourth test, ‘The Cult of Confession’, everyone was familiar with; the fifth, ‘The Sacred Science’, is an echo of‘Mystical Manipulation’, but likewise tests positive; the sixth, ‘Loading the Language’, positive, but again was something else I didn’t press people on, knowing the lexicon of regime propaganda. The seventh, ‘Doctrine over Person’, and the eighth, ‘The Dispensing of Existence’? How can those tests not be passed, if your country suffers a famine that kills untold numbers and yet the people remain loyal? When the stomach of a starving three-year-old bursts and no one dares deface the pictures of the fat rulers – is that not existence dispensed?

This isn’t a scientific investigation. You can’t do that in a tyranny. But the evidence from the defectors suggests that North Korea passes all of Lifton’s tests on brainwashing, and, on that rough-and-ready basis, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a cult, 23-million-strong.

On the top-floor balcony of the Grand Study House we had a magnificent view of the city, looking back across Kim Il Sung Square, and beyond that the river, the Juche Tower and East Pyongyang. They were testing the public address system for the rally taking place the next day. The disembodied voice echoed out over the city empty of people, of traffic, terrifyingly loud: the sound of Big Brother.