North Korea Undercover (3 page)

The regime began with Kim Il Sung, a street wise guerrilla fighter gifted a state by Stalin’s generals. Japanese occupation had been a great national insult, and for many in the North it was good to have a Korean ruler, however authoritarian. The bloodshed of the civil war followed, after which peace was a blessing. That Kim Il Sung started the war, no one in North Korea can say. In the mid-1950s, as de-Stalinization began to pick up speed in the Communist world, North Korea galloped off in the opposite direction. Kim the First’s propagandists first developed a powerful and vicious national Stalinism. This mutated into Jucheism, home-baked Jabberwocky plus a Brobdingnagian cult of personality. As the old man’s powers weakened, his son Kim Jong Il built up the Juche cult, rebaptizing it Kimilsungism. Bits of national Stalinism, Jucheism and Kimilsungism are all spouted by the regime when it suits, but the real belief system of the DPRK, the one aggressively fired at its people through television, propaganda posters, the radio and loudspeakers dotted across the nation, is that old black magic:
racial purity. There is a subtle difference from Nazi ideology proper: the Koreans of the North are not a master race who must overlord other races, but pure children who must be protected by the Leaders, Great, Dear and Fat, sorry, Young.

Like Hitlers Third Reich, the regime is depressing lypopular with masses of North Koreans. They are joyfully in thrall to a political religion. The slavishness of its adherents reminds one of Americas death cults, but in North Korea they don’t have Kool-Aid. They have nuclear bombs.

The regime’s race cult chimes with popular but dark tropes in Korean history. The Nazi-style ideology equates racial purity with human goodness. The impure haveno right to life, which is why the evidence suggesting that the regime commits infanticide is profoundly disturbing. The UN Human Rights inquiry reported: ‘A North Korean woman testified how she “witnessed a female prisoner forced to drown her own baby in a bucket”.’
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In my eight days in North Korea, I saw two people who were disabled, and they were both adults. In Africa and Asia and Latin America, you see crippled beggars all the live-long day. The absence of North Korean disabled babies, infants or children raises one troubling question: where are they?

Under Kim Three, it has been goodbye to the last echoes of Communism. In the spring of 2012, giant pictures of Marx and Lenin adorned a building on Kim Il Sung Square; on our trip, one year on, Karl and Vlad had vanished.

Kim Jong Un is now the third generation Kim to lead the dark state. At thirty years of age, he is a fat young man in a very thin nation. He was educated in a fancy schoolin Switzerland, so he
knows the truth about North Korea, even if no one else does. Footage shown on North Korean television shows him visiting a rocky beach on a gunboat. Soldiers crowd around.Kim the Third retreats to the gunboat, which slowly backs away from the beach. The soldiers plunge into the freezing sea, in a state of religious ecstasy. It is beyond bonkers.
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On the day Kim the Third threatened to use his nukes in athermo-nuclear war against the United States, we visited the De-Militarized Zone (or the DMZ or the Zee) where the two halves of Korea meet. The colonel in charge said: ‘Don’t worry aboutit,’ and patted me on the back. We drove back to Pyongyang and rocked up at a karaoke bar where our minder, Mr Hyun, sang‘My Way’. Thermo-nuclear regrets? Too few to mention. Was this talk of Armageddon for real? Or a shadow game directed at Kim Three’s own people, to make them line up behind him?

The government of North Korea tells big lies: about killing and famine and power. But the regime cannot lie about the darkness. Salute, reader, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
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In space, there is freedom of movement and freedom of speech, two things not available in the Kims’ utopia. The iconic image of North Korea taken from deep space was captured in 2011 by asatellite launched by NASA and NOAA, the American equivalent of the Met Office. The satellite boasts an instrument called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which you can think of as a very sensitive digital camera, producing images of the light emitted by human activity. This gives you the view you might get if you peeked out of the window of the International Space Station, around 500 miles up.

The weather satellite looks down on the face of the earth and
shows the world at night, the great cities sparkling with light: New York, London, Moscow, Beijing, Seoul. The capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, emits a feeble glow-wormbut the rest of the country lies in darkness so deep you could easily make the mistake of thinking that this landdoes not exist. And about the truth of the darkness, Kim the Third can do nothing.

In this book are the stories of witnesses to this darkstate, among them seven defectors from the North; an IRA man from West Belfast who spent two months in North Korea learning to make bombs; Ceausescu’s translator; an American soldier who ran away to the North and, forty years later, managed to get out; an Italian senator; an Italian chef; two translators who endured ‘cruel Christs of pus’ in the gulag; and a sculptress who vanished from Italy and died unknown to her family, two decades later in Pyongyang.

But locked inside the dictatorship, the people of North Korea do not know how dark their government is. Brainwashing, according to the world’s great authority on the subject, Professor Robert Lifton, an American military psychiatrist who treated US servicemen captured inNorth Korea, requires constriction of information.
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The less people know, the more they put up with. From the outside, the less we know, the more our fears grow.

The regime tells big lies about itself, about history. Tonail its quintessential dishonesty, I went to North Korea for BBC
Panorama
posing as a history professor. I told a lie to the dictatorship. I did so because the regime ordinarily bans journalists or minds them so tightly that they see next to nothing. The one exception is Associated Press, which boasts an office in Pyongyang. However, AP Pyongyang has been accused of running ‘chirpy,
upbeat stories rather than real news’, effectively, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, of having a tacit policy of‘Don’t mention the gulag.’
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AP dispute the argument that they self-censor as ‘erroneous’.

Going to North Korea undercover sometimes felt like being inside the movie
Argo
but readers should be aware of a strange paradox: although it treats its own people cruelly, the DPRK treats foreign guests with almost comic deference. So long as you do not proselytize Christianity, especially if you are a Korean-American missionary, no harm will come to a foreign tourist. North Korea is not Torremolinos. It is much safer.

As a group of students and a fake professor, we were honoured guests of the regime. The best – least bad – comparison I can think of is travelling around Nazi Germany in 1936 during the Munich Olympics. Michael Breen, Kim Jong Il’s biographer, also went undercover to North Korea, pretending to be something other than a journalist: ‘As foreigners, we felt safe. The worst that could happen was that we would be expelled.’
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Nothing happened to him. Nothing happened to us.

Inside North Korea, we were accompanied pretty much forevery single moment by ‘tourist guides’ Mr Hyun and Miss Jun. By filming inside North Korea without there gime’s blessing, we were accused of endangering the guides. We did not, according to Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours, generally a critic of our
Panorama
: ‘The guides in thetour shown on the programme are fine. They are still working and I saw them personally when I visited North Korea last week [April 2013]. They were not shown saying anything out of the ordinary and the reporter – other than the raw fact of being
a reporter – didn’t get up to anything wildly illegal in North Korea.’
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Cockerell, who has visited North Korea 119 times, says that North Koreais safe for foreign tourists: ‘We have run thousands of tours over twenty years and we have never had anyone detained, questioned, molested, ejected or arrested.’

Of President George W. Bush’s three axes ofevil, Saddam’s Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Iran and North Korea, the latter is by far and away the safest tovisit but also the worst place to live in. Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins of the US Army defected to NorthKorea in 1965. Thanks to extraordinary luck and the power of love, he got out after forty years inside what he calls‘a giant demented prison’.
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He is right, but prisons have guards, not guides. Behind thequestion: ‘Did you endanger the guides?’ lies an assumption that North Korea is a normal place to visit.

North Korea is not normal. No ordinary person is free tomove around inside the country. No ordinary person can leave it, ever. No free speech. No rule of law. Noparliament, worthy of the name. Brainwashing for three generations. The guides work hard to present as normal apicture of North Korea as possible. To push back against the raising of difficult questions, the regime, subtly, pressures foreign visitors to comply with its world view. Obey the guides or they will suffer – that is the message. That pressure is effective.
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But should it be complied with? The guides, of course, are realflesh-and-blood people. So, too, are the 100,000 political prisoners in the gulag. But they are invisible. By not ‘endangering
the guides’, is it possible that you are doing agreater disservice to the invisible victims of the regime? When our guides showed us nonsense – for example a hospital with patients, but only in the morning – I mentally imagined the 100,000 or so souls in the gulag cheering us on. But those cheers, and even more their screams, are silent to us. Just because we cannot see orhear them does not mean they do not exist, as
Chapter 19
: ‘The Gulag Circus’ sets out.

The human factor kicks in, as ever. Our guards or minders were sweet people but also agents of a dark regime. Richard Lloyd Parry of
The Times
put it bluntly: ‘They are privileged, well educated, and (by North Korean standards) well-informed servants of a totalitarian dictatorship. As human beings, they are as various as the rest of us. But putting aside their friendliness, curiosity or the lack of it, their job is to lie, bamboozle and obfuscate.’

There has been a lot of controversy about the mechanics of the trip. My own position is that the people invited to come to North Korea were LSE students and alumni, but it wasn’t an LSE trip. The students were told, twice, that a journalist was coming, and they were warned that there was a risk of arrest, detention and the possibility they might not be able to go on a return trip.On the day the group met, the North Koreans carried out a nuclear test. It was all over the news. Anyone who wanted to drop out could have done so. Long before we left London my name was on the paperwork. Again, from my perspective, there was no intention to deceive the students.

We went as part of a tourist trip, arranged through the KFA, the Korean Friendship Association, which has been described as being ‘like one of the moreimprobable cults’.
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The KFA’s President is
Alejandro Cao de Benós or, to use his Korean honorific, Zo Sun Il, which means ‘Korea is One’. The Spanish IT consultant, who likes dressing up in North Korean uniform, has been criticized by the
Independent
as an ‘ideological brown-noser’. The newspaper cited anonymous critics, describing him as ‘the perfect example of the useful idiot’. Another said: ‘In my view, he’s a narcissist. And he loves the power and control he has over there. He does have real influence. People are frightened of him, and he likes that power. I think his primary motivation is that he’s special there.’ A third said: ‘You can’t possibly believe that stuff if you’ve been there. To come back and tell North Korean people that everything they hear is correct – that the rest of the world is evil, out to cut each other’s throats, that war and oppression is everywhere... he perpetuates that. He’s not forced to; he does that for personal gain and power and prestige. It’s horrible.’

In his defence, Cao de Benós told the
Independent
: ‘I will take this as a type of jealousy from people who have no goals in their life. I have lived a life of big things. I didn’t want to dedicate my life to be a slave in the capitalist system. My dream was to be a part of the revolution.’
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Once our party was back from Pyongyang, safe and sound, I went on BBC World News, and said the regime was ‘mad and sad and bad and silly, all at the same time’.
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The North Koreans saw my interview, and Cao de Benos, writing as the Special Delegate for the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries of the DPRK, firedback: ‘I am now in communication with LSE representatives... To obtain a visa
without declaring the real purpose of the visit is against the law... We will ignore this incident if Mr. Sweeney stops his journalistic activities regarding the LSE–DPRK visit. Otherwise if the related programme is broadcasted, I will be left with no choice but to exposeall the real story and data. And the only one to blame for this will be Mr. Sweeney... You decide.’

Cao de Benós made good on his threat. The London School of Economics, my old university, was supplied with the information we’d given to the North Koreanembassy in Beijing. The LSE’s director, Craig Calhoun, had been in Beijing at the same time that we were.
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The LSE went public with North Korea’s information on us, condemned what we had done and called for the programme not to be broadcast. The BBC stood firm, and our documentary was aired. A row started which has yet to be resolved.

The story splashed in
The Times
and there were questions in Parliament. On Twitter, I was compared to Jimmy Savile, and to Saif Gaddafi, someone who really has adoctorate from the LSE.
Getting in and out of the world’s most secretive dictatorship is not easy. One solution is not to bother. But it is important that journalists try to shed light on dark places where freedom of thought is snuffed out. One of the great North Korea watchers, Andrei Lankov, has noted:‘No foreigner is allowed to do independent research in Korean libraries, let alone archives. Indeed, typically a foreign visitor is simply denied access to the library catalogues.’
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