North Korea Undercover (30 page)

They ended up at a military base near the beach. To begin with,
all the two chefs had to do was teach three North Korean chefs, who also seemed to be soldiers, or at least behaved as if they were under military discipline, how to cook pizza. Ingredients were not a problem. Capers from Pantelleria and trout from San Daniele were amongst the delicacies that were rushed in from Italy, shipped along with several cases of Barolo from Piedmont.

Furlanis said: ‘While I worked, my pupils, penand notebook in hand, took down every detail while the rest of the staff, a dozen people or so, gathered round to watch the proceedings in an absorbed silence.’ Furlanis said that one of the students even asked to count the olives he used and to measure the distance between them. ‘I don’t know if he was just pulling my leg, but he looked totally serious.’

After several days of tuition, the chefs and their pizza ovens and other clobber were moved to a pontoon, tied to a large yacht. The mysterious client remained invisible, not on the pontoon, nor the yacht. Furlanis glimpsed through the yacht’s windows something amazing: aman-made floating island which, he said, ‘Fellini could not have imagined.’

The floating island boasted a magnificent villa three storeys high, a large terrace out front, and gigantic fun slides that ended up in the water. Some soldiers later told him that the island also boasted its own racing track. No one ever discussed the kind of people who lived on that platform, but it could only have been Kim Jong Il. Suddenly, there was huge agitation on board. Crossing the gangplank to the ship was Kim Jong Il himself. Furlanis missed him, but, he said, ‘Our chef, who had noreason to fib, was, for the space of several minutes, utterly speechless. He said he felt as if he had seen God, and I still envy him this experience.’

Furlanis raised the contrast between the leaders’ obscene levels
of luxury and the plight of the people. Mr Om replied:‘Ermanno, my good friend, man is the same all over the world.’

Only once did the Italians witness something resembling aprotest against the regime. Every day, early in the morning, a crowd of cleaners would enter the compound gatesas Furlanis’s limousine drove past them, bound for where the yacht was docked. One morning the gates opened to let the car in, but an elderly woman stood in front of it, placing her fists on the front of the car, shouting something. Furlanis asked for a translation but Mr Om ignored him. It was as if the scene did not exist. After amoment of hesitation, the driver weaved out of her way and accelerated off.

Trivial interactions with the locals were not welcome. Marilu, Furlanis’s wife, once walked past an open door on the first floor of their residential complex where some young North Koreans were playing videogames and eating sweets. In broken English, they invited her to join them, seemingly enjoying the company of the exotic guest. Glad to have finally made some friends away from the tight supervision of Mr Om, Marilu left them after fifteen minutes to go back to her apartment. At around one o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on the door. Guards announced: ‘We are leaving now. Pack your bags.’ The Italian couple had no choice but to obey.

They were taken to a second villa by the beach, even more secluded than the first. They had the entire first floor, while the ground floor was reserved for Mr Om. While the men worked, the women had next to nothing to do. One day they were invited on a trip. Not realizing where they were going, they took no bathing costumes. When they ended up on a private beach very close to the villa, they stripped down to their underwear – not topless, entirely correct, but not acceptable for ultra-conservative North Korea. On
the second day, they were taken to a small room where they were encouraged to borrow swimsuits straight out of the fashion pages of 1953.

On the beach, the wives were monitored, their environment totally controlled. The sand was raked to the point of obsession, leaving it as hard as cement. Access to the sea was permitted, but only via a small pier covered in green velvet. Walking down the beach was not allowed. At the end of their narrow strip was an anti-aircraft gun position, made up of heavy machine guns and rockets. Marilu once put her feet in the shallows – an area not officially designated for bathing – which resulted in twoyoung soldiers popping up, rifles at the ready, screaming their heads off. It wasn’t exactly Capri.

Furlanis and Macchia and their wives were rewarded fortheir hard work with very generous tips and the occasional trip to North Korean holiday sites. They were once taken to a supposedly uninhabited island, where expensive food and bottles of Barolo and Remy Martin were laid out for the Italian guests to enjoy. When their guide fell asleep after one too many glasses of wine, Furlanis set out to explore the island. After walking for a few minutes he saw two men with bare chests and military fatigues fishing in the distance. He waved at them; they ran into the undergrowth.

Puzzled, Furlanis decided to follow the two men, and as he walked further towards the centre of the island he saw two goats and a small kitchen-garden with a few onions and tomatoes. As the other Italian guests joined him, they were soon encircled by other North Koreans. The mood turned sour. The Italians were scared. Two armed guards they knew arrived and ordered the Furlanises and the Macchias to return to the yacht they had arrived in. A football came out of nowhere. Being tipsy, the Italians told the guards
to forget about Mr Om and to join them in a game of football. The global magic of football did its trick. The North Koreans scored three early goals but the Italians ended up winning 4-3, avenging the notorious 1–0 loss of the ‘Azzurri’ in the 1966 World Cup at Middlesbrough. No one ever explained what the young men were doing on the supposedly deserted island.

After three weeks, and with very little notice, the North Korean adventure was at an end. A Pakistani chef had already arrived, renowned for cooking the best chicken curryin the world. Their passports magically reappeared and the Italian party prepared to be driven back to Pyongyang. As they left the military base, their students ran after the car for as long as they could, waving goodbye and lobbing them sweets through the windows.

Once back at home in Italy, Furlanis hit the scales. In the middle of famine, he had managed to put on several kilos.

Back in Wonsan, we caught a train to nowhere. An old-fashioned waiting room complete with cruelly thin wooden benches led us to a splendid black steam engine with great black wheels and a carriage or two painted blue with red stripes. Dylan sat by a carriage window and did a brilliant impression of Celia Johnson in
Brief Encounter
, waving to a disconsolate Trevor Howard, a hilarious moment unwittingly captured by the KITC cameraman. The train was the magical vehicle that took Kim Il Sung from the port of Wonsan to Pyongyang on 20 September 1945. Again, the date was not given in Juche Time because the propagandization of the magical train journey took place long before 1997. Back in 1945, of course, Kim Il Sung was only acontender for power. That autumn, he rose to become top cherry for the Soviets, but he certainly didn’tarrive at Wonsan as the chosen one. I left the museum and popped out into the fresh air,
looking for the railway station proper. It wasn’t there. They had created a mock-railway station, simply for the purpose of falsifying history on wheels.

Next, off to the Wonsan Children’s Camp. There were no children. Well, no flesh-and-blood children anyway. There was a bronze statue of Kim Il Sung in a Western suit with his arms around a little boy with a trumpet in his hand and a slightly taller girl. Half hidden by apine tree but clearly visible on the KITC video is a security camera, watching over the statue from behind. To the left and right were two more CCTV cameras, which we filmed. None of us had ever seen a security camera in NorthKorea and it could only have been placed there for one reason: fear of vandalism. It’s possible that atleast some of the international students from places like Russia, Vietnam, Burma and Africa who have ended up in this camp dared show disrespect to authority. Even more shocking, it could be North Korean kids. We asked Mr Hyun:‘Why the CCTV?’ He asked the local guide. He translated that the CCTV was there to prevent a plot by the South Korean secret agents to blow up the statue. It was perhaps the most preposterous explanation he gave in our whole trip.

The statue was the centrepiece of a bleak square, surrounded by Sovietische accommodation blocks. Further off was a funfair and a water slide. The local guide explained that the rooms the students used were closed, so we couldn’t see them, but we could look at the children’s gulag, sorry, centre. The whole place had a hang-dog air of neglect about it. It looked as though it hadbeen knocked up in the 1980s, possibly for the Student Games. The external walls were streaked with damp. A series of flagpoles stood barren, no flags flying.

Inside, the lights being off, the facilities looked even bleaker in
the gloom. A large vestibule was dedicated to photographs of the Kims: older black-and-white shots of Kim the First, then, in colour, Bad Elvis being weird here, there and everywhere. Hey, look, kids, here’s a picture of Dr Evil opening a factory – just what a twelve-year-old wants on holiday. Further on, there were snaps of Kim Three in the rocket control room, urging his technicians on to Armageddon. I can’t imagine any youngster looking at these photographs and being able to sleep at night. The comedy of the inappropriateness of the regime’s propaganda drivel as something young teenagers might enjoy got to the group, and we started giggling. Our trepidation of the first day was long gone. Had we been invited to bow in front of the statue of Kim Il Sung and kids, CCTV and all, I doubt whether a single one of us would have done so.

We walked past a large mosaic map of the world, with North Korea picked out in red, and we entered a great, empty theatre, a forum for plays illustrating the excellence of Jucheist internationalist thought, no doubt. Now that Kim Jong Un has been threatening thermo-nuclear war, it seems hard to imagine how the children’s camp is going to compete with other attractions. On the way out, there was a plaster goose pulling down the trousers of a plaster pig. Disneyland can rest easy.

¹
Everard, p73.

²
Becker,
Rogue Regime
, pi02.

³
Lankov,
The Real North Korea
, p80.

⁴
BBC
Panorama'.
‘North Korea Undercover’.

⁵
R. Redlich: O
Staline I Stalinizme
, Frankfurt, 1971, p217.

⁶
Ken E. Gause, p47.

⁷
Kim Yong:
Long Road Home
, Columbia University Press, New York, 2009, p57.

⁸
Kim Kwang In: ‘NK Exhumes and Decapitates Body of “Traitor”’,
Choson Ilbo
, 5 October 2002.

⁹
Andrew Natsios:
The Great North Korean Famine,
US Institute of Peace, Washington DC, 2001, p41.

¹⁰
Natsios, p79.

¹¹
Natsios, p163.

¹²
‘Making Pizza for Kim Jong IP, BBC Radio 3, 12 August 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/17hi/3559266.stm

17

The American Who Went to North Korea and Stayed

On 15 August 1962, Private James Joseph Dresnok of the US Army walked across the DMZ and defected to North Korea. More than half a century later, he’s still there, the father of three children. In the case against the North Korean regime, Dresnok is a disturbing witness for the defence, an American who quotes Kim Il Sung, condemns his old country for its military occupation of the South and weeps at how his food ration remained good throughout the ‘Arduous March’. He mouths the rhetoric of Pyongyang in a Virginian accent.

A giant haystack of a man, 6 foot 5 inches, Dresnok was seventy-two years old at the time of writing in 2013. His bulk and metal fillings remind one of Jaws. In a documentary about his life, Dresnok drawls in his southern, quaintly old-fashioned speech – because his American has been uncorrupted for fifty years – by proclaiming: ‘I will give you the truth. I’ve never told anyone before.’ The last sentence may be true.

Dresnok’s story is told in
Crossing the Line
,
¹
made by two Britons,
Nicholas Bonner, the impresario behind Koryo Tours, one of the very few travel companies licensed to do business in North Korea, and Daniel Gordon, formerly of Sky TV. Bonner and Gordon are the leading Western lights in ‘Pyongywood’, the North Korean movie industry. Their first film,
The Game of their Lives
, 2001, tells the story of the North Korean football team which beat Italy in the 1966 World Cup.
A State of Mind,
2005, is a subtle and beautifully observed film about two young girls training to take part in the Pyongyang Mass Games.
Crossing the Line
, 2007, is the most political of their films. All of their work is fascinating because they get extraordinarily good access to North Korea. But that very access raises questions about how far you go in a trade-off with a totalitarian state. Bonner, as boss of Koryo Tours, believes in working with the North Korean regime.
Observer
travel writer Carole Cadwalladr was allowed to go to North Korea. She wrote: ‘I have a special, rare dispensation as a travel writer because Nick Bonner, the founder of Koryo Tours, believes that the more the world engages with North Korea, the more North Korea will engage with the world. And because five agreed in advance that I shan’t write about North Korea’s human rights record or in any way insult the Dear Leader.’
²
None of Bonner’s films do.

Bonner has been asked whether he has been at best wilfully naive in promoting North Korea as anything less than a bizarre and oppressive tyranny. He replied: ‘We believe very strongly in engagement. Since 1945 the West has worked on very few policies to engage with North Korea on a cultural level. If being naive represents lack of experience, well we have more experience than most, and as for lack of wisdom, or being duped, I think the projects we have worked
on with our Korean colleagues are testament to the effectiveness of engagement and understanding.
³