Escape from North Korea (9 page)

For some workers in the Christian underground, the work has moved away from helping people escape to caring for them in place. Crossing Borders, an Illinois-based, Christian nonprofit, shifted its resources from the new underground railroad to providing long-term shelters in China. As Mike Kim, one of the organization's founders, put it in his book,
Escaping North Korea
, Crossing Borders is committed to “helping them live safe and happy lives” in China.
¹⁰
Mike Kim spent four years secretly guiding North Koreans out of China while working as a martial arts instructor there.

Tim Peters and his network have begun to devote more of their resources to caring for the children of Chinese men and the North Koreans brides they purchased. He estimates that there are scores of thousands of such half-and-half children, many of whom lack the official Chinese identity cards without which they cannot go to school or receive medical care.

Peters is not a fan of bringing half-and-half children out of China on the new underground railroad. “You might help a few,” he said,
“but then what?” He thinks group homes, run by foster parents who are Christian, are a better option and a way to help a greater number of children. Down the road, as the children get older, he would like to establish vocational schools to teach them farming, mechanical trades, hair dressing, and other productive skills.

Meanwhile, fifteen years after he helped launch the new underground railroad, Peters's work in China continues. In early 2012, he warned that this was an especially difficult period for Christians helping North Koreans in the border area. Since the middle of 2011, his colleagues on the ground had been reporting that China and North Korea were ramping up efforts to prevent border crossings. North Korea was building underground bunkers for border guards, making it easier for them to spot people crossing the river. China was said to be erecting a ten-foot-high barrier fence along the Yalu River at a popular crossing point near the Chinese city of Dandong. Peters's colleagues in the border area also reported the presence of an unusually large number of North Korean government agents posing as refugees. “The North Korean agents are there with the cooperation of the Chinese government,” he said. “Why? They are trying to hinder the flow of refugees and break up the aid networks.”

Peters had an additional worry: finding more Christian workers to go to China to help North Koreans. The number of missionaries in the field has been decimated by imprisonments, expulsions, and harassment by Chinese authorities. He was finding it hard to recruit workers willing to risk working in China.

On a speaking tour of Korean-American churches in the United States, he told his audiences, “I want
you
, not just your money.” It was a pitch that deliberately called upon the congregants' Korean heritage. Peters reckoned it would be embarrassing for Korean-Americans to hear such a plea from someone who was not ethnically Korean. He hoped to shock his audiences into action.

Peters emphasized the same message in his speeches in South Korea, the nation that is second only to the United States in the
number of Christian missionaries it sends overseas. South Korean missionaries are active worldwide—in South America, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent. They go to places that are at least as dangerous as China, if not more so. In Afghanistan in 2007, the Taliban captured twenty-three South Korean missionaries and held them hostage. Two were murdered.

In Seoul, Peters made his pitch to an assembly of divinity students at Chongshin University. Chongshin's famous divinity school was founded in Pyongyang in 1901 and relocated south during the Korean War. Today, its graduates disperse to the four corners of the world to preach the Gospel. One would think that the school's roots in the North would give it a special interest in reaching out to North Koreans. That was not what Peters found.

Peters described his interaction with the students at Chongshin. “Who's going to India?” he asked the assembled seminarians. Lots of hands shot up. India is a popular spot for missionary work, and the South Korean students clearly were enthusiastic about the prospect of working there.

“Then I asked, ‘Who's helping North Koreans?' ” At this point in his story, Peters paused and looked around him. It was if he still had the prospective missionaries in his sight and was waiting to count the raised hands.

Finally, he answered his own question. “Nothing.”

DEFECTORS

U
ntil the mid-1990s, when food shortages began to push women and children across the border to China, most of the North Koreans who fled were men, and virtually all were privileged citizens with access to escape routes closed to ordinary people. Most were classic Cold War defectors, men in influential jobs who peddled information or military equipment in return for resettlement and protection in South Korea or the West. They were diplomats posted abroad, students studying at foreign universities, and renegade pilots who flew their Russian-made MiG-15s across the DMZ.

There is a one-word explanation for the gender imbalance among the early defectors: sexism. For all its talk of socialist equality, modern-day North Korea is a patriarchal society with a limited number of women in positions of authority. When the famine struck in the 1990s, women's secondary status worked to their benefit; they found it easier than their husbands or fathers or brothers
did to slip away from their state-assigned jobs and sneak across the border. Young women had—and continue to have—an additional, albeit grim, advantage: They are marketable in China as brides or sex workers. Then, as now, men have a harder time finding jobs on the black market in China. Chinese families are less likely to take in men than women, which makes male refugees more vulnerable to arrest and repatriation. When famine struck in the 1990s, the flow of North Koreans to China became heavily female. Today, more than three-quarters of the refugees who reach South Korea from China are female.
¹

The early defectors almost always left North Korea for political reasons. In some instances, travel abroad had revealed new worlds, opening the defector's eyes to the realities of the North Korean regime and offering possibilities that were unimaginable at home. Others were self-declared patriots who believed their defections would prevent war and hasten the coming of a unified Korea under South Korea's freer political system. Still others were fleeing for their lives after committing some supposed transgression against the state that, had they stayed, would have condemned them to the gulag.

Few ordinary citizens escaped North Korea during the pre-famine period. The borders were sealed, and news of the outside world was scarce. Unless he had relatives in China with whom to stay, a North Korean had nowhere to go. Moreover, China was poor; it did not yet offer the comparative advantages that economic prosperity afforded it by the 1990s. In any event, North Korea's societal controls were such that a man who failed to show up at his state-assigned job for more than a few days was presumed to have deserted his duties, thereby putting his family at risk for punishment. The underground railroad did not take off until the late 1990s, when the number of refugees in China swelled near the half-million mark and Christian activists started helping them escape.

In the pre-famine days, the rare North Korean who found his way to China was on his own. Evans Revere, a former American
diplomat in Beijing, recalled his astonishment at encountering two North Koreans who turned up at the door of the United States Embassy in 1982, asking for help to reach South Korea. “I may have been the first American diplomat in China to have had to deal with North Korean refugees,” he said.
²

Revere was the duty officer one evening when the Marine guard at the embassy entrance phoned to say there were two guys sitting in front of his post. They were dirty and disheveled and had plopped themselves down on the floor of the vestibule. “I can't understand their Chinese,” the Marine told Revere. “Can you come down and talk to them?”

Revere went to the front entrance. After his questions in Mandarin also failed to elicit a response, something about the two men prompted him to try Korean, which he also spoke. The men responded with big smiles and a torrent of words. “I had a hard time at first placing their accent,” Revere said. “But then it dawned on me. I couldn't quite believe it, but they were from North Korea.”

“They said they had swum across the Yalu,” Revere remembered. “Then they hitchhiked to Beijing, stole into the U.S. Embassy grounds, climbed over the back wall, and presented themselves at the front door. They said they had worked at odd jobs and stolen food along the way.” It was a miracle that they had made it as far as Beijing without being arrested.

“I asked them, ‘If you had some more money, can you get to Guangzhou?' ”(a major city in the south of China near Hong Kong). “They said yes. So we fed them, gave them some money, and took them to the train station.” The North Koreans hid on the floor in the back seat of a van so the Chinese sentries wouldn't spot them as they left the embassy compound. If the North Koreans had been soldiers or officials with important information to impart, Revere said, the United States might have been able to figure out a way to extract them from China. But they were just farmers and not worth diplomatic intervention, and they didn't know enough to ask for political
asylum. The Republic of Korea had no embassy in China at the time, so the Americans did not have the option of handing them over to the South Koreans. The last Revere saw of the two North Koreans was when they hopped out of the van at the train station and waved good-bye before vanishing into the crowd.

Most of the early defectors ended up in South Korea, but a handful of North Koreans managed to disappear in the West, where they quietly established new lives. Defectors were not always good guys. The fact that they had permission to travel abroad indicated some significant degree of complicity in North Korea's brutal regime. Only trusted loyalists were allowed out of the country. At the same time, the defectors were also the only North Koreans who had any exposure to what life was like in freer societies.

Colonel Kim Jong-ryul—aka Kim Il Sung's personal shopper—is a case in point. The colonel defected during an official trip to Vienna in 1994. Kim Il Sung had just died, and Kim Jong-ryul was convinced that it wouldn't be long before a revolution broke out, North Korea erupted in chaos, and he would be purged. He faked his death, arranging for it to look like a hit by the Slovak mafia. His aim was to deceive the North Korean authorities and, he hoped, protect his family from retaliation. He then went into hiding in Austria for sixteen years. His story was not made public until 2010 when two Austrian journalists published a book in German about his defection. The title was
Im Dienst des Diktators
, or, in English,
In the Dictator's Service
.

As a kind of high-tech personal shopper for Kim Il Sung, Colonel Kim had traveled regularly around Europe for nearly twenty years, armed with a diplomatic passport and suitcases filled with cash. He bought armaments, fancy cars, carpets, furniture, and other luxury items. The luxury goods were for the North Korean leader's personal use or for him to dole out as gifts to his supporters. Colonel Kim purchased two encrypted telephones so Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il could talk to each other without anyone listening in.

Colonel Kim bought from Austrian, Swiss, German, French, and Czechoslovakian firms, which were only too willing to break international trade embargoes on North Korea in return for a 30 percent additional fee. He told the Austrian journalists that he did business with European customs agents and other officials, who would turn a blind eye to the illicit trade. The colonel even purchased a fleet of tanks, which he smuggled to North Korea disguised as hunting equipment. At a press conference in Vienna launching the publication of
In the Dictator's Service
, he explained why he had defected: “I wanted freedom. I needed freedom.”
³
Perhaps. Or maybe he wanted to save his skin.

The highest-ranking defector to the United States was North Korea's ambassador to Egypt, Chang Sung-gil. Chang Sung-gil walked into the American Embassy in Cairo on a sweltering August Friday in 1997 and asked for protection. The ambassador's defection was the first by a senior North Korean diplomat. In 1991 and 1996, two mid-level diplomats in Congo and Zambia had defected to South Korea.

Cairo was a significant diplomatic outpost for Pyongyang, and Chang Sung-gil was a good catch. News reports of the day identified him as a fountain of information about North Korea's sales of Scud missiles to Iran, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, although the State Department did not confirm these sales. To the extent that Chang Sung-gil had facilitated the arms trafficking when he was North Korea's man in Cairo, he had blood on his hands; at the same time, his information was valuable. There was an added bonus to Chang Sung-gil's defection: his wife. The South Korean press identified her as a well-known actress who was acquainted with Kim Jong Il, an avid movie buff; in her debriefings, she presumably added to the intelligence community's store of knowledge about the personal habits of the secretive dictator.

Chang Sung-gil's defection was actually a three-fer. In Paris, at almost exactly the same hour on that August Friday in 1997, the ambassador's brother, Chang Sung-ho, also defected to the United
States. The brother was North Korea's economic and trade representative in the French capital, a position that would have given him detailed knowledge of North Korea's trade—legal and illegal—in Europe. He brought his wife and two children with him.
⁴

North Korean students also defected. The most notorious student defections were those, in 1962, of four young men who were studying in the then Communist country of Bulgaria. The four students received asylum from the Bulgarian government in a diplomatic brouhaha that resulted in the expulsion of the North Korean ambassador from Sofia and the suspension of ties between the two countries. The diplomatic breach lasted seven years.