Escape from Camp 14 (6 page)

The money, he said, was delivered to Office 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee. This infamous office or bureau was created by Kim Jong Il in the 1970s to collect hard
currency and to give him a power base independent of his father, who was then still running the country. According to Kim (and scores of other defectors and published accounts), Office 39 buys
luxury goods to secure the loyalty of the North Korean elite. It also funds the purchase of foreign-made components for missiles and other weapons programmes.

As Kim explained it to me, his country’s insurance scam worked like this: Pyongyang-based managers for the state insurance monopoly would write policies that covered costly but common
North Korean disasters such as mining accidents, train crashes and crop losses resulting from floods. ‘The major point of the reinsurance operation is that they are banking on
disaster,’ he said. ‘Whenever there is a disaster, it becomes a source of hard currency’ for the government.

Kim and other foreign-based operatives of the North Korean insurance company were dispatched around the globe to find insurance brokers who would accept seductively high insurance premiums to
compensate North Korea for the cost of these disasters.

Reinsurance is a multibillion-dollar industry that spreads the risk assumed by one insurance company to a number of companies around the world. Each year, Kim said, North Korea would do its best
to shuffle its offerings among the major reinsurance players.

‘We pass it around,’ he told me. ‘One year it might be Lloyd’s [of London]. The next year it might be Swiss Re.’

By spreading relatively moderate losses among many big companies, North Korea concealed how bad a risk it was. Its government prepared meticulously documented claims, rushed them through its
puppet court, and demanded immediate payment. But it often restricted the ability of reinsurers to dispatch investigators to verify claims. According to a London-based expert on the insurance
industry, North Korea also exploited the geographical ignorance and political naïveté of some reinsurers and their brokers. Many of them thought they were dealing with a firm from South
Korea, the expert said, while others were unaware that North Korea is a closed totalitarian state with sham courts and no international accountability.

Over time, reinsurance companies got wise to frequent and costly claims for train crashes and ferry sinkings that were all but impossible to investigate. Lawyers for German insurance giant
Allianz Global Investors, Lloyd’s of London and several other reinsurers filed a suit in a London court against the Korean National Insurance Corporation. They contested its claim for a 2005
helicopter crash into a government-owned warehouse in Pyongyang. In court documents, the companies alleged that the crash was staged, that the North Korean court’s decision to uphold the
claim had been rigged and that North Korea routinely used insurance fraud to raise money for the personal use of Kim Jong Il.

The reinsurance companies, however, dropped their claims and agreed to a settlement that was a near-complete victory for North Korea. They did so, legal analysts said, because they had foolishly
signed contracts in which they agreed to be bound by North Korean law. After the settlement, North Korea’s lawyers said it was ‘staggeringly unfair’ to suggest that the country
engaged in insurance fraud. But publicity generated by the case alerted the world’s reinsurance industry to avoid North Korea, and so the fraud wound down.

When Kim Kwang Jin helped send the twenty-million-dollar bags of cash from Singapore to Pyongyang, he said that Kim Jong Il was delighted.

‘We received a letter of thanks and it was a great celebration,’ he said, noting that Kim Jong Il arranged for him and his colleagues to receive gifts that included oranges, apples,
DVD players and blankets.

Fruit, home electronics and blankets.

This meagre display of dictatorial gratitude is telling. In Pyongyang, living standards for the core class are luxurious only by the standards of a country where a third of the population is
chronically hungry.

Elites have relatively large apartments and access to rice. They are also granted first dibs on imported luxuries such as fruit and alcohol. But for residents of Pyongyang, electricity is
intermittent at best, hot water is rarely available and travel outside the country is difficult except for diplomats and state-sponsored businessmen.

‘An elite family in Pyongyang does not live nearly as well – in terms of material possessions, creature comforts and entertainment options – as the family of an average salary
man in Seoul,’ Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born political scientist who attended college in Pyongyang and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul, told me. Average per capita income in South
Korea is fifteen times as high as in the North ($1,900 in 2009). Countries with higher per capita incomes than North Korea include Sudan, Congo and Laos.

The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family
maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor
swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horseracing track, a private train station and a water park.

A private yacht, which has a fifty-metre pool with two waterslides, was photographed near the family’s house in Wonsan, which is located on a peninsula with white sandy beaches and is
believed to be a family favourite. The former bodyguard said Kim Jong Il often went there to hunt roe deer, pheasants and wild geese. All his houses have been furnished with imports from Japan and
Europe. The family’s beef is raised by bodyguards on a special cattle ranch and their apples come from an organic orchard where sugar, a rare and costly commodity in the North, is added to
the soil to sweeten the fruit.
²

The privileges of blood are uniquely rich in the Kim family. Kim Jong Il inherited his dictatorial control of North Korea from his father in 1994 – the first hereditary succession in the
communist world. The second such succession occurred in December 2011, after Kim’s death at age sixty-nine. His youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, was promptly hailed as the ‘supreme
leader’ of the party, state and army. Although it was unclear if he, his older relatives, or the generals would wield real power, propagandists worked overtime manufacturing a new cult of
personality. Kim Jong Eun was described in the party daily,
Rodong Sinmun
, as ‘the spiritual pillar and lighthouse of hope’ for the military and the people. The state news agency
noted that the new leader is ‘a prominent thinker-theoretician and peerlessly illustrious commander’ who will be a ‘solid foundation for the prosperity of the country.’

Other than having the right blood, the son’s qualifications were meagre. He attended a German-language school in Leibefeld, Switzerland, where he played point guard on the basketball team
and spent hours making pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan.
³
He returned to Pyongyang at seventeen to attend Kim Il Sung
University. Little is known about what he studied there.

Preparations for a second father-to-son transfer of power became apparent in Pyongyang shortly after Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008. It left the Dear Leader with a noticeable limp and
signalled the emergence of Kim Jong Eun from obscurity.

In lectures delivered to select audiences in Pyongyang in 2009, Kim Jong Eun was described as a ‘genius of the literary arts’ and a patriot who ‘is working without sleep or
rest’ to promote North Korea as a nuclear superpower. A propaganda song, ‘Footsteps’, was circulated at military bases to prepare the cadre for the coming of a dynamic
‘Young General’. He was indeed young, in his late twenties, born in either 1983 or 1984.

At his coming-out party in September 2010, the Young General’s face was officially shown to the world for the first time. Astonished Western journalists who are normally denied access to
North Korea were summoned to a grand military parade in Kim Il Sung Square, where they were encouraged to film and photograph a young man who looked as fresh as his father looked debilitated. He
was the spitting image of his late grandfather Kim Il Sung, who was always more beloved than Kim Jong Il.

That uncanny resemblance, as Kim Jong Eun moved to consolidate power after the death of his father, seemed orchestrated. His clothes and haircut – Mao suits and a short military trim with
no sideburns – were the same as his grandfather’s when he seized control of North Korea in 1945. Rumours circulated in South Korea that the resemblance had been enhanced by plastic
surgeons in Pyongyang to render the young man as a kind of Great Leader II.

If the new leader is to secure the same steely grip on the country as his father and grandfather, he certainly needs some measure of public support, along with solid backing from the military.
His father, Kim Jong Il, may never have been popular, but he had nearly twenty years to learn how to dominate his elders. He had handpicked many of the leading generals and was effectively running
the country when his father died in 1994.

Not yet thirty years old, with less than three years to learn the levers, Kim Jong Eun has no such advantage. Until he figures it out, he will have to depend on his privileged blood, a budding
cult of personality, and the loyalty of relatives, courtiers and generals who may or may not be content to stand in the shadows.

Shin was putting on his shoes in the school dormitory when his teacher came looking for him. It was Saturday morning, 6 April 1996.

‘Hey, Shin, come out as you are,’ the teacher said.

Puzzled as to why he had been summoned, Shin hurried out of the dormitory and into the schoolyard. There, three uniformed men were waiting for him beside a jeep. They handcuffed him, blindfolded
him with a strip of black cloth and pushed him into the backseat of the jeep. Without saying a word, they drove him away.

Shin had no idea where he was being taken or why, but after half an hour of bouncing along in the backseat, he became afraid and started to tremble.

When the jeep stopped, the men lifted Shin out and stood him on his feet. He heard the clunk of a heavy metal door opening and closing, then the whine of machinery. Guards nudged him into an
elevator, and he felt himself descending. He had entered an underground prison inside the camp.

After stepping out of the elevator, he was led down a corridor and into a large, bare, windowless room where guards removed his blindfold. Opening his eyes, he saw a military officer with four
stars pinned to his uniform. The officer sat behind a desk. Two other guards in khaki stood nearby. One of them ordered Shin to sit down in a straight-backed chair.

‘You’re Shin In Geun?’ the officer with four stars asked.

‘Yes, that is correct,’ Shin replied.

‘Shin Gyung Sub is the name of your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jang Hye Gyung is your mother’s name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shin He Geun is the name of your brother?’

‘Yes.’

The officer stared at Shin for about five minutes. Shin could not figure out where the interrogation was headed.

‘Do you know why you’re here?’ the officer asked at last.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Shall I tell you then?’

Shin nodded yes.

‘At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. That’s why you’re here. Understand? Were you aware of this fact or not?’

‘I . . . I didn’t know.’

Shin was so shocked by the news that he found it difficult to speak. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. The officer became increasingly angry and incredulous.

‘How is it possible for you not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away?’ he asked. ‘If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’

‘No, I really didn’t know,’ Shin said.

‘And your father didn’t mention anything?’

‘It’s been a while since I was last home,’ Shin replied. ‘When I visited a month ago, I heard nothing.’

‘What kind of grievance does your family have to risk an escape?’ the officer asked.

‘I honestly don’t know anything.’

This was the story that Shin told when he arrived in South Korea in the late summer of 2006. He told it consistently, he told it often and he told it well.

His debriefings in Seoul began with agents from the government’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). Experienced interrogators, they conduct extensive interviews with every North Korean
defector and have been trained to screen out the assassins that Kim Jong Il’s government periodically dispatched to the South.

After the NIS, Shin told his story to counsellors and psychiatrists at a government centre for resettlement, then to human rights activists and fellow defectors, and then to the local and
international news media. He wrote about it in his 2007 Korean-language memoir, and he told it to me when we first met in December 2008. He elaborated on it nine months later during a week of
day-long interviews with me in Seoul.

There was, of course, no way to confirm what he was saying. Shin was the only available source of information about his early life. His mother and brother were dead. His father was still in the
camp or perhaps dead too. The North Korean government could hardly set the record straight, since it denies that Camp 14 exists.

On a cloudless morning in Torrance, California, Shin revisited and revised the story.

We’d been working on the book on and off for about a year, and for the past week we had been sitting across from each other in my dimly lit room in a Best Western hotel, slowly sifting
through the events of his early life.

A day before this session, Shin said he had something new and important to disclose. He insisted that we find a new translator. He also invited Hannah Song, his then boss and de facto guardian,
to listen in. Song was the executive director of Liberty in North Korea, the human rights group that had helped bring Shin to the United States. A twenty-nine-year-old Korean American, she helped
Shin manage his money, visas, travel, medical care and behaviour. She jokingly described herself as Shin’s mum.