Escape from North Korea (19 page)

But the scene that became an icon was the shot of him with Defense Minister Lee Byung-tae, who visited him at the hospital. From his hospital bed, the former POW saluted the defense chief and announced, “Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho of the artillery unit, military service number 212966, reports his safe return.” In describing that scene, the South Korean daily
Dong-A Ilbo
later wrote that “the nation shed tears.”
¹⁰
President Kim Young-sam also paid the POW a visit.

Upon his release from the hospital, the second lieutenant was promoted to first lieutenant before being honorably discharged from the army in a ceremony at the Korea Military Academy. A parade was held in his honor. He had lunch with the president at the Blue House. In the years that followed, Cho Chang-ho went on to build a new life. He completed his degree at Yonsei University and married a South Korean woman. He became an advocate for South Korean POWs still captive in North Korea. He urged the South Korean government to speak out more aggressively against human rights abuses by the North Korean regime.

In 2006, Cho Chang-ho visited Washington, D.C., where he testified in the House of Representatives about his forty-three years in captivity. “Even as I speak,” he told the American legislators, “there are many, many South Korean prisoners of war still in North Korea awaiting a helping hand from the outside world.”
¹¹
He died in Seoul a few months after his return from Washington. His remains were buried in South Korea's National Cemetery where, years before, his name had been enshrined among those of the war dead.

President Kim Young-sam left office in January 1998. He was succeeded by Kim Dae-jung, who pursued a policy of détente toward North Korea. That approach became known as the Sunshine Policy, and it culminated with Kim Dae-jung's historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 2000.

The POW rescue team did not fare well during the Kim Dae-jung years. The man who had served as the intermediary between the rescue team in China and the South Korean government still had well-placed contacts who were willing to help quietly, mostly in the form of providing information. But coming up with the money to fund the extraction operations was tough, and the intermediary turned to private sources such as POW families for financial help. Mr. Jung has nothing good to say about those years. “In the Kim Dae-jung era, right before the summit in Pyongyang,” he said, “I had several POWs lined up to go to South Korea, but the government canceled.” The South Korean government presumably didn't want to risk disrupting the summit. The arrival of former POWs in Seoul would have reminded the South Korean public of the true nature of the dictatorial regime in North Korea.

The unwillingness of the Kim Dae-jung administration to risk confrontation with Beijing or Pyongyang over South Korea's POWs is apparent in the story of another old soldier, Chang Mu-hwan. In 1998, four years after Cho Chang-ho's escape and shortly after Kim Dae-jung took office, a popular
60 Minutes
–style show on South Korean TV caused a national uproar when it broadcast the story of an elderly POW who had escaped to China from North Korea.
¹²
The POW was stuck in China, risking arrest and repatriation to North Korea, and unable to get home to South Korea. The South Korean Embassy refused to help.

The TV program recorded the efforts of Chang Mu-hwan, then seventy-two years old, as he sought help from the embassy in Beijing. The camera closed in on Chang's trembling right hand as he placed a phone call to the embassy. When a woman answered, the old man
identified himself as a POW and asked for assistance. A transcript of his conversation with the embassy reads as follows:

Chang: I'm a South Korean POW. My name is Chang Mu-hwan.

Embassy
:
So?

Chang: I'm Chang Mu-hwan, and I would really appreciate it if you could help me out a little…

Embassy: Listen, why exactly are you calling?

Chang: Isn't this the South Korean Embassy?

Embassy: Yes, that's correct.

Chang: All right, then. I'm in [the name of location is redacted] now, and I was just thinking that the embassy could probably help me out. That's why I'm calling.

Embassy: Of course we can't.

Chang: But I am from North Korea. I…

Embassy: Oh, no, we can't. (She hangs up.)

Chang: But I'm a South Korean prisoner of war…
¹³

 

Chang Mu-hwan eventually made it to South Korea with the help of private aid workers. He had spent forty-five years in captivity in North Korea.

In 2002, Mr. Jung was arrested in China and charged with espionage. There was no trial, and the length of his sentence was unspecified. For the first two years of his imprisonment, the Chinese questioned him periodically, he said. After eight years in prison, including three in solitary confinement, he was released in 2010 and deported to South Korea.

Since the return of Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho in 1994, a total of seventy-nine South Korean POWs have made their way home, according to a tally the South Korean government released in
2010.
¹⁴
South Korea has also welcomed nearly two hundred family members of POWs. Other POWs have not been so lucky. Several escaped to China but were arrested and repatriated to North Korea, which claimed them as citizens.

The Kim family regime in Pyongyang remains acutely sensitive to the POW issue. It continues to assert that every former South Korean soldier who lives in North Korea is there by choice. To reinforce this point, it occasionally puts a POW before a television camera and uses him for propaganda purposes. The POW dutifully talks about how wonderful his life is in North Korea and how content he is to live in the people's paradise.

Pyongyang pulled this stunt in 2010 at one of the rare family reunions organized by the Red Cross organizations of both countries for relatives who had been separated during the Korean War. At the reunion, four former POWs were reunited with family members from South Korea. The participation of the four POWs came as a surprise in South Korea. Before Pyongyang put the four men's names on the reunion list, neither their families in South Korea nor the South Korean government had any idea that these soldiers had survived the war. The event threw doubt on the accuracy of South Korea's lists of the dead and missing. How many other POWs whom no one knows about are still alive and living in North Korea?

Ask a South Korean today about the POWs detained in North Korea, and a typical response is to speculate that these old soldiers may not want to come home. They have lived in North Korea for more than half a century, the speculation goes; they have new families and are happy where they are. The surprise inclusion of the four POWs in the North-South reunion in 2010 fueled this line of thinking; all the POWs said publicly that they were in North Korea by choice. But of course, Pyongyang never puts the question to the POWs themselves—or if it does, the question is framed in such a way that the POW knows that he puts his life at risk, or that of his family, if he gives a wrong answer.

When President Lee Myung-bak took office in 2008, he pledged to work for the return of the POWs. The government won't talk publicly about its work to get the POWs back, but some information has emerged. One aspect of that work appears to be exerting pressure on Beijing to release POWs who have crossed the river to China. On a visit to Beijing in the summer of 2011, Lee's defense minister reportedly pressed China to give exit permits to five POWs who had sought sanctuary in South Korean consular facilities in Beijing and Shenyang.
¹⁵
The fate of these five POWs is unknown.

Meanwhile, South Korea has made no progress with North Korea on the POW issue. Relations between South and North worsened in 2010 when the North Korean military attacked South Korea and killed South Korean citizens: In March of that year, forty-six sailors died when a North Korean submarine torpedoed the South Korean naval ship
Cheonan
, on which they were serving. In November, North Korea shelled the South Korean–held Yeonpyeong Island. Four South Koreans were killed, including two civilians.

In 2011, the Lee administration suggested that South Korea might try to purchase the freedom of the POWs still captive in the North. Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik cited the West German
Freikauf
program as a model.
Freikauf
, meaning “buy freedom” in German, was the secret Cold War program through which West Germany paid ransoms to East Germany in order to bring out some 33,755 dissidents and political prisoners held there. A Korean
Freikauf
program is unlikely to work, however, not least because Pyongyang refuses even to acknowledge that any South Korean POWs are being held against their will.

At the time of his inauguration, President Lee said he wanted to mark 2010, the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, as the occasion to launch a joint effort with Pyongyang for the recovery of the remains of South Korea soldiers who died on the other side of the border. This has not happened. It probably was not a realistic goal in the first place, as the American experience shows.

In 2005, the United States abandoned its program to recover the remains of American soldiers in North Korea, due to concerns about nuclear tensions and the safety of the recovery teams. The United States conducted thirty excavation missions in North Korea from 1996 to 2005, finding the remains of what it believed to be 230 American soldiers. The program was marked with dishonesty and fakery on the part of Pyongyang. North Korea moved the American soldiers' remains, stole American equipment, and billed the United States at inflated rates for the cost of its assistance. It is a measure of the importance the United States attaches to recovering the remains of its fallen soldiers that it nevertheless decided in late 2011 to restart the program. But the program never got off the ground. The U.S. suspended it again in March 2012 after North Korea announced plans for a missile test that violated a United Nations ban.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jung, his plastic surgeries nearly complete, was preparing to sneak in to China to continue his work. Unlike many of the South Koreans, Americans, and Chinese providing assistance to North Koreans who are trying to escape, Mr. Jung said he is not motivated by his Christian faith. His motivation is patriotism. The American government worked hard over the years to get back the remains of its soldiers from the Korean War, he said, even if it eventually suspended the program. But South Korea is not even trying to get its living soldiers back. Bringing POWs home to South Korea should be Seoul's first priority, he argued. Because it isn't, he will do the job.

If Mr. Jung is lucky, he will succeed in repatriating a few more old soldiers. But the task is harder now than it was in the 1990s, when he was first on the job. The POWs are elderly, and many of them are too frail for the rigors of an escape. Eighty-year-old men cannot paddle themselves across the Yalu River on a wooden raft, as Second Lieutenant Cho Chang-ho did in 1994.

Successive South Korean governments have spent decades trying to negotiate their return, without success. The United Nations,
under whose flag they fought, has forgotten them. Somewhere in North Korea, five hundred South Korean prisoners of war have been held for nearly sixty years. They are unlikely ever to see their homeland again.

ON THE RUN

HUNTED

O
n December 23, 2006, Adrian Hong expected to be on a plane heading home to Los Angeles, where he would spend the Christmas holidays with his parents. Instead, he was in Beijing, holed up in a room at the Intercontinental Hotel in the city's financial center. He was pacing the floor and waiting nervously for a phone call that was several hours overdue. A few minutes after ten o'clock in the morning, there was a knock on the door. He peered through the spy hole and saw a housemaid with a stack of towels in her arms. When he opened the door, his heart sank. Arrayed behind her were five men in suits, men he could tell at a glance were plainclothes police. They were there to arrest him for the crime of helping North Korean refugees in China.
¹