Escape from North Korea (25 page)

The story of the Reverend John Yoon suggests the perils that conductors on the new underground railroad face, even when they are well organized, well funded, and well intentioned.
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Failure brings penalties, usually jail, for the conductor, and it brings arrest, repatriation, and possible death for the fugitives he was trying to lead to freedom.

Pastor Yoon was in high spirits. The American minister had just succeeded in leading thirty-two North Koreans out of China. They had walked undetected across the Chinese border into Laos just after dawn the previous day. At noon, a motorboat, hired in advance, met them at a dock on the Laotian side of the Mekong River. The boat whisked them over to Thailand, where they also disregarded border formalities and landed on a deserted beach. There they were met by a South Korean missionary, who served as their guide in Thailand.

The group was now safely settled in a large tourist hotel in the fourteenth-century river town of Chiang Saen in northeast Thailand, and Pastor Yoon felt that he could finally relax. The operation had been a success so far. He was confident that the final leg of their journey, to the South Korean Embassy in Bangkok, was equally well planned and would go off without a hitch. In the morning, two
minibuses were scheduled to show up at the hotel and pick up the group, passing (as far as the drivers were concerned) as a group of tourists from a church in South Korea who were enjoying a vacation in rural Thailand. To reinforce the fiction that the refugees were Christian tourists, Pastor Yoon had prepared two placards to put in the front windows of the buses. The signs said, “Emmanuel,” Hebrew for “God is with us” and, for Christians, another name for Jesus Christ. The plan was for the group to relax and lie low for five days in Chiang Saen and then take a train to Bangkok. By this time next week, praise God, they all would be in Bangkok. Nothing was likely to go wrong now, and he expected that the refugees would find permanent homes in South Korea within a few months.

It had been a difficult journey, complicated to orchestrate and frustrating to implement. Pastor Yoon had spent weeks collecting information, deciding on an itinerary and lining up a network of reliable, trustworthy people to assist the travelers at the various stages of their trip. In China, most of the people he relied on were Chinese and Christians. Some were of Korean heritage; others were majority Han Chinese. In Laos and Thailand, he had hired locals and lined up South Korean acquaintances to go there and act as facilitators once the group arrived.

Several weeks earlier, at the pastor's behest, missionary friends had traveled to Kunming and then across the border to Laos. They were traveling on legitimate visas and were posing as tourists. But they weren't genuine tourists. The real reason for their trip was to gather information about the Laotian border crossing. Pastor Yoon had the missionaries take photographs of the terrain on both sides of the border, the border-control posts, the nearby roads, and other landmarks. The missionaries sketched out a map of the area, noting the wooded areas where the refugees could hide, and recommending a path that would skirt the official checkpoints. Crossing the Laotian-Chinese border illegally should not prove difficult, they informed Pastor Yoon. Drug runners had been doing it for years,
smuggling opium from the Golden Triangle into Kunming and from there into all parts of China.

In Laos, the missionaries had also gathered information for Pastor Yoon about the going rates for bribes. They found out that the Laotian border police expected a “gratuity” of between thirty and fifty American dollars for every undocumented person they discovered. If the police came across an illegal immigrant and weren't paid off, their policy was to take him to the official border crossing and force him to walk back into China. For a North Korean, that meant he would be arrested, sent to a detention center in northeast China, and repatriated to North Korea.

Based on this information, Pastor Yoon decided to make sure that every North Korean in his group had enough cash on hand to bribe his way out of a jam. Before they crossed the border, he gave each refugee $150 in ten-dollar bills. He told them to offer the Laotian security official a bribe of thirty dollars if they were captured. If the worst happened and some of the North Koreans were arrested, he reassured himself that they would be able to bribe their way out of jail. The pastor wouldn't begrudge any such payments. Rarely did freedom come at such a low price.

The refugees' journey through China had begun in Yanji City, a gritty city in Jilin Province in the northeast of the country, not far from the Sino-Korean border. The thirty-two men and women had been staying there, scattered among a string of apartments rented by Pastor Yoon and his wife. It was not safe for thirty-two North Koreans to travel together as a group across China, so the pastor had divided them into units of four or five travelers. He decided that they would be less likely to attract suspicion if they traveled by the express train, rather than by the local train or a bus. It was more expensive, but it was safer. The Chinese police would not be on the lookout for refugees on the pricey express train.

In Yanji City, Pastor Yoon saw each group off at the train station. It wasn't safe for him to acknowledge them directly, so he took up
a position apart from them on the train platform and communicated through eye contact and small body gestures—hands clasped together in prayer, an almost imperceptible bow. He had made his formal farewells the day before each group's departure. He invited them to his home, said a prayer, and urged them to have courage. God was watching over them, he promised, and would keep them safe. Before he said his final good-byes he reminded the refugees one last time of the instructions he had given them during a pre-trip briefing: Sit in the same car of the train, he ordered, but sit separately. Don't sit together. That way, if one person were arrested, the others might be spared. Don't worry if you see a policeman come through the car. That's routine. But if the police begin to check IDs, go to the restroom and wait there until the ID checks are over. He also advised them to look occupied. Hold a Chinese magazine or newspaper, flip the pages, and pretend to be reading it even though you can't read Chinese. The last thing you want is to appear nervous and attract attention.

The trip to Beijing by express train took about twelve hours. In Beijing, Pastor Yoon arranged for a pastor with whom he had worked before to meet each group at the train station and escort them to the train they would board for the next leg of their journey. The pastor took the refugees to a hotel, provided dinner, and then escorted them back to the train station in time to catch their next train. The refugees' final destination was Kunming, two thousand miles to the southwest. Kunming is the capital of Yunnan Province and very close to the border of Laos. It was a journey of about two days—forty-eight hours for those who took the slower train, thirty-eight hours for those on the express.

Meanwhile, Pastor Yoon traveled separately to Kunming by plane. He met each group upon their arrival at the train station and took them to the different hotels where he had booked rooms. Once everyone had arrived in Kunming, they convened at the bus station,
where they boarded an overnight bus to the town of Jinghong, very close to the Laotian border. After breakfasting together at a restaurant near the bus station, the group boarded a local bus, which took them to the wooded outskirts of Jinghong. Here they split up again into small units of four or five people. At intervals of an hour, with Pastor Yoon or an associate leading the way, they walked over a mountain until they reached the Laotian frontier. Once in Laos, local guides met them and led the groups to a prearranged meeting spot on the Mekong River.

The entire rescue—train fares, hotel rooms, food, and bribes—cost about $20,000. That worked out to $625 per person.

All in all, the rescue had to be deemed a resounding success, and so when Pastor Yoon's cellphone rang that evening at the tourist hotel in Chiang Saen, he was not mentally prepared for the news he was about to receive. The caller did not identify himself, but Pastor Yoon recognized the voice as that of a colleague in Yanji City. The message was brief. The caller warned him, “Do not come home.” Chinese police had raided the pastor's apartment in Yanji City and found a photocopy of his American passport. His identity was compromised. But that was not the worst news. There were nineteen refugees staying in Pastor Yoon's apartment at the time. They were all arrested during the raid and were now in a detention center, soon to be repatriated to North Korea.

Pastor Yoon's original plan had been to drop off the thirty-two refugees at the South Korean Embassy in Bangkok and then fly back to Yanji City; he would then repeat the entire journey he had just completed, this time with the nineteen refugees who had just been arrested in his apartment. But returning to China was not an option now. Instead, he went home to Seattle to regroup.

Pastor Yoon was born in 1938 in what was then Japanese-occupied Korea and is now the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. He was twelve years old when the Korean War broke out. His parents ordered him, his older brothers, and a sister to flee to safety in the South. They would follow later, they promised. He never saw his mother and father again. Many years later, his daughter Grace Yoon Yi attributed her father's compassion for North Korean refugees in China to his wartime experiences as a child. The North Korean refugees' experiences of starvation and divided families recalled the tribulations of his boyhood, she said.

In South Korea, the young John Yoon lived in a home for war orphans. When he turned eighteen, he was drafted into the army. After his military service, he entered college on a scholarship financed by an elderly Christian woman. He obtained an undergraduate degree in theology, went on to get a master's degree and was ordained in 1970 as a minister in the Korean Assemblies of God church, a Pentecostal denomination. In the early 1980s, he was invited to serve as the pastor of a Korean-American church in Fairbanks, Alaska. He became an American citizen in 1992.

Not long after that, the Korean Assemblies of God sent him and his wife on a mission to Siberia. His assignment was twofold: Set up a small seminary for thirty Russians who were training to be pastors, and minister to the growing community of South Korean businessmen who worked in Siberia. Trade between South Korea and Russia was growing apace in the wake of the diplomatic ties established in 1990, and South Korean companies had sent representatives to Siberia to buy timber and minerals. The Korean businessmen were usually there without their families, and Pastor Yoon's church functioned as a home away from home for them, a place where they could go to speak Korean and eat familiar food. Some of the businessmen were Christian, drawn by the prospect of Sunday worship. Others were open to Pastor Yoon's Christian message and in some cases became converts.

In the Far Eastern Russian port of Vladivostok, Pastor Yoon was less than a hundred miles from North Korea. Sometimes he would visit Khasan, a tiny border town south of the Vladivostok and the terminus for trains from North Korea. He would walk down to the Tumen River and gaze over the frontier to North Korea in the distance. Then he would say a prayer and think about the day when he would be able to visit his hometown again and reunite with relatives who might still be living there. He never expected that his mission in Russia would include ministering to North Koreans.

Not long after he arrived in Russia, he began to hear stories about timber camps deep in the Siberian woods where North Korean loggers were working under an arrangement worked out between the Russian and North Korean governments. His first sight of the loggers was on the train platform in Khabarovsk, where a group of two hundred young North Korean men were waiting to board a train that would take them farther north. They had just disembarked from the train from North Korea and were looking around them, their eyes drinking in the unfamiliar sights—the Cyrillic letters on the signs, the well-dressed Russians, the private vendors selling hard-boiled eggs and other snacks. The men were dressed identically in government-issued dark blue suits and wore identical ties. Pastor Yoon remembers his sadness at seeing the excited, hopeful looks on their faces. “They had nice suits,” he said. “They had all this fancy stuff they never had before. So they were really happy.” He knew the privations that were waiting for them at the logging camps, and he knew that their hopes of earning enough money to buy luxuries for their families were going to be dashed.