Escape from North Korea (26 page)

Pastor Yoon expanded his mission in Russia to include helping North Koreans who escaped from the logging camps. He set up food kitchens and shelters in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok to serve loggers. He also helped several loggers make the four-thousand-mile journey to Moscow to seek asylum in the South Korean Embassy. The embassy turned almost all of them away. He sent other loggers
to China with introductions to missionaries there. A few of the loggers he assisted eventually reached South Korea, including a man who married a South Korean woman and set up a successful dental practice. Years later, the two met up again in Seoul, and the grateful dentist fixed Pastor Yoon's teeth.

It wasn't long before Pastor Yoon began to hear disturbing reports about life in North Korea from the loggers who showed up at his church looking for assistance. They spoke of widespread food shortages back home, even starvation. His fellow missionaries in northeast China were hearing similar stories from the North Korean refugees who crossed the river into China looking for food. Pastor Yoon decided he had to help.

The pastor's comparative advantage was his knowledge of the Korean-American Christian community and his web of contacts in the United States. So he made the decision to return to the United States to raise money for food assistance for North Korea. He traveled around the country, preaching at Korean-American churches and raising relief funds.

“North Korean government rations have stopped,” he would tell the congregations, “and people are living off grass.” He passed along information he had learned from his sources in South Korea who had visited the North. The most terrible reports were of cannibalism. At first he could hardly believe such stories, but his sources were excellent and he trusted them. “The starvation is so intense,” he told the Korean-Americans, “that some of those who are hungry begin to hallucinate and see children and adults as animals to eat.”

Pastor Yoon was a charismatic and persuasive speaker, and the congregations opened their wallets in response to his appeals. He raised enough funds to ship 150 tons of flour and rice to North Korea, along with seventy tons of fertilizer. He often gave thanks to God for the generosity of the Americans who were helping to save the lives of the starving people of North Korea.

And then he went there.

In 1997, Pastor Yoon joined a humanitarian mission to North Korea to visit a noodle factory supported by the donations he had raised. He was astounded at what he found. The suffering was worse than he had imagined, far worse than anything he had seen as a child in war-torn Korea. Children, in rags, were patrolling the streets, begging for food or picking up crumbs that had fallen to the street. The bodies of the dead were piled up outside the train stations, he was told over and over again.

Worst of all, he found evidence that the government was stealing some of the international food donations. Instead of reaching the starving civilians for whom it was intended, the aid was diverted to the military or given to the well-off elites of Pyongyang. International aid organizations that worked in North Korea were aware of the corruption. A few humanitarian groups, such as Doctors Without Borders, pulled out, refusing to operate under such circumstances. As one worker put it, “the [aid] teams realized that the government fabricated whatever they wanted aid workers to see: malnourished children in nurseries when more food air was desired, and well-fed children when donors needed reassurance that food aid was doing good.”
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Some of the North Korean refugees this worker interviewed in China said they had heard of the aid, and others had seen it for sale on the black market, but none had ever tasted it.

Other aid groups saw the leakage as a cost of doing business. They figured, probably correctly, that if the regime did not get what it presumed to be its share, it would expel the humanitarian workers. From the aid workers' point of view, it was necessary to overlook the regime's theft—even to the extent that they suppressed knowledge of the theft to international donors—in order to keep the aid flowing into the country. Yes, much of the aid was stolen, but they reasoned that a small percentage reached needy people who would otherwise die.

Pastor Yoon was outraged. He had always opposed the Communist government of North Korea. As a Christian, he deplored
the regime's violent repression of the North Korean people. But he had not realized the lengths to which the regime would go to keep its hold on power—even to the extent of pursuing policies that led to the deaths of millions of North Koreans. He began to see the international relief efforts as a means of perpetuating a regime whose policies were responsible for the murder by starvation of a million or more North Koreans. Kim Jong Il was killing his own people, he said, and “those of us on the outside world were not aware of this killing because it was done within the secrecy of a closed society.”

He decided to join the effort to help North Koreans escape. As he put it: “If you see someone who is drowning in the river, wouldn't you reach out and help that person? That was what was in my heart.”

From that moment, he resolved to dedicate his life to helping North Koreans reach free countries. He saw the oppressive Kim family regime as beyond any hope of change; it was his duty, he believed, to help overthrow the regime. Help one person escape, he reasoned, and that person will get word to his family back home about the freedom that awaits them on the outside. Others will follow, and the regime will implode.

In the late 1990s, Pastor Yoon relocated his mission to China. Unlike his years in Russia, this time he couldn't operate openly as a missionary. Instead, he went into China on a business visa, with a cover job as the manager of a gravel factory. Using as a model the work he had done in Siberia and the Russian Far East, he began to set up an underground network of assistance for North Korean refugees. He and his wife, Sunja, rented apartments in several cities and turned them into shelters for North Koreans on the run. The shelters were temporary abodes where refugees could stay until they found jobs in the underground economy or decided to risk riding the new underground railroad to South Korea. The Yoons provided newly arrived refugees with stylish clothes to help them blend into Chinese society. Mrs. Yoon gave the women instruction in how to style their hair and apply makeup.

Pastor Yoon believed in the principle that work was essential for human dignity, and he came up with the idea of starting handicraft studios in his safe houses. His wife taught refugees how to do cross-stitch embroidery. The refugees stitched both enormous religious pictures and tiny crosses attached to key chains. The pastor would lug the handicrafts back to the United States in bulging suitcases to sell to the congregations he visited. He used the proceeds to pay wages to the refugees.

News of the Yoons' generosity spread among the refugee community. Soon the pastor had more North Koreans knocking on his door than he was able to handle. “When I helped a refugee, he would tell a friend, and that friend would tell his friends,” he said years later. People would line up outside his apartment, waiting to talk to him. Some wanted money, some were looking for a meal or a place to live, and others wanted help in contacting a conductor on the new underground railroad. He sometimes became frustrated with his inability to help everyone as fully as he wanted to, and he took it out on the refugees.

“Sometimes I felt overwhelmed and would say: ‘No, I can't help you. Go to your father Kim Jong Il and ask for help.' Then they would leave, and I would feel really bad. I would run after them—I'd yell, ‘Hey, wait, wait, wait'—and give them money or whatever else they needed.”

For security reasons, Pastor and Mrs. Yoon changed their own apartment every three months, sometimes even moving to a different city. If they stayed in any one location too long, they feared that a neighbor might become suspicious of the activity in their home and report them to the police. Local police routinely checked up on foreigners living in the neighborhood, sometimes stopping by unexpectedly, so the Yoons made it a rule not to answer the door if there was a North Korean in the apartment with them. They would sit quietly until the knocks on the door ceased and the policemen went away.

They didn't talk about it much, but the Yoons also feared for their own safety. In Russia, the couple knew missionaries who had been harassed by North Korean security agents. A South Korean minister had been murdered under suspicious circumstances. The murder was officially unsolved, but rumor had it that North Korean agents killed the missionary because of his work helping escaped loggers. Pastor Yoon believed it. In China, refugees told the Yoons stories of North Koreans who pretended to be refugees while they were really spies for the North Korean government. One of the spies' jobs was to report back to Pyongyang about foreigners who were working as conductors on the new undergound railroad.

Pastor Yoon's fears were not unfounded. Years later he received a phone call in Seattle from a prosecutor in South Korea. The prosecutor was calling to ask him about a North Korean woman who was under arrest in Seoul for spying for Pyongyang. The woman, who had reached South Korea by posing as a refugee, told the prosecutor that several years earlier, in Yanji City, she had been ordered by her superiors in Pyongyang to kidnap Pastor Yoon and take him to North Korea. Her orders were to befriend Pastor Yoon, learn as much as possible about his rescue operation, and obtain information about the refugees he was helping.

Pastor Yoon remembered the woman well. How could he forget? She was associated with one of the most painful incidents of his years in China. During the time he knew her in Yanji City, the Chinese police arrested and repatriated a group of refugees he had been helping. It was a group of about thirty men, women, and children. The North Koreans had crammed into his apartment one evening for a jovial dinner of beef soup and rice followed by a worship service. Later that night, after they went home, the refugees were arrested by the Chinese police in coordinated raids on the safe houses where they were living. The woman who was later arrested in Seoul told the prosecutor that she was the informant who had turned them in. Not long after that incident, the Yoons packed up and moved again,
a decision that probably saved the pastor's life. If he had stayed, the plot to abduct him and take him to North Korea might have succeeded.

Another North Korean informant was responsible for the arrest and repatriation of the nineteen refugees in Pastor Yoon's Yanji apartment while he was in Thailand. This time the snitch was not an agent of the North Korean government but a disgruntled refugee who betrayed the other refugees to the Chinese police. Pastor Yoon said the informant was angry that the pastor had not included him in the group of thirty-two refugees who made their escape on the previous trip.

Years later, Pastor Yoon still found it painful to talk about this incident. The arrest of the nineteen North Koreans in his care was heartbreaking, he said. At the time, though, the emotion that overwhelmed all others and carried him through was anger. He resolved to find a way to return to China and continue his work. Back home in Seattle, he turned the problem over and over again in his mind.

Finally, he had an inspiration. John Yoon was barred from returning to China. China would never grant him a visa. But what if John Yoon was not the man applying for a visa? He consulted a lawyer about how to legally change his name. Within a few months, John Yoon, the name he was born with, was dead; Phillip Buck was born. He chose the name “Buck” because it was an unusual transliteration of a common Korean name usually written in English as “Park.” He obtained an American passport under his new name and applied for a Chinese visa. He soon was back in Yanji City, and his branch of the new underground railroad was up and running again.

The first priority of the newly named pastor was to find out what happened to the nineteen refugees whom he had failed. Among the nineteen was a family of four—a mother and three sons. He eventually was able to piece together their story. He learned that the repatriated family was sent to prison, where the oldest son contracted tuberculosis and died. The rest of the family survived and eventually
was released. The mother, unable to feed her family, crossed into China again. This time she hooked up with a broker, who sold her as a bride to a Chinese man. One day she managed to get to a telephone and call one of Pastor Buck's missionary colleagues, who told her to leave her “husband” and come to Yanji City. Within two days of her arrival, Pastor Buck arranged for her to go to South Korea, this time using an escape route through Mongolia. He then hired a broker to go into North Korea and bring out the woman's two surviving sons. They eventually were reunited with their mother in Seoul. The pastor was able to help six more of the nineteen North Koreans who had been arrested in his apartment when he was in Thailand. Of the remaining nine, he managed to track several to prison camps in North Korea, but after that the trail went cold. He was not able to find out what happened to them.

Pastor Buck continued his work in Yanji City until May 9, 2005, when he was arrested for the crime of helping illegal immigrants. His trial began on December 31 of that year and continued for several months. During the trial, he had a chance to address the judge who presided over his case. Months in prison had not quelled his anger: “You should not try me,” the pastor scolded the judge. “The one who should be tried is Kim Jong Il for the murders he committed against his own people. I have only rescued them from drowning.”

The Chinese court convicted Pastor Buck under Criminal Law 318 for the crime of illegally transporting people out of China. The crime carried a sentence of two to seven years, but he was deported before he could be sentenced. He had spent fifteen months in jail. He arrived home to a hero's welcome at Seattle-Tacoma Airport on the evening of August 21, 2006. Under the terms of his deportation, he is permanently barred from reentry into China.