Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (110 page)

“The authorities investigated for about a year to find out who did it,” Lim said. “I was always stressed, fearing capture. Probably the reason I wasn’t caught is that my people were among the searchers.” But mean-while the larger anti-regime organization in the military was discovered and crushed. “State Security agents in the ministry found out about their attempt. They got rid of them by late 1992, arrested them all. At the New Year in 1993 Kim Il-sung made a speech. The State Security man who caught the plotters was promoted from major general to full general. The group arrested included a vice-marshal and nine or ten other general officers, one of them four-star. They were going to have an armed coup, get rid of Kim Jong-il and resume talks with South Korea. Yi Bong-yol was rumored to be the four-star general involved. I’m not sure of the others. I didn’t dig up details for fear I’d be arrested myself. Word on this came via the State Security people in the military units. I never saw the documents, but in each department they had official discussions of what had happened inside the ministry. When State Security felt something was fishy, they bugged the houses of some officers, got evidence and secretly arrested them. People thought they’d just gone on long trips, and only later heard they had been arrested. Along with the generals, about 200 to 300 were said to have been arrested, with half of those executed and half sent to political prison. I don’t know the method of execution, but at that time they had started using the electric chair in North Korea.

“A year after we distributed the fliers it seemed the coast was clear for me, but in February 1993 they resumed investigating the incident. In North Hamgyong, my home province, a special State Security force was formed to find the criminal. They investigated anyone who had ridden a train there in September 1991. It was discovered I had visited the province September 24, 1991, and stayed about ten hours, so State Security suspected me. In March of 1993 they found some evidence at my home.” While the authorities worked to nail down further evidence, Lim made his preparations and fled to South Korea via a third country.

There is much drama in Lim’s account. Perhaps that owes something to his skills as a screen-writer. In South Korea he published two books about his experiences. “When I first defected, South Korean intelligence people knew of the flier incident very well,” he wrote in the second volume,
River That Runs South.
“One of them said, ‘Did you know that Kim Jong-il promised to bestow the title of “hero” on whoever could find the truth of this incident?’”

While Lim’s accounts were gripping, some readers were skeptical. Defector Oh Young-nam said he had been a captain in State Security in Pyongyang from June 1991 until April of 1993, covering the entire period when Lim supposedly was the object of intensive investigation. Oh told me he had not heard of the flier incident even though he was in charge of an inspection department combatting spies and anti-government movements. He added that the regime was “very fast to act in such a case. If someone puts out a leaflet with anti-government information, there’s no possibility of getting away. The intelligence net-work is very well kept. Sometimes sons would report on fathers. I never really trusted my wife, because I’ve seen too many cases where wives reported on husbands. Thus there is no open opposition.” Due to extreme shortages, Oh added, “you can’t find clean A-4 paper anywhere, even in an office. You can use a kid’s notebook, but I can’t imagine someone tossing full packs of leaflets.”

That is not to say there were no opponents of the regime. Oh told me that his father, a bodyguard, had died in a 1960s shootout with special forces soldiers at a mansion where Kim Il-sung and first lady Kim Song-ae were staying in Changson county, North Pyongan province. “It was Kim Song-ae who shut my father’s eyelids,” Oh said. “This is widely known in North Korea.” The coup plotters, he said, turned out to be under the control of Minister of National Defense Kim Chang-bong, who was not present for the gun battle.

Other sources indicated that anti-regime activities had not been infrequent. Kim Myong-chol guarded both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il during his stint in the bodyguard service from 1976 to 1985. When I met him in 1994 he was suntanned, with coarse hair and a toothy smile. Oh yes, and he wore a gold watch. “When I entered there were only about 3,000 to 4,000 bodyguards,” he told me, “but after the killing of Ceaucescu and his wife in Romania in 1989, they increased the number and now it’s about 70,000.” Kim Myong-chol had left by then but he learned of the increase from old colleagues when he visited headquarters.

“Externally-we were guarding against enemy countries; internally, counterrevolutionaries,” he said. “There was a 300-page book published by the Bodyguard Service detailing past incidents involving people who opposed the government. I remember a lot, but I can’t remember dates and names. Around 1977, in Anak County, Hwanghae Province, a person stole an AK assault weapon from a soldier, cut it down—sawed it off—and hid it inside his jacket. He was headed for Pyongyang to terrorize a high party official when a plainclothes bodyguard caught him. His chest was bulging. There were similar incidents involving different weapons. Some people decided they wanted to give a letter of complaint to Kim Il-sung personally and tried
to get through the bodyguards to him, but they got caught.” He mentioned also a large student anti-regime movement, led by the son of a vice director of State Security that he said was uncovered in 1991 at Wonsan University. “I didn’t realize any of the contradictions while I was a bodyguard,” Kim Myong-chol said. “I was prepared to give up my life for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Bodyguards are more loyal than the army. Bodyguards are people with a sturdy background of loyalty. Even a dog wouldn’t go against an owner who had raised him.”

Aspects of Lim’s story did check out. For example, army movie creative boss Li Jin-u was a real person who got into real trouble. Lee Chong-guk, former sergeant in the Bureau of Nuclear and Chemical Defense, related to me a rumor that Li Jin-u had been killed for spreading secret information about nuclear weapons. “In 1989, Li Jin-u was making a movie,
Red Maple Leaf,”
Lee said. “Researching for the scenario, he had to use data processing and look up information. He found some information about nuclear weapons and told Western reporters about it. That upset Kim Jong-il, who had Li killed. That’s a rumor, but for sure Li was never seen again.”

And the 1992 purge of dissident or at least disgruntled officers in the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces did happen, by the accounts of many sources. According to Kang Myong-do the leader was Vice Marshal Ahn Jong-ho, and forty other elite officers were involved. Ahn Jong-ho, Kang said, had graduated from Mangyongdae Revolutionary School. As an officer he had studied at a Soviet military academy before returning to the KPA for assignments in the strategy and battle training departments, heading the latter. He had been a rising star, Kang said. Others involved were the deputy commander of the battle training department and the vice head of the strategy department, Kang said.

Kang said the officers harbored doubts about the regime and personally disliked Kim Jong-il. All had studied for three to four years at the Russian academy and had experienced considerable freedom, comparatively speaking. It was natural, he said, that they had some doubts after that experience. They also abhorred Kim Jong-il’s distortion of history. Quite a few had been his classmates at Namsan Senior Middle School, so they knew his “promiscuous lifestyle. They disliked his changing his birthplace to Mount Paektu.” The forty, Kang said, were executed, and the authorities “got rid of” fifty others who had studied in Russia. Kang listed previous coup attempts from as far back as the 1960s led respectively by Ho Bong-ha, Yi Hyo-seun, Kim Chang-bong and Kim Byong-ha. “Even in this tightly controlled regime there is always a possibility of coup d’etat,” he said.
¹

Former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop added that in addition to the leaders who were executed, “almost all the people who had studied in the
Soviet Union were deemed to have been influenced by the anti–Kim Jong-il organization even if they-were not soldiers. These people were not allowed to travel overseas, and anyone found to have the slightest connection to the anti–Kim Jong-il organization was executed, resulting in the death of almost all the students who had studied in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I used to supervise the Juche Science Institute, where I met a Russian literature graduate of Kazan University in the USSR. The professor who had supervised his graduation thesis was the dean in charge of foreigners, and such professors usually had connections with the Security Bureau of the Soviet Union. Based on this flimsy reasoning, the People’s Army arrested the graduate and had him shot.
²

Choe Joo-whal, a former People’s Army lieutenant colonel who defected, said the purged officers’ offenses included giving military information to Russian intelligence. The internal spy who discovered the plot was Won Eung-hui, said Choe, who put the number purged by Won on Kim Jong-il’s orders at around three hundred. Kim Jong-il, he added, was going all out to build support among other military officers. In 1992, Kim had a “very fancy” apartment building constructed on the Taedong River in Pyongyang so that he could give the apartments to influential generals. In 1995, he gave twenty generals new Mercedes Benz automobiles as presents, Choe said.
³

In his December 7, 1996, speech, Kim stated that “currently, there are no anti-revolutionaries within the party,” although there was “huge chaos due to the poor performance of the party in constructing socialism,” and those party workers who had “stood by with folded arms during this hard time will have to account for their actions in the future.” In the event, after the three-year period of mourning for his father ended and he made good his threat, he seems to have found some officials to accuse of being outright oppositionists.

From 1997, according to reports that filtered out of the country, North Korea publicly executed over fifty high officials. According to South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan, one of them was Ri Bong-won, a four-star general who supervised KPA personnel decisions and was accused of spying for South Korea.
⁴

There were rumors, reported abroad, of a coup attempt by elements of the Sixth Army Corps in North Hamgyong Province. Kim Jong-il told some ethnic Koreans from Japan in April 1998 that the rumors were “a baseless lie. There was no such attempt. What really happened was that we found some defects in the political indoctrination program of the corps and had to remove some officers after self-criticism meetings. Contrary to the published reports, neither the corps commander nor the political commissar was executed. The joint chief of staff, who was the corps commander in question, is here today. After the so-called coup attempt, he was promoted to the chief of
the joint staff. Now the enemy propagandists claim that the political commissar was behind the coup and that it was he who was executed. The truth of the matter is that the commissar was relieved because of his stomach cancer.”
⁵

Back to the account by Lim Young-sun of his adventure on the train, I see three items of circumstantial evidence in favor of crediting Lim’s story. First, there were afterward quite a number of new and credible reports of anti-regime leafletting and graffiti writing. Second, the single provocation Lim claimed to commit was so modest (except by North Korean standards) that I would expect a movie scenarist exercising literary creativity to come up with something more heroic—car chases, shootouts, that sort of thing.

Finally, I found Lim to be perfectly plausible in the role in which he cast himself: leader of an ambitious movement. He seemed to me the sort of man who in traditional Korean cultural terms would be accepted as a leader and thus would be capable not only of dreaming up but also of carrying out an important movement. That is to say, he came across as an impatient authoritarian—the same bossy type as Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and the South Korean military coup leaders-turned-dictators who had opposed them. Lim showed that side of himself in his behavior toward my interpreter, Rhee Soo-mi, pounding home his points to her. (An ambassador’s daughter, accustomed to big shots, she refused to let him rattle her; following her work with me, she went on to become a New York lawyer.) I was not sure whether Lim intended irony in one peculiar exchange. “You should go to live in North Korea,” he told me. I asked what I would learn there. “To obey,” he replied with no sign of mirth.

Lim said he wanted to study for a while and then work in a corporation. I figured that in no time he would be CEO.

[N]o man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.