Sweeney - North Korea undercover: inside the worlds most secret state

NORTH KOREA
UNDERCOVER

INSIDE THE WORLDS MOST
SECRET STATE

John Sweeney

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER

Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004

Copyright by John Sweeney

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part
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ISBN: 978-1-60598-802-3

ISBN: 978-1-60598-803-0 (e-book)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

To the forgotten of the gulag

The woman was paper-thin

A sign hung from her neck.

Selling my daughter, 100 won

[100 won is roughly 73 US cents or 47p]

Jang Jin Seong, Selling My Daughter

The Leader is the supreme brain of a living body, the Party is the nerve of that living body, and the masses are only endowed with life when they offer their absolute loyalty

Juche, the guiding philosophy of the North Korean regime, set out in Kim Jong Ils Ten Principles

Life, in the abstract, in its great coach how nice;

But amidst vomit and outrage the real thing triumphs,

It flows, sewage and decay...

I suffer moons, hungers, cruel Christs of pus...

I give in bone the explanation of this, mymisfortune.

Pieta by North Korean gulag inmate196774, Ali Lameda

Preface to the American Edition

North Korea is mad, bad and dangerous to mock. Kim Jong Un may appear a fat clown but when his tyranny bites its venom, like a cobras, blackens flesh. In 2013 I went undercover to the dark state for BBC Panorama. Pyongyang feels like the set of some weird version of The Hunger Games. North Koreas go-between kicked up a great fuss about our documentary and, to cut a long story short, the BBC apologised and I ended up losing my job.

So I feel great sympathy for the makers of The Interview, Seth Rogen and James Franco, who came up with a bold comedy idea about two dumb-ass American journalists getting an interview with Kim Jong Un. Along comes the CIA and theyre ordered to assassinate Kim. The movie has too many butt jokes but it is funny and good. There is a show-stopping moment when the hitherto entirely moronic celebrity interviewer asks a simple question of Kim Jong Un: why dont you feed your people? The North Koreans called The Interviewan act of war. There followed a massive hack of the almighty Sony Picture Corporation.

The North Koreans denied hacking Sony but nevertheless called it a righteous deed. When the film wasnt shelved, a peculiar outfit calling itself The Guardians of Peace made more threats: We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places The Interview be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to... The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001.

The idiom is pure North-Korglish, hate-speak with clunky English grammar boiler-plated in Pyongyang. Despite their denials of being responsible for the hacking, North Korea remains the prime suspect. The leaks show how the Japanese boss of the parent company, the Sony Corporation, worked hard to tone down the satires sting. Kazuo Hirai, the chief executive of Sony proper, instructed the Sony Pictures boss, Amy Pascal, and she emailed the films director, Rogen, to enfeeble the scene which culminates with Kim Jong Uns head exploding. Pascal requested: no face melting, less fire in the hair, fewer embers on the face.

Rogen replied: This is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy. But in time chunks of the film, including the entire secondary wave of head chunks, were deleted. Then Sony killed the movie, pulling it from release on Christmas Day 2014. The bad news for North Korea was that this was widely seen as a cave-in to a mad dictatorship. President Obama diplomatically rebuked Sony and on Twitter one wit replaced the famous HOLLYWOOD sign with one boasting NORTH KOREA. Sony reversed its decision and The Interview was watched in a small number of independently owned picture houses across the States but by millions moreon the internet.

Kim Jong Uns minions should have been more wary of the Barbara Streisand effect, that if you try and suppress something in the West, you may end up giving it afar wider publicity. The great virtue of the Interview affair is that it has shone alight on the darkest government in the world and for that we have reasons to cheer Rogen and Franco. North Korea is a clown state but it is also evil. The simple aim of this book is to set out to Americans the nature of that evil and how it might be ended.

The European who has known North Korea the longest is Izidor Urian, who first went to the newly Stalinized state in 1948. The journey from his native Romania to Pyongyang by train took the best part of 14 days. Izidor ended up being Ceausescus interpreter when he visited the founder of the state, Kim Il Sung, in the early seventies. On YouTube you can see Izidor, a real-life Zelig, crouchingin the back of the massive limousine carrying the two despots when Ceausescu went to Pyongyang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd3H9X-Yl2k

I tracked Izidor, now a very old man in his lateeighties, to his home in Bucharest. How long has the regime got? Izidor and I both agreed that Kim Il Sungsgrandson, Kim Jong Un, was making a hash of power: openly bloody, reckless, foolish. Fortyyears? said Izidor.

My take? Kim Jong Un could fall in forty months. How is that possible in a society whose people know next to nothing about the outside world? For example, the average North Korean doesnt know that the Americans have landed on the moon, that Michael Jackson lived and died, and that Elvis lives again. For the vast majority of people, there is no internet. The regime shoves propaganda down peoples throats all the livelong day, telling them they live in the most perfect and most racially pure society in the world.

The good news is that I suspect more and more North Koreans are beginning to realise that that claim is a stinking lie. The reason is simple. North Koreas information lockdown is no longer possible in the digital age. Just as the tyranny of Libya fell because people who hated the moronic, botoxed rule of Muammar Gaddafi realised via the internet and social media that they were not alone, North Koreans are beginning to understand that too. The most powerful moment of optimism I felt in North Korea was the day when we visited the DMZ the very south of the country and one of the very bright LSE students I was with, an American, realised that his iPhone would work, piggy-backing off the signal from mobile phonemasts in the very north of South Korea. If we could do that, then so could a North Korean with a smuggled Chinese-manufactured phone. Likewise, North Koreans who live in the very north of the country can piggy-back signals fromthe very south of China. We met people who had seen Homeland, Mission Impossible the complexity of explaining Tom Cruises devotion to the Church of Scientology to a North Korean was beyond me and even, I suspected, Team America