A Kim Jong-Il Production Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:

  us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Mom, Dad, and Crosby

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  A Note on Sources, Method, and Names

  Cast

  Photo of Kim Jong-Il

  Photo of Shin Sang-Ok

  Photo of Choi Eun-Hee

  Photo of Kim Il-Sung

  Introduction: August 1982

  REEL ONE: A SENSE OF DESTINY

  1. A Photograph on the Blue House Lawn

  Photo of Shin Sang-Ok, President Park Chung-Hee, and Choi Eun-Hee

  2. Director Shin and Madame Choi

  3. Shrimp Among Whales

  4. A Double Rainbow over Mount Paekdu

  5. Kim Jong-Il’s First Loves

  6. Fathers and Sons

  7. Inside the Pyongyang Picture Show

  8. A Three-Second Kiss

  9. Repulse Bay

  REEL TWO: GUESTS OF THE DEAR LEADER

  10. The Hermit Kingdom

  11. Accused

  12. Musicals, Movies, and Ideological Studies

  13. Taken

  14. The Others

  15. Escape from the Chestnut Valley

  16. Shin Sang-Ok Died Here

  17. The Torture Position

  18. Division 39

  19. The Hunger Strike

  20. Director Shin Is Coming

  INTERMISSION: THE PEOPLE’S ACTRESS WOO IN-HEE

  REEL THREE: PRODUCED BY KIM JONG-IL

  21. Together

  22. The Tape Recorder

  23. Lights, Camera …

  24. Out of the North

  25. Like a European Movie

  26. The Press Conference

  27. Same Bed, Different Dreams

  28. A Full Shooting Schedule

  29. The Rubber Monster

  30. Vienna

  31. From Kim to Kim

  32. The Stars and Stripes

  Epilogue: 2013

  Photo of Choi Eun-Hee and Marilyn Monroe

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A Note on Sources, Method, and Names

  The primary source for this book is the firsthand account of their time and experiences in North Korea by Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee. Shin and Choi have written several memoirs and articles about the years they spent working for Kim Jong-Il, which I have used as a starting point for the research and telling of this story, cross-checking dates and facts against other contemporary accounts, news archives, academic research, and original interviews. I have conducted nearly fifty original interviews with participants in the story as well as North Korean defectors, either involved in Shin and Choi’s own story or who simply lived in North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and informed my description of that time. And while North Korea largely remains a mystery to outsiders, there are tools today that can help confirm or disprove information, such as Google Earth, used by many studying North Korea to locate buildings and landmarks described by those North Koreans who have escaped. Wherever possible I have traveled to the locales of the action: to South Korea, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Hong Kong, and, of course, North Korea.

  Most of the physical descriptions in the text are taken from contemporary photographs or footage. Dialogue is only in quotes if quoted in an original source, such as Shin and Choi’s memoirs. On occasion, I have shortened dialogue, but I have made rigorous efforts not to excise elements that would alter the intended meaning or tone. Where dialogue was available from several different sources, I chose the translation that seems most accurate and natural in the context, or found the original source and commissioned a new translation from a professional native speaker. My own Korean is extremely rudimentary, so any errors of judgment are, of course, entirely my own.

  It has become a truism about accounts of North Korea that, because of the DPRK’s isolation and lack of transparency, each story must be taken at the teller’s word. I have endeavored to corroborate facts wherever it was possible to do so. A more detailed discussion of the process employed to verify Mr. Shin and Madame Choi’s personal version of the facts can be found at the end of this book.

  Korean names are written with the surname first, followed by the personal name: for example, Kim is the family name, Jong-Il the first name. As there is no fixed style regarding spelling (Kim Jong-Il has sometimes been transliterated as Kim Chong-Il, and Choi Eun-Hee as Choe Un-Hui), I have chosen the most common spellings for all names involved. When there was any doubt, I tried to write the names in the most natural, readable way for a Western reader.

  Until the early twentieth century, Koreans traditionally made no use of family names. It was the Japanese empire, when it colonized the peninsula, that legally required Koreans to do so. The vast majority of Koreans, seeing an opportunity to enhance the perceived prestige of their lineage, chose one of a handful of family names—Kim, Lee, Park, Pak, Shin—associated with the country’s landed nobility, so that today only about 270 surnames are shared by over seventy-five million Koreans. Any people appearing here with the same surname are not related, unless specifically indicated.

  Cast

  KIM JONG-IL

  The Great Leader’s son, and head of the Propaganda Film Studios

  SHIN SANG-OK

  South Korean film mogul

  CHOI EUN-HEE

  South Korean film actress

  KIM IL-SUNG

  North Korea’s Great Leader, founder of the DPRK

  INTRODUCTION

  August 1982

  The last thing Shin Sang-Ok remembered was sitting in his cell, unable to feel his own heartbeat, too weak to move or stand. He had been held in a North Korean detention center for almost two years, crammed inside a solitary cell barely big enough to lie down in, with one tiny slit of a window high up on the wall and thick steel bars across it. Bugs teemed through cracks in the floor. Except for a thirty-minute lunch break, a ten-minute supper, and a thirty-minute “sunning” period in the prison yard, he was required to sit in the exact same position all day, head bowed and motionless, absolutely stock-still, or suffer even greater punishment.

  He had been on a hunger strike for five days when he lost consciousness. Now, awakening in a prison infirmary, he struggled to breathe. The August air was hot and thick with humidity. A blinding headache blurred his thoughts. His mouth felt dry and metallic, and his stomach was seized with cramps. The simplest movement hurt.

  “This guy is probably going to make it,” a voice said. “He just moved his toes.”

  Shin blinked his eyes open. An investigator was standing by his bed, a high-ranking military officer at his side. A prison guard stood attentively behind them. The two men talked among themselves in agitated tones, never addressing Shin directly. After a short while, all three men left.

  It was then that Shin became aware of another prisoner in the room. The convict pulled a chair up by Shin’s bed and brought him a tray of food. Shin knew him. He was a trusty, an inmate given charge of basic tasks around the prison—sweeping, mopping, serving food, and delivering messages—in exchange for more freedom and time out of his cell. Often a trusty was also a snitch; it was the way he had obtained his position and the way he kept it.

  “Eat,” the trusty said.

  Shin looked at the tray: r
ice soup, a bowl of stew, and an egg. By prison standards the food was luxurious. Shin turned it down anyway. When the trusty spooned some soup out of the bowl and tried to feed him, Shin pinched his mouth shut tight. “Take it,” the trusty insisted. “It will do you good. You need to eat.” The man persisted, and eventually Shin gave in. At first, the thought of food made him feel sick, but one taste and his hunger rushed back. He quickly devoured most of the meal but, in gratitude, left some of it for the trusty.

  “What happened?” Shin asked.

  “You missed roll call yesterday,” the trusty said. “I went to check on you and found you unconscious on the floor. You should have seen their faces. They were so scared they’d let you die. They sent for the doctor and he checked your pulse and had you taken here. They’ll be relieved to know you will live.”

  The trusty eyed him carefully. “Now I really know you’re an important person. No one cares here if a prisoner dies. I went on hunger strike once. They told me that a man dies in ten days from hunger, a woman fifteen. It didn’t take me long to give in and start begging for food. I’ve heard of important prisoners on hunger strike being held down and force-fed through a funnel—they wouldn’t even do that for you. For the sake of your pride, they said. That’s how important you are.”

  “Who was that officer?” Shin asked. “The stranger?”

  It was the Minister of People’s Security, the trusty explained, the head of all law enforcement in the country. “That’s the first time I ever saw the Minister of People’s Security come all the way out to the prison just because some prisoner was starving to death. He raised all kinds of hell.”

  “You must be joking.”

  The trusty shook his head, deep in thought. “You must be very favored for them to care what happens to you. Do you know someone? Who do you know?”

  Shin closed his eyes. He thought of the prison around him: of the inmates tapping on each other’s cell walls to communicate, of the ones suddenly and arbitrarily taken out to the yard to be executed, of their cruel and violent guards. For almost two years he had lived in brutal, meaningless captivity. Yet he didn’t know a single person in the entire country.

  Shin Sang-Ok was fifty-five years old, divorced, with four children. He was the most famous filmmaker in his native South Korea, where he had made blockbusters, won every possible award, and rubbed shoulders with presidents. Four years earlier his ex-wife, Choi Eun-Hee, the most famous actress in South Korea, had disappeared while in Hong Kong, and when he went to find her he had been tricked and kidnapped. Now, after an initial period of less stringent house arrest, he was trapped in Prison Number 6, two hours outside of Pyongyang, North Korea.

  No, Shin did not know anyone, and he still did not know why he had been taken. But he did know one thing.

  He knew who had ordered his abduction.

  * * *

  In Pyongyang, miles away from the reeking cells and corridors of Prison Number 6, Kim Jong-Il knocked back his Hennessy, put the glass down, and watched as a waiter silently poured him a refill.

  The party in full flow around him was one of the weekly banquets that Kim held for top members of the Workers’ Party Central Committee. The large, bright hall was decorated with an explosion of garish fake flowers and swiveling colored lights. At the tables laid out around the dancing area, party cadres and Central Committee officers were eating the finest food, both Western (lobster, steak, pastries) and Korean (including cold noodles, kimchi, boshintang or dog soup, shark-fin soup, jokbal or pig’s feet in soy sauce and spices, bears’ feet flown in from Russia). They drank cognac, champagne, soju (rice liquor), and other North Korean specialties such as ginseng wine, with the roots still twisting inside the bottle, and snake liquor, a thick, venomous asp infusing in each jar of grain alcohol. Beautiful young women, aged fifteen to twenty-two, moved across the hall, dancing, flattering, giggling. They wore revealing clothes and some of them gave massages; many would later perform sexual services for the guests. Known as the Gippeumjo, or Joy Brigade, the girls had been handpicked from schools across the country and trained, for up to six months, in manners, comportment, and sexual and massage techniques. While they served, they were banned from any contact with their families, who were rewarded handsomely for the privilege of having a daughter in such a favored position. It was said Kim Jong-Il selected all members of the Gippeumjo himself.

  Musicians played a mix of North Korean and Russian folk songs as well as contemporary South Korean pop hits. Virtually all adult Korean males of the time smoked, and the air was thick with tobacco. After dinner the men would gamble—mah-jongg or blackjack—and dance the fox-trot, disco, or blues with the girls provided.

  Kim sat at the head table. He had a plump, oval face, black eyes, a small mouth with full lips, and a wide, short nose. He wore square-shaped glasses, smaller than those for which he would later be famous, and favored gray or blue in his Mao-collared tunics, not the khaki he would adopt in the last decades of his life. He was five foot two but wore five-inch platform shoes and sported a tall, boyish bouffant hairstyle to disguise his small stature (the girls of the Joy Brigade were required to be five foot two or shorter, just in case). He was the son of Great Marshal Kim Il-Sung, military hero and founder and Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Officially Jong-Il was the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department and the director of its Movie and Arts Division, but while his father was still the country’s official leader, by 1982 Jong-Il had effectively taken control. Schoolchildren around the country were told he was kind, sensitive, and caring; and were taught to call him Dear Leader. He was forty-one years old, and the North Korean public had never heard his voice.

  Usually Jong-Il was the heart and soul of these gatherings, boasting and telling dirty jokes, instructing the band, and generally enjoying the fawning deference of lackeys who jumped to their feet whenever he called.

  But tonight Kim was preoccupied. He was thinking about motion pictures.

  After the party, in the early hours of the morning, a handful of people would follow Kim, an insomniac, to one of his projection rooms and watch one of the new movies produced by the state-run studios. Over the last decade he had found the work of his film crews increasingly repetitive and dispiriting. These films were unlikely to hold the attention of his people for much longer, let alone impress the world abroad, which was his lifelong ambition. They were simply not good enough. Not yet, anyway. Four years earlier he had put in action a plan to remedy this problem, but that plan had stalled. He had treated his guests, Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee, so well, but they seemed determined not to play along.

  For now. Less than six months later, Shin would surrender to Kim’s plans. And together, they would change the course of North Korean history.

  REEL ONE

  A SENSE OF DESTINY

  “The course of our lives can be changed by such little things. So many passing by, each intent on his own problems. So many faces that one might easily have been lost. I know now—nothing happens by chance. Every moment is measured, every step is counted.”

  —Lisa (Joan Fontaine), Letter from an Unknown Woman, screenplay by Max Ophüls and Howard E. Koch, directed by Max Ophüls

  1

  A Photograph on the Blue House Lawn

  Twenty Years Earlier

  On May 16, 1962, Shin Sang-Ok was standing at the center of a party at the South Korean Presidential Residence. He was the talk of the evening—and, in that moment, of all of Seoul.

  The reception was part of the closing ceremonies of the Seventh Asia-Pacific Film Festival, an annual competition to honor and give awards to Asia’s best films. Thirty-five years old and standing tall in his white tuxedo jacket, crisp white dress shirt, and black slacks, Shin was the guest of honor and the subject of excited whispers among the guests. Five years earlier none of the people on the lawn had known his name. Now he was the country’s hottest filmmaker, director of the biggest box-office hits of the previous two years. The crit
ics loved him. His wife was the most beautiful and most famous actress in the nation. And tonight his new film, The Houseguest and My Mother, had won the Best Picture award at the festival, the first South Korean film to win the top prize in an international competition.

  Shin shuffled his feet restlessly in the dry grass outside the Blue House. Once the royal garden of the Joseon dynasty, whose kings had ruled the peninsula for more than five hundred years, it was now the site of the presidential compound, a complex of traditional buildings with sloping blue-tiled roofs. The legendary tiles were individually baked in the sun in the old way and rumored to be strong enough to last for hundreds of years. The outskirts of the compound were, more pragmatically, protected by high walls and several checkpoints manned by units of national police and army guards. Very few outsiders were ever allowed inside the Blue House buildings. It was an honor just to stand on the grounds.

  A few feet away from Shin, the photographer tinkered with his camera, getting the flash ready and the exposure levels right, as the other dignitaries arranged themselves in a line around Shin for the photo. There would be seven people in the photograph, but the real focus was on the three standing at the center: Shin; his wife of nine years, Choi Eun-Hee; and, between them, South Korea’s new president, General Park Chung-Hee.

  President Park was forty-four years old, short, with shrewd, hooded dark eyes and large jug ears. He had taken power in a military coup exactly a year earlier, on May 16, 1961. Prior to that he, too, had been largely unknown to the guests mingling on what was now his front lawn, a second-rank general with a commendable military record and no political experience. But he had great ambitions for the country that he loved and that he had watched descend, over the fifteen years since its partition, into poverty, corruption, and chaos. He had grown up in the countryside in the very south, surrounded by simple, patriotic folk who wanted a government as disciplined and hardworking as they were. Once in office, his first act had been to arrest dozens of corrupt officials and businessmen and parade them through the streets of Seoul, with sandwich boards slung around their necks that proclaimed I AM A CORRUPT PIG! The move had won him the immediate adoration of the masses, as had his announcement of a new constitution to be ratified later in 1962, followed by presidential elections in 1963. He had been making many appearances like this one, raising his public profile and introducing himself to the key industries, cinema among them, that he planned to use to change South Korea’s image in the world. In most people’s minds South Korea was a sad, aid-dependent third world country with little to offer the wider world, but today’s award suggested much brighter possibilities. Accordingly, earlier that day, at the Seoul Civic Center, it had been Park who was onstage to hand the award for Best Picture to Shin and Choi.