Pair of North Korean Defectors Find They Are Now Being Muted in Seoul
By Jay Solomon and John Larkin
The Wall St. Journal
May 8, 2002

SEOUL, South Korea -- In 1997, when Hwang Jang Yop and Kim Dok Hong defected from North Korea, they were celebrated as heroes here in the South. But by the time Mr. Kim met with South Korean intelligence agents in November 2000, things were very different.

Days before the meeting, the duo -- the most important defectors ever from the North -- had published the latest in a series of newspaper articles condemning Seoul for muzzling their opinions. Waving a copy of the article, one of the South Korean agents responsible for watching the pair screamed at Mr. Kim, "Do you want me to die because of this?" according to Mr. Kim's assistant, who was there. "If I die, we should die together," the agent said.

Mr. Kim sat unmoved behind his tortoise-shell glasses, then coolly replied, "Fine, let's die together." A senior official with the South's National Intelligence Service says agents have met frequently with Mr. Kim but don't recall this exchange.

The South Korean government's aggressive campaign to restrain the two turncoats from the totalitarian North offers a revealing window on one of the highest-stakes debates under way in global diplomacy: whether to freeze out North Korea or work with it.

President Bush has branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil," along with two other alleged sponsors of terrorism, Iraq and Iran. Messrs. Hwang and Kim passionately agree, and for nearly five years they urged Seoul and Washington to take a hard line on Pyongyang. But that stance landed them in trouble with one of the world's foremost democrats, South Korea's Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, Kim Dae Jung.

The defector duo spoke with authority when they arrived in Seoul, asserting that the North is a "living hell" incapable of reform. Mr. Hwang, 79 years old and the more eminent member of the pair, served for 17 years as a senior official of the North's ruling Worker's Party. He was also president of the country's most prestigious university and personal tutor to its dictator, Kim Jong Il. Many in South Korea assume that Mr. Hwang and his sidekick possess knowledge that could bring down the northern regime: secrets about nuclear and biological weapons, for example.

In their public diatribes, the defectors haven't revealed whether they really have such explosive information. But after their initially warm welcome to the South, Messrs. Hwang and Kim encountered increasingly vigorous government efforts to silence them. The National Intelligence Service, according to Mr. Kim, shut down their monthly newsletter, tried to bar them from meeting foreign reporters and local politicians, and blocked their attempts to travel to the U.S. to speak about North Korea. The NIS has flatly denied this.

What's beyond dispute is that Messrs. Hwang and Kim put themselves sharply at odds with President Kim Dae Jung, a former dissident who campaigned for years to bring democracy to the South. Today, the president is pushing what he calls the Sunshine Policy, a broad program to promote trade, tourism and investment as a way to bring peace to a Korean Peninsula divided for half a century by Cold War.

The policy has lured North Korea out of isolation, officials in the South say, bringing about the first meeting between the leaders of Seoul and Pyongyang in 2000. The two governments announced last month an agreement to develop transportation links and free-trade zones, although in recent days North Korea canceled a round of economic talks scheduled to begin this week. "We've tried conflict for the past 50 years, and it hasn't worked," said South Korea's ambassador to the U.S., Yang Sung Chul.

Ties With the West

More broadly, the North has forged diplomatic ties with 10 Western countries in the past two years, as well as with the European Union. The U.S. isn't among that number. But the Bush administration, for all of the president's tough rhetoric, announced last month that it had received word from North Korea's United Nations mission in New York that Pyongyang is interested in negotiating about its weapons program. A U.S. State Department official is expected to visit North Korea in coming months.

Mr. Hwang argues that all of this is naive. Proceeds from any economic development in the North will only be diverted to Pyongyang's military, he argues. His aides brandish maps which they say show where North Korea is housing missiles and other weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. intelligence officials concur that the North is working on nuclear weapons, and the Clinton administration made overtures aimed at persuading Pyongyang to stop. Despite pervasive food shortages, the country channels 25% to 30% of its economic output into developing weapons generally, according to outside experts. Famine killed an estimated one million North Koreans in the early 1990s.

That crisis might have destabilized the Pyongyang government, but international aid "resuscitated North Korea's regime," Mr. Hwang said in a rare interview last year. "Kim Jong Il was adamant to follow a path of war, even though his people were dying of starvation." There is a broad consensus that North Korea is among the world's most repressive regimes, maintaining an elaborate system of government informants and prison camps for suspected dissidents.

The debate over relations with the North has split South Korea. President Kim Dae Jung's conservative critics say he is trying to silence Messrs. Hwang and Kim for fear the defectors could galvanize opposition to the Sunshine Policy here and in the U.S. The alleged effort to stifle dissent in the South goes beyond the celebrated defectors. Last year, South Korean police arrested executives at three of the country's largest newspapers on tax-evasion charges. The newspapers say the arrests were partly aimed at squelching their criticism of the terms of Seoul's improved relations with the North -- a charge Seoul denied. The publishing executives have been released on bail, and their cases are pending in court.

Among many South Koreans, there is tremendous enthusiasm for the cross-border family reunions the Sunshine Policy has brought. But many in the South also complain that the North hasn't reciprocated by reducing its troop strength or ceasing its international missile sales. At least partly as a result, President Kim's approval ratings have dropped to 30% from more than 70% near the beginning of his term in 1998, according to a Gallup poll conducted for the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.

As for defectors Hwang and Kim, the NIS maintained that what may be perceived as suppression has been merely an effort to monitor and protect the pair. "There have been hundreds of threats made against both men from North Korea," the senior NIS official said.

Mr. Hwang, who now has white hair and a hearing aid, spent the 1940s and 1950s mastering Stalinist ideology at universities in Japan and the Soviet Union. He worked his way up to the post of personal clerk to Kim Il Sung, North Korea's tyrannical founder and father of its current supreme leader. The elder Kim, backed by the Soviet army, established the country in 1948, as the formerly united Korea split into pro-Communist and pro-Western camps. In June 1950, Northern troops invaded the South, setting off the three-year Korean War.

Mr. Hwang helped develop the new state's peculiar ideology, known as juche, or self-reliance. A combination of Marxism and Korea's traditional isolationism, its chief tenets are glorification of Kim Il Sung and fierce devotion to North Korean independence.

"Juche's main point is to avoid servitude to the larger powers," Mr. Hwang said in the interview last year, recounting how the Chinese, Russians, Japanese and Americans had occupied Korea at various points. His comrade, Kim Dok Hong, now 63, has worked under Mr. Hwang since the 1960s.

Beginning in the 1970s, though, Mr. Hwang said he grew disillusioned with Kim Il Sung's preparing his son, Kim Jong Il, to be the next leader. Mr. Hwang disdained the younger Kim's abilities and opposed the creation of a family dynasty. "They wanted to use juche for their own purposes," Mr. Hwang said. His revulsion increased as the country's poverty deepened while the regime poured money into the military.

In the 1990s, Mr. Hwang and his aide, Kim Dok Hong, used contacts in Beijing and elsewhere to begin putting out feelers to opponents of North Korea, including the South Korean intelligence service, according to Mr. Kim. Mr. Hwang carried around a cyanide tablet, prepared to kill himself if he was arrested by North Korean agents.

In early 1997, while traveling through Beijing, the duo made their move. They told their North Korean minders they wanted to shop for a birthday present for dictator Kim Jong Il. Instead, they took a taxi to the South Korean Embassy in Beijing, accompanied by an official from Seoul. To their dismay, the embassy gates were locked, and the South Korean took 10 minutes to find keys. "Those 10 minutes felt like 10 years," recalled Kim Dok Hong. Two months later, they were in Seoul.

Messrs. Hwang and Kim were received at splashy national press conferences. They met with intelligence officials and gave university lectures. Mr. Hwang wrote extensively about juche. There was much talk about Mr. Hwang knowing the names of spies for Pyongyang operating in the South, although if he has divulged such information, none has become public.

But Kim Dae Jung's rise to the presidency in 1998 presaged a drastic change in the defectors' standing in South Korea. President Kim quickly moved to improve ties with his counterpart in the North, Kim Jong Il. Mr. Hwang was loudly lobbying to "liquidate" the northern regime. The historic June 2000 meeting between the two national leaders brought the southern President Kim his Nobel prize, but it also earned him a rebuke from Mr. Hwang in an opinion piece in a South Korean newspaper.

From that point on, said Kim Dok Hong and other aides to Mr. Hwang, Seoul moved decisively to silence the defectors. In October 2000, the government shut down a monthly publication on North Korean affairs the two men put out. They lost their positions at a government think tank. And later, NIS officials threatened to toss them out of their government-provided apartments if they didn't stop attacking Kim Jong Il in the press, said Kim Dok Hong.

"I came to South Korea to save our people from dictatorship, but now I find myself fighting the government of South Korea," Kim Dok Hong said.

The senior NIS official strongly denied the agency sought to stifle the defectors. The newsletter folded for lack of funds, the official said, and no attempt was made to banish the men from their government apartments. Rather, the NIS, responding to complaints that the defectors faced overly harsh restrictions, offered to let the pair live elsewhere. Hwang Jang Yop and Kim Dok Hong "replied that they would stay, as they were receiving so many threats," the NIS official said. The agency also denied the men were stripped of their think-tank jobs.

Tight Surveillance

The interview with Mr. Hwang last year illustrated that surveillance remains tight. About a dozen NIS agents followed him as he attended his daily meetings. Two government cars -- one in front and one in back -- shadowed his car's every move. The NIS agents looked surprised when an American reporter approached Mr. Hwang, but in the end didn't prevent the interview. "You're the first foreign reporter who's met me in years," Mr. Hwang said.

Conservative American groups, including the Defense Forum Foundation in Falls Church, Va., have been inviting Mr. Hwang to come to the U.S. since 1997, hoping he would describe North Korea's biological- and nuclear-weapons capabilities. Suzanne Scholte, the foundation's president, traveled to Seoul in December 2000, hoping to meet him. South Korean government officials told her Mr. Hwang didn't want to meet her or come to the U.S., as he was working on a book, she recalled. Frustrated, she left Seoul but through the South Korean government passed on to Mr. Hwang a Bible and an open invitation to visit the U.S.

Days later, Mr. Hwang answered in a faxed letter. "I have received with pleasure the valuable book," he wrote. "I am sure that I will have the opportunity to share very useful and significant conversations with you in the near future."

By 2001, GOP Sen. Jesse Helms and Reps. Henry Hyde and Christopher Cox had lent their support to the Defense Forum's invitation. Sen. Helms raised the issue with President Kim Dae Jung when the South's leader visited Washington in March 2001, according to an aide to the senator.

But Helms staff members found themselves thwarted when they tried to reach Mr. Hwang during a July 2001 visit to Seoul. Three separate meetings with NIS officials failed to produce an interview with the defector. "The NIS said they couldn't rock the boat" by letting Mr. Hwang travel, said Chuck Downs, one of the Helms aides.

Late last year, the NIS hit upon a gambit to block conclusively any Hwang trip to the U.S. The agency played on Mr. Hwang's determination to create a permanent legacy for his version of juche. In a letter to Kim Dok Hong in December, Mr. Hwang wrote that he has only a few years left to complete his life's work on juche and that he wants to create an institute to study and preserve it. The NIS would pay for an institute, and in exchange, Mr. Hwang would abandon his goal of going to Washington, the letter said. "If the U.S. invites me again, I will say I am delaying my trip," he wrote.

According to a copy of a formal agreement dated Jan. 13 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the NIS has pledged to donate 300 million won ($235,400) for the development of Mr. Hwang's institute in Seoul. The NIS gave him 20 million won as a down payment for construction of a five-story building, according to the document.

The NIS denied striking any deal with Mr. Hwang. In response to questions about the 300 million won agreement, the agency pointed to a Jan. 17 open letter to the press in which Mr. Hwang said the "NIS never tried to persuade me" not to travel to the U.S. A follow-up interview with Mr. Hwang couldn't be arranged.

At a meeting in January with a representative of Rep. Hyde, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Hwang signaled he no longer wished to criticize the North. When asked by an NIS agent at the meeting if he still wanted to go to the U.S., according to other people who were there, the defector replied, not if the Americans "want me to explain about nuclear and chemical weapons" in North Korea. The senior NIS official confirmed the meeting and this discussion.

Mr. Hwang's decision has cost him the admiration of Kim Dok Hong. On Jan. 14, Mr. Kim wrote in a letter to his mentor, "I feel bitter toward you for selling your political honor and conscience for only 20 million won." They haven't talked since.