Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
2/22/2007
North Korean spy agencies love kidnappings. Of course, their colleagues worldwide also would not mind abducting a person or two, but in most cases there are some urgent reasons for taking such drastic measures _ the victims are prominent opposition leaders, or wanted criminals who cannot be extradited through normal channels, or people who are unlucky to know something way too important. North Korean abductions are different: They are often surprisingly random and target people of no significance. The very randomness of most of their abductions once was often cited by sceptics who tried to refute these accusations as “Seoul-inspired falsities.’’ Indeed, why should the secret services of a Stalinist state spend so much time and money only to kidnap a Japanese noodle chef, or a tennis-loving teenager? Nonetheless, in 2002 Kim Jong-il himself confirmed that these seemingly meaningless abductions of ordinary Japanese citizens did take place.
Of course, North Koreans spies did not limit themselves to Japanese only. Quite a number of South Korean citizens have disappeared into the Northern maw as well: it is known that at least 486 South Koreans have been forcibly taken to the North and have never returned.
A vast majority of them are fishermen who were imprudent to come too close to the North Korean coast, but this figure also includes a number of known victims of covert operations. Currently they number 17, but there are few doubts that the actual number is much higher. If the abduction is planned and conducted well, its victim simply disappears and is eventually presumed dead.
A good example is the case of the five South Korean high school students who disappeared from the island beaches in 1977 and 1978. They all were believed dead for two decades, but in the late 1990s it was discovered that the youngsters were working in North Korea as instructors, teaching the basics of South Korean lifestyle to would-be undercover Northern operatives.
Eventually, one of those former students was even allowed to briefly meet his family at the Kumgang resort. Kim Yong-nam disappeared from a beach in North Cholla Province in 1978. Later he was identified as the husband of an abducted Japanese woman, so North Korean authorities grudgingly admitted that Kim Yong-nam was indeed in the North, and staged a meeting with his family. Unsurprisingly, during this meeting and press conference, he insisted that he was not kidnapped but saved from the sea by North Korean sailors. Far more surprisingly, he sort of admitted that his job was related to spying.
It is remarkable that the kidnappings of the South Korean teenagers roughly coincided with similar abductions in Japan. In both cases the abductors obviously targeted randomly selected teenagers who were unlucky enough to be on a lonely beach. Another commonality was that the abductees were later used to train espionage agents. Perhaps, teenagers were seen as ideal would-be instructors for the spies _ still susceptible to indoctrination but with enough knowledge of local realities to be useful.
In April, 1979, a young South Korean walked into the North Korean Embassy in Oslo, Norway. His name was Ko Sang-mun, and he was a schoolteacher back home. Why and how he came to arrive at that embassy is not clear. As was usually the case, the North Korean side insisted that Ko Sang-mu defected, while the South Koreans alleged that the young teacher was the a victim of a taxi driver’s mistake: He took the taxi to a “Korean embassy’’ and the driver delivered him to the embassy of the wrong Korea.
It is impossible to say now whether this highly publicised case was abduction, defection, or something in-between. However, in 1994 it became known that Ko Sang-mun was in a labour camp. A small propaganda war ensued. Ko was made to appear in a North Korean broadcast assuring everybody that he was free, happily married, and full of righteous hatred for the US imperialists and their Seoul puppets (most of his speech consisted of customary anti-American rhetoric). We do not know where he went after delivering this speech _ to an apartment in Pyongyang or to a dugout in a prison camp. Meanwhile, Ko’s widow in the South committed suicide, unable to cope with the stress of the situation.
There were also more “normal’’ instances of abductions. The North Koreans kidnapped people who possessed important intelligence. In 1971 Yu Sang-mun, a South Korean diplomat stationed in West Germany was kidnapped in West Berlin, together with his family _ wife and two children. Perhaps, the few other South Korean officials who went missing in Europe in the 1970s were also abducted by North Korean agents, but presently only Yu’s case is certain.
In the 1990s most abductions of this sort took place in China, and their victims were political activists, missionaries, and real or suspected South Korean spies. All these abductions occurred in the Chinese North-East, near the borders of North Korea.
The abduction of North Korean dissenters, or suspected would-be defectors, from Soviet territory has been quite routine for decades. Sometimes these abductions sparked a crisis in relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, but in most cases the Soviets simply turned a blind eye to such acts.
