The Invitation-Only Zone Read Online Free

to compensate for the exodus of professionals—bureaucrats, policemen, engineers—who fled in the years leading up to the war. There was nothing random about the operation. “North Korean soldiers with long lists of names went from house to house looking for specific men to take with them,” remembers Choi Kwang-suk of the Korean War Abductees’ Family Union. 2 Choi’s father, a high-rankingpoliceman, was on one list, and the ten-year-old never saw him again. It is estimated that the North took eighty-four thousand South Koreans in all, sixty thousand of whom were inducted into its army. Although the number of abductions decreased dramatically after the Korean War, they never entirely stopped. The Korean Institute for National Unification reports that four thousand South Koreans,mostly fishermen, have been abducted since 1953. This includes five high school students abducted in 1977 and 1978 and a teacher snatched while on vacation in Norway in 1979.
    The majority of those taken in the twenty-five years after the Korean War were fishermen. In the days before GPS technology, ships often drifted over the “Northern Limit Line,” a water-borne demilitarized zone whose preciselocation the two Koreas have never agreed upon. Hundreds of fishing vessels were boarded by the North Korean navy and towed back to port. The abductees were welcomed to the socialist paradise and treated with the kind of respect that illiterate laborers seldom received in the South. Lee Jae-geun, a fisherman who was abducted in 1970, told me about the hero’s welcome he received. 3 Upon disembarkingfrom his ship, he was greeted by six women loaded down with flowers. “Don’t go back to the South! Come live with us in the earthly paradise of the North,” they begged him. Most of the abducted fishermen were returned after a few weeks or months, with the hope that they would talk about how well they had been treated, and spread the word about the higher living standards then enjoyed in the North.A few chose to stay in the North voluntarily, convinced (perhaps correctly) that poor fishermen would lead a better life in a socialist than in a capitalist country. And the North Koreans were always on the lookout for exceptional men who, despite their lack of formal education, had the kind of raw intelligence that might be of use. Many, including Lee Jae-geun, were recruited and trained tospy on the North’s behalf. Most were returned to South Korea, and a few, like Lee Jae-geun, escaped. Five hundred South Korean abductees remain in the North today.
    The abduction project matured during the period when Kim Jong-il was rising to power. In February 1974, Kim Jong-il was elected to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, an event that marked his ascension to his father’sposition. Proving his worth was not as easy as many assume. Kim would often arrive to Politburo meetings late or hungover, only to be berated by his father in front of the senior leadership. 4 As part of his new portfolio, he ran the regime’s intelligence service, and it didn’t take long for him to conclude that it needed upgrading. Kim was particularly bothered that several North Korean spieshad confessed after being captured, instead of committing suicide as instructed. Others had betrayed the regime by accepting bribes from foreign intelligence agencies. It was time to clean house. One by one, he recalled spies from around the world, putting them through drills and weeding out those he deemed unfit. Dozens were either executed or sent to the regime’s far-reaching gulag. To replace them,Kim recruited an army of elite spies, handpicked from the best schools and universities, loyal to him alone.
    The world in 1974 was a more complex place than the one his father had faced in 1948. Kim diversified and expanded intelligence operations, abducting native teachers to train North Korean spies to navigate the languages and cultures of Malaysia, Thailand, Romania, Lebanon,