Top Defector Sheds Gray Light on North Korea

When Hwang Jang Yop came out of the North Korean cold this year to become that nation’s highest-ranking defector, he was viewed as an intelligence gold mine who could finally lift the veil shrouding the secretive and mysterious Communist regime.

But in the five months since Hwang, 74, nearly set off an Asian security crisis with his sensational political asylum request at the South Korean Embassy in Beijing, the mystery surrounding him--and North Korea--has only deepened.

Questioning everything from his ideology to his information, a growing number of experts appear confounded over what to make of the man credited with tutoring North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and with crafting juche, the regime’s nationalistic ideology of self-reliance.

Even as Hwang casts withering scorn on Kim--painting him as a jealous megalomaniac who believes that war is the only way to assure national survival--he is reportedly refusing to sign a “conversion letter” renouncing communism. Hwang has declared that he is not a defector, but a patriot dedicated to preventing a holocaust from destroying the Korean peninsula.

Cho Gab Je, a North Korea watcher and editor of the influential South Korean magazine Chosun Monthly, described Hwang as a humanistic intellectual who fled because he could no longer tolerate the distortion of his beloved juche philosophy--stressing collective cooperation and self-help--into a tool for the cult worship of a Kim dynasty. But Hideshi Takesada of the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo ascribes far more personal motives to Hwang, saying he probably left because he was shunted aside when the late Kim Il Sung, Kim’s father, died in 1994.

Hwang has offered chilling scenarios stressing North Korea’s war capabilities, and they have shaken many South Koreans but have stretched the credulity of other military and academic experts outside Seoul. According to South Korean intelligence officials and statements obtained by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, Hwang has described, for instance, North Korea’s ability to scorch the South with chemical and nuclear weapons.

He also has disclosed a plan to launch a blitzkrieg using more than 100,000 special agents to take the southern South Korean port city of Pusan in three days, missiles to attack Japan and suicide units to sink U.S. aircraft carriers in and near Japan--all at once.

Hwang was quoted as saying the hotheaded junior Kim wanted to implement the plan in 1992 but was vetoed by his father, who ruled that restoring the sick economy should be the nation’s top priority.

“Horrendous testimony,” cried the Korea Times in a May editorial, urging a review of the nation’s soft-landing approach--which calls for coaxing the North into reforms by offering food aid, trade privileges and other incentives--if Hwang’s statements turned out to be correct.

But other analysts question whether the North’s regime, however bellicose, would invite its own destruction by attacking South Korean, Japanese and U.S. forces in the region to escape famine and other domestic problems. Many also say Hwang was a political ideologue with neither the background nor security clearance needed to know any details of military operations.

“We think he perhaps is out of date, with less specialized knowledge in traditional military and security issues,” said a senior Clinton administration official, adding that Washington believes Hwang had been pushed out of North Korea’s inner power circle several years ago.

Opinion is similarly divided regarding Hwang’s assertions that the North has enough nuclear devices to turn the South into an inferno and to launch a “scorched earth” policy against Japan.

“Some of his reports about nukes, we find hard to make judgments about. . . . There is no evidence supporting his assertions,” the administration official said.

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He added that Washington’s official view is that North Korea had acquired enough fissile material from its nuclear reprocessing facilities to make one or two crude bombs before the program was frozen under a 1994 international agreement. Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry recently said he doesn’t believe that North Korea currently possesses any nuclear bombs.

But others, such as self-described North Korean nuclear scientist Lee Wha Rang, assert that the regime purchased as much as 120 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from a former Soviet republic in 1992, and Lee says the North may have crafted “20 or 30”

nuclear devices. Lee also says U.S. intelligence agencies are aware of the North Korean purchases but are not publicly acknowledging them to prevent other “rogue regimes” from getting similar ideas.

Some Western, Japanese and South Korean analysts agree that claims of such purchases are plausible, citing verified cases of Soviet officials trying to sell plutonium to other countries and North Korea’s long history of cooperation with the former Soviet Union to develop nuclear capabilities.

Few seem to believe the North has managed to miniaturize any crude devices into missile warheads, but the administration official said: “We really do not fundamentally know the level of North Korean military technology.”

To deepen the mystery, it is unclear how much access U.S. officials have been granted to Hwang and whether they have been able to authenticate any of his claims.

U.S. military officials say they have very recently gained access to Hwang and are fully satisfied with South Korea’s cooperation on the matter. But they declined to provide details--including whether they have been able to directly interview the defector.

A South Korean official told The Times that “once results of our own investigation are made public in South Korea, we will be able to consider granting the U.S. request for a direct interview,” but declined to provide further explanations.

Former Ambassador to South Korea James R. Lilley said any refusal to grant U.S. requests for a direct interview would be “unusual.” When North Korean agent Kim Hong Hwe was apprehended in 1987 in Bahrain on suspicion of blowing up a South Korean airliner, U.S. officials were granted access “in a matter of weeks,” said Lilley, who served as ambassador from 1986 to 1989.

“We were able to get a comprehensive statement [from agent Kim], and we were able to check it out. That’s the way you do things. . . . You get a sort of validity factor,” Lilley said. “I don’t see that here. This is weird.”

Lilley said some experts in Washington--”those who should be in the know”--suspect Hwang’s testimony is being colored by Seoul for “political action purposes.” In one early statement attributed to him, for instance, Hwang advocated strengthening the South Korean military, security apparatus and ruling party--positions critics at the time believed were all too convenient for the government.

Others, however, speculate that Seoul may have promised Beijing as part of the original asylum deal that it would not embarrass North Korea by making Hwang widely available--for news conferences or interrogation by other countries. Still others say Hwang has not been trotted out to the public because he is a genuinely independent intellect unwilling to attack communism or North Korea.

“He doesn’t hate North Korea, he hates Kim Jong Il,” one analyst said.

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But even South Korea’s intelligence services say Hwang has proven to be of limited usefulness so far. They have dismissed his earlier reports that North Korea had as many as 50,000 spies, operatives and sympathizers planted in the South--including some in the top levels of government.

Interrogating Hwang has been “slow going,” said an official with South Korea’s National Security Planning Agency. “Since he is a scholar and philosopher, he does not seem to have much practical information on the military or about the North’s strategies.”

Cho, the Chosun Monthly editor, and others say Hwang’s most useful information has pertained to the mind-set of the North Korean leader, who has still not assumed all titles of power but may do so this month, the third anniversary of his father’s death.

Hwang has said Kim is entirely consumed with strengthening the military, has weakened the party and left the economy in the hands of technocrats, blaming them for its failures. He said Kim, as supreme commander of the nation’s 1-million-member armed forces, had provoked a war atmosphere within the country since 1991, extended military service to 13 years from seven and still clings to North Korea’s longtime strategic goal of unifying the peninsula by war.

Hwang also has described Kim as an “abnormally” jealous man who belittles his underlings, disparages historical figures and is both disturbed by and envious of China’s economic development. He demands total obedience and propagates the idea that he was born to be a “guiding star” for the people, Hwang said.

“It is difficult to have any expectation of him returning to any semblance of normal behavior,” Hwang wrote.