Freed Pastor Home After Ordeal

Three months after he was arrested as a suspected spy in North Korea, a 73-year-old pastor from Lomita came home Monday, landing in the arms of his grandchildren and a family bound tighter by a struggle to see him released.

The Rev. Kwang Duk Lee, who routinely travels to the famine-stricken country on humanitarian missions, was detained May 26 while trying to get financing for a soybean processing plant, his family said.

North Korean authorities said Lee was a spy posing as a businessman and demanded $122,000 for his release, the family and officials said. While U.S. officials pressured the Communist government to release him, North Korean authorities held the pastor at a hotel in the northeastern part of the country, where he had been working on the soybean deal. “It’s been three months of hell,” said his daughter, Christine Lee. “But we were learning a lot about how important family was to us.”

Friday, the Korean-born Lee was greeted by U.S. diplomats as he crossed the North Korean border into China at the Tumen River. His release was the result of intense work by his family, the U.S. State Department, the House of Representatives’ International Affairs Committee and members of Congress, including Rep. Jane Harman (D-Torrance).

On Monday, Lee emerged from a gate at Los Angeles International Airport to see 10 smiling grandchildren holding a banner that read, “Welcome Back, Grandpa!”

But the moment that the family had so anticipated was dominated by a mob of reporters who surrounded Lee, aggressively seeking a statement.

He began to read from note cards in Korean, but after several minutes, some broadcast reporters demanded he speak in English, and swarmed him in as he tried to walk to his car.

“I am feeling just fine,” he said quietly. “Thanks for praying for me so I could safely come home. I deeply appreciate it.”

Asked if he would return to work in North Korea, Lee said, “Maybe so, yes.”

His family said that there would be a news conference today , and that he wanted to rest Monday.

“The media scared me,” said Jenny Yamada, one of his children. She was not able to speak to her father because of the cameras. “I thought they were going to knock him over. I tried to get between him and the cameras so that he could have some room and I got pushed and kicked.

“I wanted to ask him what he was going to eat for lunch. Now I doubt he’ll want anything,” she said.

The family, including his four children and his wife, Chong-Soon, planned to have a quiet lunch with Lee. They said he looked healthy but tired after the 20-hour flight. According to them, the pastor received three meals a day and was released with his blood pressure significantly lower than when he left California just after Easter.

“We were so concerned about his health,” said Christine Lee, who first heard from her father Friday at 2 a.m. “When we heard his voice we couldn’t believe it. He sounded like he got out of a vacation lodge or something.”

Lee’s recent work in North Korea is part of a lifelong passion for the country in which he was born, she said. In Los Angeles he has long been an activist in the Korean community. He sponsored cultural exchanges to South Korea, she said, and traveled extensively there.

In 1989, Lee, who is a Presbyterian, began missionary work in North Korea. His daughter said he mainly worked to bring food to the countryside, which has endured a famine since 1996.

In April, Lee left to work in the Rajin-Sonbong region along the Chinese border, where the government allows a minimal level of capitalism. He was excited about the trip and was hoping to secure investors for the soybean factory so that the residents of that area would have more food.

Because the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, the family communicated through the Swedish Consulate, which routinely works on behalf of the U.S. government for its citizens in that country.

“We had to be careful that the media didn’t get the Koreans upset,” said Christine Lee. “But at the same time we needed U.S. officials to get involved.”

After the story of her father’s detention made headlines in the local English and Korean-language media, Christine Lee flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Harman and Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio), who deals extensively with famine aid to North Korea.

Those offices contacted Mark Kirk, counsel for the International Affairs Committee, who was in North Korea earlier this month to discuss famine aid and other issues with Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Guan. Kirk said he used food aid and Guan’s upcoming visit to New York as leverage to secure the pastor’s release.

“I asked him how he thinks his trip will be if he gets off the plane and the New York Post is running headlines like, ‘Elderly Priest Held in North Korean Hellhole,’ ” Kirk said. “I was about as forceful as I could be to get this guy out.”

Other agencies, including the State Department, pressured the Korean government as well, officials said, until Lee was released last week. The family has said they paid some money for the release, but have not specified how much.