Freed N. Korean Ex-Spies Remain South’s Captives

Kim Dong Ki was a 35-year-old North Korean intelligence agent when he was caught spying by archenemy South Korea in 1966 and thrown into jail.

Thirty-three years later, when Kim was freed in an amnesty program, an astonishing thing happened: South Koreans embraced him with a hero’s welcome.

Taxi drivers here in Kwangju gave him free rides when they learned his identity. A human rights group rented an immaculate house for him. Townspeople donated new appliances. The local government sent two women to cook and clean for him.

In striking contrast to Kim’s worst fears, much of South Korea practically hung yellow ribbons for him and 18 other long-term North Korean prisoners, nearly all of them self-confessed spies, who have been released from the cells where they had languished for decades. Hundreds of their compatriots either died in prison or in years past signed documents renouncing their Communist ideology to secure their releases from prison.

In the months since their releases, the former prisoners have learned about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of their old Communist ally, the Soviet Union. In contrast to the severe hunger reported in their home country, the former prisoners’ tables groan with donated food.

Yet they yearn to go home, and cannot, because the two Koreas technically still are at war nearly 50 years after the Korean War ended in a truce, and the South won’t allow them to leave. Now that the historic summit between the two Koreas is about to take place, their hopes are high that they’ll be able to go home at last.

“Ideology aside, it’s human nature to want to be with your family,” said Kim, now 68, who longs to see the wife and child, then just 2 years old, he left behind--and hasn’t seen for 34 years. “Even animals or birds can freely cross the DMZ [the no man’s land between the two countries known as the demilitarized zone]. It’s a shame that human beings, the masters of all animals, cannot do so.”

The prisoners’ predicament poses a political and humanitarian dilemma for South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, who has promoted a “sunshine policy” toward his country’s northern neighbor, encouraging dialogue and cooperation between the two Koreas even though their border is the most heavily fortified in the world.

His policies have ushered in a spirit of hope that is manifest all over South Korea. Long lines snake around new restaurants in Seoul, the capital, that feature special cold noodles from North Korea. A basketball game between the North and South Koreans tipped off in December.

And the remarkable welcoming party for the spies would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, before Kim’s inaugural. Although North Korean spy submarines have been caught along the coast as recently as last year, many in the South sympathize with the released prisoners.

“How can they be compensated for the youth they wasted in jail?” said Choi Young Ho, 37, a taxi driver in Kwangju, who believes the men were pawns in a game between politicians. “Words like ‘agent’ are a product of the Cold War ideology--times have changed, and we shouldn’t even be using those terms,” he said.

But more conservative citizens, including members of the opposition Grand National Party, are as fearful as ever about the North.

“If they repent, they should be given a chance, but if they continue to refuse cooperation, they should be sent back to North Korea,” said Shin Chang Shik, 66, the president of a real estate firm who lived through the Korean War but was too young to join the army. “The younger generation is idealistic--they have no experience in communism, but people over 60 have different thoughts. I’m not ready to forgive them.”

Now old men, the former prisoners seem more like grandfathers than spies--except perhaps when one of the four former inmates interviewed, Hong Myong Ki, 71, opens a beer bottle with his mouth, a skill he said he learned in prison.

When Kim Dong Ki left North Korea in 1966 as an agent infiltrating the South, the North was a far brighter place than South Korea: The more prosperous Korea before the South’s meteoric economic rise in the 1980s, the North possessed far more factories, resources and electricity than the South. Kim was recruited as an intelligence agent after studying at the University of Pyongyang and learning Russian.

Kim bristles at the term “spy.” He was known as a “unification agent” and said he prefers to be known as a “patriot.”

His mission: slipping into South Korea under the cover of night to persuade a former politician in the North to return home. But Kim was shot and taken prisoner.

The last time he saw his wife and son, the Beatles were in their international prime. He was thrown into a prison cell just more than a yard wide and three yards long, with a ceiling so low he could touch it with his hands. When the lid of the cell’s non-flush toilet was lifted, clouds of black flies swarmed out. A 30-watt bulb provided only enough light for guards to keep watch over him. There was no heat and no blankets.

One writer described it as a “living grave,” Kim recalled.

Until the 1980s, the prisoners received “fourth class” daily provisions, Kim said, of two swallows of gruel--about 80% barley mixed with a few grains of rice. “We were always hungry,” Kim said. “There is a proverb: Nobody can climb over a wall if they are hungry for three days.”

The goal: to encourage the prisoners to “convert” their ideologies. Guards were rewarded with promotions if they could get conversions. The officers were so desperate to win kudos for conversions that on one occasion, they took the fingerprint of a prisoner who had died and affixed it to a conversion statement.

“They beat me all the time, till my flesh was torn; they hung me from the ceiling, then would drag me down to the basement, to a special room for water torture,” Kim said. “Those who weren’t accustomed to it could die.” Some prisoners did die. Others committed suicide.

The barbed wire on the blacked-out window was what kept Kim alive. “I always knew that if it got so bad, I could hang myself on that barbed wire.”

At one point, the only book they were allowed to read was the Bible.

“It’s ironic,” Kim said. “A socialist in prison reading the Bible.”

Another year, all he could get his hands on was an English dictionary. “Have you ever read sections A through G of the dictionary completely?” he asked an American reporter. (Kim doesn’t understand much English, but when an interpreter translated one of his phrases using the word, “cunning,” he laughed in recognition and muttered, “Cunning.”)

Prison conditions began to greatly improve after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. “Our treatment became known to the world and the U.S. recommended that [South Korea’s] National Security Law be abolished, and treatment changed,” Kim said.

Today, Kim shares a small, tidy house in the southwestern part of the country with three other former prisoners. It is called “Unification House,” named by the civic groups that support it.

“This nation shouldn’t be divided,” Kim said. “We witnessed the division, and all this tragedy stems from the division. We shouldn’t let the next generation inherit a divided nation.”

One of the four former prisoners interviewed says he wasn’t a spy and was falsely imprisoned for 29 years. Lee Jai Young, 54, says he was a fisherman who mistakenly sailed across the DMZ into South Korean waters and was accused of spying. He wouldn’t convert on principle, saying, “As they kept beating and torturing me, I became more favorable to the North.”

Said his fellow prisoner, Lee Kyong Chang, 65: “If you strike a weak iron constantly, it becomes very strong.”

Working, but Under Government’s Wing

Since their releases, the men sweep the streets in return for a meager monthly pension of $150 each, which doesn’t go far in South Korea. Ironically, it is paid by the South Korean government.

Awed as they are by the televisions, videocassettes, personal computers and all sorts of technical marvels that have swept the economy since they were imprisoned, they are just as awed by the things they once took for granted. They are fascinated, for instance, by children, whom they didn’t see for decades.

“I thought they were living dolls,” Lee said.

What they’ve also found is the antithesis of the harsh treatment they expected. “We’ve encountered so much love,” Kim said. “It reaffirms that I’ll contribute to society and unification.”

But they still haven’t given up on socialism. “If I have 10 loaves of bread and there are 10 people who should share it, I still don’t think I’m entitled to two and someone else is entitled to half a loaf,” Kim said. “That equality applies to money, food and clothes.”

Former prisoner Hong lives in Seoul with his sister, Hong Myong Ja. They talked of how their family split before the war--they lived in a town near the border. While his family fled south, Hong volunteered to join the North Korean army in 1950 because he was disappointed with the South Korean government and thought the North a “more moral, legitimate government.” He was particularly attracted to North Korea’s “land reforms,” in which he said land was distributed to all of the country’s farmers equally.

Paid Dearly for Handing Out Fliers

He was captured in 1962, caught distributing political propaganda in the South. “In South Korean terms, I was a spy, but we never considered ourselves spies. We only wanted an independent country free of foreign intervention.”

He bristles at the constant watch the South Korean government keeps on him now, even though he has been released from prison. He gets official calls asking what his plans are for the day.

He and his sister good-naturedly ribbed each other about their differing ideologies. Another sister died in the war when U.S. planes bombed her school. Hong says that North Korea “is isolated not from the people of the world but from power politics.” His sister laughed, and he laughed too. “I’m an idealist--she’s mundane. All people under capitalist influence are mundane and vulgar,” he said with a teasing tone.

Having her brother out from behind bars is a dream that Hong Myong Ja thought would never come true. She grimaced at the thought that, if he returns to the North to find the wife he left behind, as he yearns to do, it might mean never seeing him again.

But she added, “I hope his dream will be realized--a unified country in which he can travel back and forth freely. I never give up hope.”