A rescuer of Korea’s forgotten

RUSTY squid trawlers chafe at their tethers in this bustling harbor along South Korea’s east coast, just as they did on the August morning in 1975 when fisherman Choe Uk-il boarded the Cheonwang with a crew of 31 others and set out on an expedition that was supposed to last a week.

It would be close to 32 years before he came home. Choe, 67 now, finally returned in January, a gaunt shadow of the man who went to sea as a hired hand looking to help support his wife and four children. He and his shipmates had vanished four days into the trip. Their families were told they had been lost at sea.

More than two decades passed before Choe got word to his family that the Cheonwang’s crew had instead been captured by a North Korean naval vessel and sent to live inside the gulag state. He had since wed a North Korean widow with two children and was scratching out a living as a farmer in a village.

It would be 10 more years before he was able to escape the North Korean dictatorship and return home a free man. But only the happy conclusion to his story makes Choe’s disappearance stand out.

By count of the government of South Korea, 3,790 of the country’s citizens have been kidnapped by North Korea since the 1953 truce in their civil war, of whom 485 are believed still alive, held against their will and unable to keep in touch with their families. Yet successive South Korean governments have been reluctant to press the cause of these hostages.

If Choe owes his freedom to anyone, it is to his South Korean wife, who never gave up on the possibility of his returning home, and to a soft-spoken but determined rescuer named Choi Sung-yong.

Choi has become the embodi-

ment of hope for families whose loved ones have been abducted by North Korea. His own father was kidnapped from a fishing boat in 1967. Pushed by a mother who “ordered” him to bring his father back, Choi, 55, has spent 15 years developing a network to penetrate the mists of North Korea.

Over the years, his “messengers,” as he calls them, have managed to locate some of the abducted South Koreans and have freed five, at a price as high as $30,000 each.

The story of Choe’s rescue underscores the perils of Choi’s enterprise. More than three decades after being abducted, Choe was still closely watched by North Korean security agents and afraid to risk escape.

“For 32 years I lived under the surveillance of the North Korean security agency,” he said at a news conference after his release. “I was not able to eat or live properly.”

So acute was his fear that he went to the local police department and reported some of the messengers sent to rescue him. Four of the eight Choi dispatched ended up in the hands of North Korean authorities. Their fate is unknown.

“In the end, this is a happy story,” Choi said recently in his cramped Seoul office, its walls papered with photos of abducted South Koreans. They are haunting portraits of previous lives, snapped on graduation days or at tourist attractions with left-behind wives and children. “But there were sacrifices,” he added.

“It’s like the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ -- a lot of people sacrificed to save one man.”

MOST of the men who left from Jumunjin’s chipped concrete docks and waterfront fish markets that August morning were not fishermen by trade. Crew members looking to pick up some extra money from the squid haul included construction workers and policemen, a bankrupt businessman and two sets of brothers. Most had wives and children.

Three boats left together, heading toward the deep water near Ulleung island. But the catch was disappointing, and the Cheonwang’s crew decided to look for different fishing grounds.

“We went into North Korean waters for 29 hours because there were no fish,” Choe explained upon his return, clearing up one mystery.

Upon their arrest, they were taken ashore and dispersed across North Korea in groups of three to five. In the ensuing years, they rarely saw one another, mainly meeting at periodic ideological training sessions that sometimes lasted a few weeks.

There was no contact with relatives at home, and as the years passed, several families moved away from Jumunjin.

Today, about 10 of the families remain, and they describe ruined lives marked by grief and grinding poverty.

“All of our families still live very cautiously,” said Lee Dae-u, one of seven children left fatherless by one of the kidnappings from the Cheonwang. He is the only one in his family still dealing with “this business,” as he calls it. “None of my brothers or sisters will even talk about it.”

He was devastated when the families learned that the crew had not died, but that his father remained beyond reach.

“I had been angry at my father,” Lee said. “I thought my life was miserable because he had died.

“And then this gets dropped on you. I felt like a lump grew inside me.”

NO one knows for sure why North Korea kidnapped civilians. Many were fishermen, but North Korean agents also are alleged to have snatched South Korean students and workers from their hometowns or as they traveled abroad.

Some observers contend that the civilians were abducted to teach spies the vernacular and customs of the South. Others say the abductions were a bizarre way for North Korean agents and military personnel to demonstrate their allegiance to the Kim family, which has controlled the country since the end of World War II.

“It was a reward system, like policemen who get rewards for handing out a high number of parking tickets,” Choi said. “Fishermen were just easy targets.”

But through the years, South Korean governments have been reluctant to make a major issue of kidnappings. During the paranoiac years of the Cold War, Seoul’s fiercely anti-communist governments treated the abductees as possible defectors or worried that they would serve as spies upon their return. The stigma meant families often kept the truth of the disappearances from neighbors and friends.

The plight of the abductees and their families has scarcely improved during the last 10 years of liberal governments that have sought a better relationship with the Kim Jong Il regime. Seoul has been reluctant to confront North Korea’s denials that it had kidnapped anyone (though Kim acknowledged in 2002 that state services had kidnapped 13 Japanese civilians).

There has been no South Korean diplomatic campaign to free the victims, no financial aid for wives and children left without a family breadwinner. Families also complain that their government refuses to share whatever information it has on the missing.

“When we said we would go look for our family members ourselves, we were treated as an obstacle to reunification,” said Choi Woo-young, whose father was kidnapped when she was in high school.

She remembers telling classmates made-up stories of weekend outings with her dad. “I would tell them about the father of my imagination,” she said.

“I am really living a sad life,” she added.

“But I am not the only one. And that makes South Korea a sad country.”

IT was a letter from Choe, smuggled to China in 1997 and soon after passed along to the rescuer, Choi Sung-yong, that alerted families of the Cheonwang’s crew that their loved ones might still be alive.

Choe’s carefully worded letter was addressed to an older brother and lamented the years of lost contact. But Choi read it as a signal that the fisherman wanted to get out.

Famine was ravaging North Korea at the time. Some foreign analysts have estimated that as many as 2.5 million people died of hunger in the calamity, which began in the mid-1990s and was brought about by the withdrawal of aid after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failures of collective farming, and catastrophic flooding.

The letter indicated that Choe was suffering badly.

Choi contacted Yang Jeong-ja, the fisherman’s South Korean wife, who was working as a cleaner in Seoul, and they began lobbying the government for help. When none was forthcoming, Choi agreed to send messengers into the North to try to contact the missing seaman.

Choe, however, was suspicious of the intermediaries who came to the farming village of Pungnyon-ri, asking whether he wanted to escape. Fearing that he was being set up by the North Korean authorities, he reported some of the approaches to the police, resulting in arrests.

By last fall, Choi was ready to quit. Only incessant appeals by Yang persuaded him to take one more chance on her husband.

Choi had a messenger carry a letter to Choe that listed the birthdays of his children, enough evidence to finally convince the abductee that the offer was authentic. Choe said he was ready to come out, and Choi began organizing his escape.

On Dec. 22, Choe left his village, and his North Korean family, traveling north toward the Chinese border by freight train. The train passed through 18 checkpoints.

“My organization dealt with each checkpoint well,” Choi said with an enigmatic shrug.

There were still difficulties once Choe crossed the border. The car carrying him through China crashed on a snowy mountain road, and he needed eight stitches for his injury. But Choi’s handlers got him to a safe house, arriving at 3:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day.

Then, from his office in Seoul, Choi called the fisherman and put his South Korean wife on the line.

YANG flew to China to join her husband, but the couple still had to contend with ornery South Korean consular officials in China who were reluctant to help. China has treaty obligations (sometimes ignored) to send defectors back; without the protection of South Korean citizenship, Choe could yet have found himself back in North Korea.

But Choi had a recording of his

clients getting the bureaucratic brushoff (“How did you get this number?” the diplomat shoots back at the couple when they reach him on his cellphone), and arrangements were soon made to fast-track the fisherman’s way home.

He landed in Seoul on Jan. 16, shakily telling reporters that “life in North Korea was so hard I cannot even express the difficulties I experienced.” He was questioned by intelligence officials for two weeks, and then went to live with his son in Ansan, a city southwest of Seoul on the Yellow Sea.

In Jumunjin, news of the fisherman’s return has been met with mixed emotions. Choe raises hope that other missing fathers and sons may find a route out of the walled North. But his escape also raises new fear among the families still waiting. Will surveillance of those still detained be tightened? Will their already harsh lives get harder?

“I guess we might meet him one day, but what can he tell us, really?” said Lee, the son of a kidnapped fisherman, sitting in the chilly dried-fish packing plant where he works. “Sometimes I think: Why would you come out? You don’t solve anything.”

Choi, on the other hand, sees Choe’s return as a success. He has continued his long-odds rescue work, even though he learned seven years ago that his own father had been executed in North Korea, probably in 1970.

“At first I felt I couldn’t continue after I learned of my father’s death,” Choi said. “I lost all my mental and physical strength.”

It was Choi’s mother who insisted that he keep trying to bring other abductees home. She died two years ago, and Choi carries on. He travels with a full-time police bodyguard now, after whispers of North Korean death threats.

“Every time I bring someone out, I feel like I am bringing my father out,” he said. “It relieves my burden.”

A battered briefcase sits at Choi’s feet. It holds a gun, a list of the nearly 500 South Koreans still believed to be alive in North Korea and a tiny cloth bag that in which he has wrapped his mother’s ashes.

He held up the ashes.

“Until I can get my father’s ashes back and bury them together,” he said.

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bruce.wallace@latimes.com

Special correspondent Jinna Park contributed to this report.