The Fox

Night became day and then night again. They rolled out of European Russia, through the Urals and into their native Asia. They steamed slowly through dimly lit towns wreathed in pollution clouds, and on to Yekaterinburg, where, in 1918, the last Tsar and his family were slaughtered in a cellar, and neither knew nor cared.

The days dragged by, and the nights, as the Siberian cold gripped the fathomless forests. The coal was shovelled in the engine cab, the engine roared, the water boiled, the pistons turned and the wheels rolled.

They passed through cities with names the Korean guards could neither read nor pronounce: Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, where US pilot Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 spy plane in 1960. Out of the windows here the guards saw a huge lake. It was Baikal, the deepest in the world. They did not know that.

To the south lay Mongolia, but they didn’t cross the border. This cargo was not to risk possible impoundment, or even examination. Then the country to their south became China, but the track stayed inside Russia. Khabarovsk came and went and they turned south at last for the border with their home. Vladivostok slid past and, finally, the train stopped.

But it was only Tumangang, the Russian–Korean border halt. The train crews, though they had ‘spelled’ each other for seven days and six nights, were exhausted. Fresh teams came on board. Had the vehicle been a passenger train carrying those very few Western tourists who make the journey it would have rolled on the last few hundred miles to the capital.

But this was a special cargo for a special destination. Mount Paektu was many miles away from the main line Pyongyang to Moscow. The train would be diverted and its cargo disembarked for reloading on to a branch line. The border station teemed with agents of the SSD secret police.

Under new command it rolled across the estuary of the Tumen River then turned towards the west and the hinterland which housed the sacred mountain and the secret silo keeping the Hwasong-20 from prying eyes.

The Marshal took the news in his palace in Pyongyang and beamed with pleasure. His duplicity had worked. Eager for détente, President Moon to his south was sending relief aid of corn, wheat and rice. South Korea had had a good harvest, with ample surpluses to donate. He, the Dear Leader, was within a week of becoming a truly global thermonuclear power.

Sir Adrian had the habit of subscribing to several small-circulation technical magazines on foreign affairs and intelligence analyses. It was in one of them that he read of a man called Song Ji-wei, of whom he had never heard. The visitor was going to give a talk about Korea. A small attendance was expected. Nevertheless, the retired spymaster decided to meet him.

Mr Song had had an extraordinary life. He had been born North Korean fifty years earlier and when he was just ten his parents had escaped to China and thence to the West. But in the process they had become separated from their son, who was captured by the police, who, after several weeks, threw him on to the streets.

Part of the grip over the people maintained by the Kim governments is the ruthless punishment of the entire family of an escaper. Parents, siblings, offspring – all are arrested and sent to concentration camps if anyone tries – let alone succeeds – in escaping abroad. Wishing to leave at all is a crime.

Released from police custody, the child became one of those who are called ‘fluttering swallows’; street urchins who live rough, sleeping in alleys, scavenging for food, receiving no education. This was far from the capital, so no tourist would ever see one. At eighteen, Song too tried to make a break for the Chinese border, crossed it in the pitch dark of a moonless night, but he was caught two days later, stealing food. Back then, the Chinese authorities handed refugees over to the North Koreans. Song was sentenced to a labour camp for life. There he was tortured, beaten and put to work. He suffered for eleven years before he made his breakout.

This time, he went with three companions and again made for the northern border with China, rather than the South Korean border, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, far to the south. Far from being demilitarized, the DMZ is the most lethal border in the world: in fact, two borders with a mile-wide strip between them containing landmines, spotter-towers and machine-gun posts. Very few ever make it across to the south.

The quartet got into China. One of them, having worked there, spoke good Mandarin. The other three kept their mouths shut while the Chinese-speaker secured them rides on trucks and the freight car of a slow-moving train. They moved further and further into China, away from the border, with its numerous patrols. Then they turned south and eventually reached Shanghai.

It is a very long time since Shanghai was a fishing village. Today it is simply vast. Its miles of docks, quays and jetties play host to merchant ships of every kind. Most are large container ships, but there are still coastal freighters and they found one bound for South Korea across the East China Sea.

They stowed away under the canvas covers of a lifeboat. Discovered at sea by a single crewman, they persuaded him to replace the canvas tarpaulin and say nothing. Half starved and weak with hunger, they slipped ashore at Busan, South Korea, and appealed for asylum.

Song Ji-Wei had a good brain. He recovered his health and got a job, which enabled him to make a living. Ten years later, with his life savings and some local financial backing, he began to fight back. He started the No Chain Movement. When he and Weston met after his talk he explained to Sir Adrian what he was doing.

The core of the bewildering docility of the broad masses of the people of North Korea, he said, was their utter ignorance of anything that happened in the outside world. The sealing of their country and their lives from everything elsewhere was total.

They had no radios to listen to foreign broadcasts, no TVs, no iPads. From morning until night, then through until dawn, and throughout their lives, they were drenched in pro-government propaganda. Without any standard of comparison, they thought their lives were normal, instead of thinking them grotesquely distorted.

Out of 23 million there were about 1 million of the state-privileged who lived reasonably well. They did not suffer from the periodic famines that saw bodies piled in the streets, with the survivors too weak to bury the dead. The price was total and absolute loyalty to the Kim dynasty.

About twenty per cent of citizens, children included, were informers, supported by about 1 million secret police, constantly vigilant for a hint of disloyalty or disobedience. They might change – they would change – said Mr Song, if they could be told what a wonderful life was possible with freedom. His task was to try to inform them.

Near the border he had posted several volunteers, waiting for a south-to-north wind. Then small helium balloons were released with messages and pictures describing life in the South. These balloons drifted north, rose until they burst and rained their messages on to the landscape. Though it was an offence to read them, he knew that many did.

Sir Adrian recalled the story he had heard of the now-dead Kim Jong-il and his private dread of the ‘Ceausescu moment’, when the people stop cheering and, one by one, start to boo.

‘What would you need to expand your operation?’ he asked now.

Mr Song shrugged and smiled. ‘Funding,’ he said. ‘The No Chain Movement gets no material help either from the South Korean government or from abroad. We have to buy the balloons and the helium gas. With funding, I could even look into moving from balloons to drones. These could be recovered intact and used again. Over and over.

‘With drones I could move to small, cheap, battery-powered tape-players. The spoken word and the moving picture are much more persuasive, more convincing. The North Koreans could see life in the South for what it is. The freedoms, the liberty, the human rights, the ability to say what you think and what you want. But that is a long way off.’

‘And you think your once-fellow citizens might change? Rebel? Rise up?’

‘Not immediately,’ said Mr Song. ‘And it would not be the broad masses of the people. As in Romania years ago, it would be the generals who you see fawning upon the fat man. They really control the machine of suppression and enslavement. It suits them to live in wealth, ease and privilege. At the moment, worshipping the Kims enables that to happen.

‘Do not forget the age factor. In my society, age is venerated. The whole High Command is old enough to be Kim’s father. They do not like being treated with contempt. The defection of General Li has shaken them badly. So Kim has to deliver, and go on delivering. The West being so gullible, believing Kim is one day going to abandon all his nuclear weapons, enables him to go on delivering. So the generals will stand by him … until they are themselves threatened. Then they will strike, like the generals of Romania.’

‘You are persuasive, Mr Song,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘Personally, I cannot help you. But I may know someone who can.’