But processing is tricky...
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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Killing is easy, says former North Korean spy who defected |
| 2005-03-09 |
| EFL. The prisoner holds a knife and waits for the assailant to enter the cell with orders to kill him. The door opens and the assailant, using only his bare hands, completes the brutal assignment within two minutes inside the small windowless room. At unit 695 in an elite North Korean spy school, killing is all in a day's training, says Ann Myeong-Jin, who graduated in 1993. Ann spent six years at the school in the northern suburbs of Pyongyang, being trained for overseas espionage work, but months after graduating defected to capitalist South Korea, North Korea's rival since the 1950-53 Korean War. Unit 695 of the North Korean People's Army, also known as liaison office 130, is known to spies the world over, says Ann. "If you work in intelligence anywhere, you know about it," he says, sipping coffee in a Seoul suburb where he lives with his South Korean wife and daughter. Ann, who also speaks Japanese, now divides his time between his home in Seoul and a second home in Tokyo and says he earns his living partly through managing property in Seoul. He says he also lectures and writes and acts as a consultant on North Korea, mainly in Japan. But he admits he can never completely relax outside his communist homeland. "I am always taking precautions for my safety here in Seoul," Ann said. "I heard the North Korean leadership has put my name on its list of people for assassination. The South Korean government know about it." But Ann is worried that South Korea is being taken for a ride by a North Korean regime that is interested only in its own survival. "Defectors here are astonished to find that South Koreans are now trying to be friends with the communist North and are actually propping the regime up," he said. Some 6,000 North Koreans defectors live in South Korea, among them a small number of party, government and military officials as well as spies, although no figures are available on the breakdown. They face hardship in adapting to a capitalist way of life while many South Koreans tend to look down on them as backward and idle. Ann says the hardship takes a toll on the defectors' mental and physical wellbeing. "Nearly all of them have serious mental issues. Fewer than five percent really adapt," he says. Now there is also a bitter sense of irony as Seoul courts the regime they risked their lives to flee from. For Ann, defection from his homeland was the last thing on his mind during what he describes as a normal childhood that abruptly ended one day in 1987, just before his 19th birthday. That was the day he first entered unit 695. "My life changed that day," he said. "I was never the same again." It was tough to get into spy school for a country boy from a rural province outside Pyongyang but it helped that he was robust and smart and his father was a career soldier who served for 30 years in the military. "There are thousands of candidates and fewer than 100 a year make the cut," said Ann. "They are looking for brains and brawn, but mostly brains." The year Ann entered the school a Korean Air Boeing 747 blew up in midair over the Indian Ocean killing all 115 people on board. North Korean female spy Kim Hyon-Hee was convicted of the bombing in a South Korean court. "She is one of my school's graduates," said Ann. Students at the school undergo classic training in infiltration techniques, bomb making and terrorism activities, psychological operations, weapons training, and methods of persuasion, he said. Learning to kill was among unit 695's less demanding courses, he says, though he refuses to say how he fared in the small room with orders to use his bare hands to kill a prisoner armed with a knife. "It is easy to do when you are trained to a certain level," he says. The spy school never disclosed who the prisoners were, he says, simply letting it be known that they "deserved" to die. "We assumed they had already been condemned to death and were mostly political prisoners," says Ann. "Even with a knife they were up against the impossible. We had gone through harsh training. In most cases the killing was done inside one or two minutes." Learning how to commit suicide in different ways was also an important course element. "We were taught that if we were caught we had to kill ourselves and we learned how to do it in any circumstances, even if we were tied up," he said. As Ann's spy education progressed, he was selected to specialize in South Korea, the target of most of North Korea's espionage activities, he said. "We were taught to live like South Koreans," he said. "We had South Korean goods, even products like toothpaste, and we had South Korean money. I had to learn 60 South Korean pop songs by heart." His instructors were agents who had already worked in South Korea and had returned as teachers, or South Koreans who had been kidnapped and forced to work as spy trainers in the North, he said."We were taught about how good life was in South Korea. But to counter-balance that, we were also taught how corrupt the society was, how it was split between rich and poor with conflict between the classes and also that South Koreans were ruled by money," he said. But in one of the unintended consequences of the spy school curriculum, Ann began to question long-held assumptions about his own country. "North Korean spies develop immunity to North Korea's own propaganda," he said. "I had a good feeling about South Korea. I knew I had been taught lies all my life and my despair was immense." Keeping a lid on such subversive thoughts Ann kept quiet after graduation and was sent to a spy unit, liaison bureau 712, near the border with China for training prior to his first infiltration mission into South Korea. With three others he formed an infiltration unit whose mission was military surveillance inside South Korea. The first task was to cross over the demilitarized zone (DMZ), the four kilometre (2.5 mile) wide buffer zone that has divided the two Koreas since the Korean War. "Of course it is dangerous, but it is not that difficult," said Ann. "The main thing is by-passing or removing landmines." The team, wearing US military uniforms because they were going to an area teeming with US soldiers, he said, set off from the Northern side of the DMZ at 2:00 am on August 30, 1993. They were safely inside South Korea by dawn, digging themselves an underground shelter within 700 metres of the entrance to a South Korean army camp. They were due to return to North Korea by the same route on September 4 but Ann had other ideas. While the others slept or relaxed underground following night operations Ann slipped away from guard duty and surrendered to the South Korean army camp nearby. He said he walked up to the gate, pulled his North Korean AK-47 from beneath his jacket and held it above his head. Within minutes, he had been bound and placed aboard a helicopter headed for the Seoul headquarters of South Korea's main spy agency, then known as the National Security Planning Board. Interrogated at length by the South Korean security agencies following his defection, Ann has since been left to lead a normal life, including marrying his South Korean sweetheart in 1996. He is vague about his sources of income and about his employment record but says he manages to provide successfully for his family. "I live well here," he said. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #2 :) |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-03-09 5:09:34 PM |
| #1 Killing is easy, says former North Korean spy who defected But processing is tricky... |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-03-09 4:01:15 PM |