Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Scholarly encounters



	October 28, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: Scholarly encounters
By Bradley Martin

When North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun was in New York last month, he proposed an exchange of North Korea and American scholars. According to a Yonhap report Paek told the Council on Foreign Relations that Pyongyang would consider exchanging academics for discussions of political issues - if the CFR would show interest in pushing for a less hostile US policy.

It sparked my memory to read of Paek's complaint that Washington's pro-Seoul, anti-Pyongyang policy had stalled such exchanges since several years ago, when North Korean scholars and defense-research fellows had visited Washington several times to meet officials and attend seminars. For in 1989, during a brief thaw in the otherwise almost unremitting enmity between Pyongyang and Washington, I met the first delegation of North Korean ''scholars'' to visit the East Coast of the United States.

They had just arrived in New York from Washington when I was invited to join them at a private dinner in their honor, hosted by a friend. There I was introduced to the North Korean delegates, including their leader, whom I will call Pak Soandso. Pak and I looked at each other for a while, and it was he who spoke first to ask: ''Haven't we met before?'' Indeed we had, I replied - but I had been with a daily newspaper at that time, back in 1979, while now I was working for a weekly newsmagazine.

Deciding to be diplomatic, I didn't mention another difference - that he had met me the first time not as Professor Pak Soandso, deputy director of a scholarly think tank called the ''Institute for International Studies'', but as Cho Suchandsuch, a diplomat working for the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. (I'm disguising the names to protect the, er, innocent.) On a night train from Pyongyang to Kaesong, ''Cho'' and I had shared a bottle of whiskey and a long chat - by far the least staged and most informal of any conversation I experienced during that three-week 1979 stay in the North.

The 1989 New York dinner at which we were reunited likewise proved to be an extraordinarily relaxed and pleasant occasion. The North Korean guests and a group of Korean-American scholars talked animatedly of their hopes for reunification and gathered around the piano after supper to sing Korean songs. Everyone was tieless and in shirtsleeves.

At one point Pak asked sociably if I had been back to North Korea. That was just the question I'd been waiting for. Frustrated in many efforts to get into the North a second time, I had applied to cover the World Festival of Youth and Students. The festival was scheduled to open in Pyongyang just a few days after this New York party, and quite a few foreign journalists had been invited. But I was not among them and the prospects for my attendance did not look good.

When I explained that situation to my long-lost acquaintance, Pak unhesitatingly offered to intercede on my behalf, assuring me that I would be admitted. He was as good as his word, and my approval came forthwith. Soon I was in Pyongyang. And a few days later my guide came to me excitedly in the Potonggang Hotel and told me I would be meeting a very important person. That person turned out to be none other than Pak (not only diplomat and scholar but VIP, it now seemed), who shortly arrived and invited me for a picnic.

In a lovely woodland setting, the site of some ancient ruins, we tucked into a copious alfresco feast. Once again I decided not to bring up the matter of his dual identity. As we munched away, Pak quoted his mother on the extent of improvement in living conditions since the old days, when it had been necessary to substitute inferior grains for scarce rice. He recalled that, in his own youth in the 1940s and '50s, times were so hard that a kind of grass or hay had to be mixed in to make pounded-rice cakes. Recently, he said, his children had been complaining about how bland everything tasted. He had given them some old-fashioned rice cakes with just a little hay in them, he said, and the youngsters had pronounced the taste wonderful.

Throughout that 1989 visit, North Korean officials had been denying persistent reports of food shortages. Officials acknowledged that rice was rationed, but the figures they gave for rations (700 grams a day for an adult, 500 for a child) seemed adequate assuming they were accurate. That still left the question of what the diet might include beyond the staples of grain and kimchee, the national dish of spicy pickled cabbage, cucumbers and other vegetables. Foreigners living in Pyongyang said that eggs were available but meat was a rarity on most North Korean tables.

Visitors to the youth festival did not confront any shortage personally. Far from it. Our hosts fed us great quantities of meat - fulfilling the dictates of traditional Korean hospitality even as they sought to persuade us that meat was plentiful in the diet of ordinary Koreans.

At the picnic, country air and an endless supply of beer sharpened my appetite - and as soon as I finished off one plate of roasted meat, another appeared. I was skeptical of Pak's assurances that food had become plentiful, but I did not know at the time just how bad the situation had become. Later, when I learned more, I felt ashamed of having eaten so much at Pak's picnic. The truth is that food supply already was very bad - if nowhere near as bad as it would get in the '90s. The regime had come up with special supplies for the festival, but soon North Koreans once again would be eating grasses - out of necessity, not nostalgia, and not mixed in with their rice but instead of rice.

North Korean officials were unhappy with my coverage of that visit. One official told me later the main complaint was that I had described then-Great Leader Kim Il-sung as the object of a personality cult. Pyongyang vehemently insists that the popular worship of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il is purely voluntary and from the heart and should not be described in the same terms as a state-imposed Stalinist personality cult.

Presumably as a result of the official unhappiness, the previously ever-gentlemanly Pak after that visit treated me distantly, ignoring my friendly letters. Eventually I heard that he had gone to Latin America as a diplomat. Some time later he reappeared in New York with ambassadorial rank as deputy chief of the North Korean mission to the United Nations. Still he showed no interest in resuming our acquantanceship.

I wondered often about Pak/Cho, about who he really was. It seemed likely he was some sort of high-level spook. Finally, I had a chance to ask some former high-ranking North Korean officials. ''In North Korea we have a dual system, official and unofficial rank,'' one such source told me. Pak Soandso ''is part of the party's intelligence organization, so his rank should never be known. People who don't know the inner workings of the system might think his rank is not so high. But in fact he's much, much higher than most people . . . You can assume he's more powerful than a minister.''

Pak Soandso's diplomatic appointments and his brief incarnation as a scholar, as two former officials confirmed, have all been cover for intelligence work, I was told. Former career diplomat Ko Young-hwan, who defected to South Korea in 1991 after postings in Africa, told me Pak was ''not a true diplomat''. Rather, Pak ''was sent to the United Nations as a spy. He's in that department''. And Pak's scholar role? Well, chances are it was likewise cover for intelligence work.

But who am I to say it's impossible that Pak really is a scholarly fellow who happened in 1989 to be on sabbatical leave from his usual duties? After all, I myself finally managed to make my third trip to North Korea in 1992 not as a journalist (in which capacity I had continued to have trouble gaining admittance) but as a scholar. In 1992 I joined a delegation from the East-West Center in Honolulu, where I was spending a year as a fellow. It was a genuine academic appointment. And, as is my practice, I did use my right name - fortunately so, as it turned out: when we arrived at the Pyongyang airport a couple of young North Korean diplomats recognized me instantly and asked if I had REALLY gotten out of the news business.

Well, um . . .

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