RedHanded - Episode 351 - North Korean Abductions: Korean Career Couriers
Episode Date: June 6, 2024Kidnapping might seem like an odd solution to low levels of education, but for The Democratic People's Republic of Korea it seemed like a perfect plan. Whisk away international intelligentsia... to your hermit kingdom and reprogram them to become perfect North Korean citizens, capable of pushing forward your scientific endeavours – or more importantly, directing a cult classic knock-off Godzilla movie. Unfortunately, it is a plan that hasn’t gone down overly well with the rest of the world. So how did it happen? And is it still going on today?Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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I'm Saruti.
I'm Hannah.
And welcome to Red Handed.
Annyeonghaseyo.
Which is hello in Korean.
Good.
Tag. welcome to red-handed annyeonghaseyo which is hello in korean good tag well it's annyeonghaseyo is like to an equivalent or a higher person if it's a child you just say annyeong sure sure sure
sure and one of my foreign friends didn't know that and she looked really stupid in the park
well i'm glad you chose to address our listeners with the utmost respect yes yes do you want to
know something really sad? Always.
So my friends who I met in Korea have recently moved to South Africa.
Very recently.
And I walked past a Korean supermarket the other day
and I thought,
oh, I should text them and see if they want anything.
And then I realised they're not here.
No.
Why not?
Wow.
These things come in waves.
I can't think of a way to segue from that into this apart from the fact that this entire episode
is about Korea yeah not south because there's a bit of south there's a bit of south fine
mainly north because that's the fun bit on the 29th of November 1987 Korea Air Flight 858 was
on its way from Baghdad to Seoul when it exploded over the Andaman Sea. All 115 people
on board died. Was it a Boeing? Probably. Most of the people who were on board who died were
South Korean workers returning home from jobs in the Middle East. But two passengers had had a
narrow escape. During the plane's scheduled stopover in Abu Dhabi, they had disembarked.
This very final destination.
Now they were later stopped trying to enter Bahrain.
According to their passports, these two were a Japanese father and daughter.
But their passports were clearly fake.
While the pair were being detained in Bahrain for using these fake passports,
the man ended his life by biting into a potassium cyanide capsule.
Nazi style.
Doesn't make you look innocent.
No, a la Goebbels.
The woman, who was restrained, tried to do the same, but didn't manage it.
Now, if you haven't already guessed, these two were in fact North Korean spies.
And they were the ones who had planted explosives in a Panasonic radio
and placed it in the overhead compartment of that Korean Air Flight 858.
So I won't blame Boeing either way for this one.
Now this wasn't your usual terror plot.
It was an element of a plan that the world had long suspected was coming,
but perhaps had found too terrifying to believe.
When Japan found out that North Korean terrorists had been using fake Japanese passports,
they sent detectives out to Bahrain to dig a little bit deeper.
In a series of interviews, in a remote hut way up in the mountains,
these Japanese investigators interrogated the
woman who had not managed to kill herself, and they found out that her name was Kim Hyun-Hyu.
To their shock, Kim spoke Japanese like a native and was clearly very highly educated.
At first, Kim Hyun-Hyu insisted that she was a Japanese native, like her passport said she was,
but then the artifice within which she had
been living was revealed. She was taken to Seoul and shown pretty quickly that it wasn't the
corruption-riddled hellhole that her country had described. And Kim was shown news reports and
videos showing the affluence, freedom and prosperity South Korea had actually been enjoying all of
these years. And after more than a week of this exposure, she broke down and confessed.
Kim described her role in the planning and execution of the bombing. She admitted that
she'd been trained to imitate a Japanese native from a young age. Kim also said that a Japanese
instructor had taught her the language, customs, and behavior, right down to how Japanese women wore make-up.
The Japanese government suspected that this teacher man was one of 17 Japanese citizens they believed had been abducted by North Korea.
But could North Korea really have been kidnapping Japanese citizens,
holding them hostage in the Hermit Kingdom and then forcing them to educate terrorists?
Short answer, yes.
Long answer, the Japanese culture instructor was just the tip of the iceberg.
In North Korea's incredibly short history,
180,000 people are believed to have been taken by the world's strangest and most secretive regime.
And this week, we have, for your listening pleasure, just a few of the worst cases, including two world-famous film stars forced to create an all-out totalitarian tinsel town featuring communist Godzilla.
Today, North Korea is one of the least accessible countries on the planet.
We did do a big deep dive years ago when we did the episode
on Otto Warmbier.
And Kim Jong-nam.
And Kim Jong-nam.
So yeah, it's somewhere
we've been before,
strictly through the podcast.
I've physically been.
And you've physically been.
We don't know who she is anymore.
Now the regime views foreign influence
as a virus that could contaminate its population
So to keep that virus out, it has quarantined itself off from the rest of the world
Except from China, who keeps pumping the Kim dynasty full of cash
And could send the nation into oblivion any time it wanted to
North Korea is well aware that in order to thrive, a country needs smart people and skilled workers
And from the
very start of the partition, people got the fuck out of the North, in their thousands, while they
still could. I would, I think there is a bit of an attitude of like, oh, anyone who stayed in the
North was an idiot and like an unskilled buffoon. That's not true. Like it's, we'll go on to talk
about this later, but North Korea was doing better than the South for a long time.
Also, if you're like partitioning a country and you're like, this side's going to be great.
Everybody says that.
No one's like, this side's going to suck dick.
You're, you're, you know, you should stay.
At that time in history, half of the world was communist.
Exactly.
I mean, it's just the dream they would have been sold
about how it was going to work, which obviously it wasn't.
And that's why they would have stayed.
It doesn't make you an idiot.
It just means you were massively lied to.
So with people fleeing left, right and centre,
in 1946, the country took the next logical step
and started kidnapping people from other countries.
But let's rewind.
By the time World War II ended in 1945,
the whole Korean peninsula had been a Japanese colony for 35 years.
But after the war, for various war crime-shaped reasons,
Japan was in the international doghouse,
and its colonies were all divided up amongst the winners.
So Korea was split rather sloppily down the middle
and divided between the US and the USSR.
It's actually not even the middle.
So they did it based on population.
It was along the 34th parallel.
And that's why North Korea is smaller than South Korea
because there were so fewer people in the South.
And since tensions were frosty between the us and the ussr to put
it mildly each side installed a head of state and told them that they were the only rightful leader
to all of korea which is an interesting yeah system to go about and the ussr's golden boy
kim il-sung was appointed the first illustrious leader of Korea by Stalin himself.
People think that he was like, he's referred to sometimes as the founder of North Korea.
No, he wasn't. He just happened to be from there.
He happened to be from around Pyongyang.
And Stalin was like, you'll do. as it moved to Mao and Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung gave a speech on the 31st of July 1946 announcing that
as a nation, the North had a dearth of what he called intelligentsia, which is so interesting
because that's literally the opposite to what most communist leaders will do. Yeah, it's very much
the opposite. So he decided that to fill up the North with intelligent people, he was going to bring them over from the South.
And as far as to how he was going to get his hands on those South Korean capitalist brains, Kim had two choices.
Carrot or stick.
Either the North Koreans could persuade intellectuals to defect or they could just kidnap them.
And since North Korea was brutally executing anyone they deemed to be an enemy of the state,
not many people were desperate to hop the border.
So Kim settled on stick.
And the timing couldn't have been better.
In 1950, all-out war kicked off between the North and the South,
and that gave the North Korean regime the perfect cover to start stealing souls.
And three days into the Korean War, the abduction started.
North Korean soldiers were ordered to capture southern political, economic, and socially
prominent figures, re-educate them, and strengthen the military front line with them.
In August 1950, the southern forces representing the UN and the Republic of Korea only held a
small piece of land known as the Busan Perimeter.
The North Korean forces controlled the rest of Korea, including Seoul, which was eventually
liberated in October that year. But before that, North Korea managed to abduct almost 83,000 people.
20,000 of those were politicians, academics, government ministers and civil servants.
Now you would think that those people that they've gone to all the effort of kidnapping
would then be put to work in positions of power,
using their diplomatic knouts to further the mission.
Well, not quite.
Instead, they were forced to work in coal mines and factories.
Which is an interesting...
I've been thinking a lot about
communism recently for reasons that will become clear in about six weeks but there's a bit in the
genoble drama the hbo series where the lady scientist is like trying to get an audience
with this like pretty low level government official and he just ignores her and she's like
i am a nuclear physicist and before you got this
job you worked in a shoe factory and like the point which obviously it's a great line yeah yeah
but it also points out that like in the ussr the hierarchy was completely blown apart and there was
no um like most of the people who were in office were workers. And that was the point.
Well, I think it was also the thing of like with communism where it's like,
okay, well, you're going to be this because that's what we need.
And it's like, whether you're skilled for that job or you're the right person for it because you've got that based on merit or because of your own innate interest in that thing is irrelevant.
You're in that position.
Oh, you're an academic that we've gone to the effort of kidnapping.
Well, we kind of need people to work in coal mines, actually. So get down there. We'll deal with you later. It's also
a very tricky system. Like, I don't really follow a lot of the logic. I get it. Kim Il-sung is like,
we don't have enough intelligent people. Let me go kidnap them, drag them here. But then he's like,
I can't just put them immediately into positions of power because they haven't been sufficiently
brainwashed yet. So like, I need to stick stick them somewhere but at least we've got them we've got them under control i'll deal with the
rest later that's a problem for kim tomorrow throughout the 50s after world war ii the world
was evolving and in a way rebuilding itself especially if you're japan and then a ceasefire
between north and south korea was agreed in 1953. No matter what
anyone tells you, the war has never ended. It is still going now. It is the longest armistice
in history. And that's why there ain't no D in that MZ. But as the world around the Koreas
changed, North Korea decided that its abduction program needed to evolve too.
Over the following decades, a campaign went through three phases. Firstly, there was the
strategic phase between 1955 and 1977. South Korea reckons that about 487 of its citizens
were abducted by North Korea during these 22 years, although the real number is likely to be far higher.
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During this period, the abductions were carried out as brazenly as possible,
many taking place in South Korea's territorial waters near the DMZ. The strategy was to cause
havoc and chaos in South Korea with the hopes of
inspiring dissent among its people. Essentially Kim Il-sung believed that he could legitimize his
regime by delegitimizing the one going on in South Korea which now sounds bonkers but at the time
Seoul had only just become South Korea. There were still a lot of North Korean sympathizers in Seoul
and also communism was a huge deal like there were loads of underground communist parties in
Seoul specifically, like it's not like it's not, it's not what it is now this like laughable butt
of every joke, like it was at the time, a pretty legitimate regime. Yeah. And I also do think,
you know, any nefarious foreign government, the way in which they would seek to destabilize
another country is by delegitimizing yeah the regime there the government there the politics
there the culture there and denigrating that to be like well it's it's shit of course it is that
causes destabilization that causes problems which makes that country more ripe for whatever propaganda you want to pump their way.
Which is why TikTok concerns.
Now what everybody forgets about this point in time
is that South Korea's economy was actually absolutely tanking
and they relied heavily on US aid,
just like the North couldn't survive without China now.
Yeah, the South Korean mega explosion super economy is a phenomenon that people are going to be studying for 100 bajillion years. Like it's pretty unprecedented what they managed to do.
Well, I think it's also the thing of both countries, the USSR has got the North,
the US have got the South. It's not just a battle of like literal land or people
it's a battle of ideologies absolutely it's a battle of that because the ussr is saying look
capitalism sucks it sucks it's awful it's terrible communism works we're going to show it to you here
is a test case it's almost a perfect test case it's like similar people ethnically speaking
homogeneous split them somewhere
down the middle by population. Let's give it a go. Let's see what happens. It's the
My Fair Lady of fucking geopolitics. And so the US is fully invested in South Korea, winning
in terms of the capitalist success.
Yeah, because they lost Vietnam.
Yeah. So Kim Il-sung saw an opportunity to convince south koreans that the north was more
prosperous and incite an uprising so again he's trying to say look it sucks over there look your
economy's tanking come over here it's great we won't even abduct you probably but that's a lie
because they abduct south koreans left right and center and brainwash them with pro north korean
propaganda now this wasn't massively successful.
Only two of these abductees were ever sent back across the border
into the South as spies,
and both of them were very quickly arrested.
A boiling point was reached between 1966 and 1969,
a period often referred to as the Second Korean War,
due to the guerrilla warfare that was taking place across the border.
And a lot of mad shit happened during this period.
In 1968, the Blue House Raid, also known as the January 21 Incident, took place.
This was an absolutely crazy operation carried out by 31 North Korean commandos,
where they attempted to assassinate the South Korean president, Park Jung-hee.
As the name suggests, this bold assassination attempt took place at the Blue House in Seoul,
which was the presidential residence until 2022.
The president survived the attack, but 26 South Koreans and four Americans were killed,
and 66 people were wounded.
Because of the ceasefire, Koreans aren't actually allowed on the DMZ.
So it's run by Americans.
So that's why four Americans died.
It's all American GIs.
Anyway, three days later, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo, a US Navy intelligence ship, and held the 82 crew members captive for 11 months.
One of the crew was killed during the attack,
and the remaining 82 were tortured and abused for almost a year.
And the torture got worse when the North Koreans figured out what the middle finger meant,
because the US prisoners were flipping the bird in every propaganda photo that the North Koreans took of them.
The North Koreans threatened to kill the Pueblo's crew in front of their commander unless the commander admitted that they were all spies.
In the end, the commander of the USS Pueblo wrote a full confession, which he ended by saying,
we pian the DPRK. Pian as in like, Lord, praise. I had to look it up. Out of interest,
what do you think DPRK stands for? DPRK? It's not like the Democratic...
No, I don't know.
Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Oh, yeah.
Which is hysterical in a country that's never had an election.
Yes, of course. I knew that.
So we peon the DPRK.
We peon their great leader, Kim Il-sung.
It was totally lost on the North Koreans that he was
pronouncing peon as pee-on, as in urinate. Anyway, the captive crew were released on the 23rd of
December 1968, after the US admitted that they'd been spying on North Korea and promised not to do
it again. Which, lol. If America tell you they're never going to do something again, you can guarantee that they will.
But, fun fact, the USS Pueblo has remained in North Korea ever since.
And if you think that's insane, well, wait until you hear what the North Koreans did the following year.
On the 11th of December 1969, a North Korean agent hijacked an entire Korean Airlines flight, carrying 46 passengers and four crew. The agent then forced
the pilots to land in Pyongyang. Immediately after the plane landed, the two pilots were made to
appear on national TV and testify that they defected of their own free will. A huge welcome
ceremony was broadcast in North Korea. The next day, 100,000 South Koreans rallied together to protest the hijacking
and even burned a huge effigy of Kim Il-sung. The passengers were held for 66 days, after which 39
of them were set free. But the four crew members and remaining seven passengers were never seen
again. The rate at which South Koreans were kidnapped during this period was unbelievable.
A record 133 were taken in 1986 alone.
And to be honest, the true numbers are likely far higher.
But all of this planejacking and torture was getting a little bit too overt and absolutely no one outside the top of the peninsula was buying the fake defections.
So in 1977, it was time for phase two, the covert expansion
phase. Through the 70s, the Cold War was finally thawing out, but tensions between China and the
Soviets, originally big body big pals, were growing. So that meant that China and the USSR
were both forced to improve their diplomatic relations with the United States.
And since North Korea was nothing without its two biggest buddies,
North Korea was forced to chill out its public attacks on both the US and on South Korea.
Which is when Kim Jong-il stepped in with the covert abduction strategy.
The number of abductions went down, but the geographical
scope expanded. It began with the kidnapping of Japanese citizens in 1977, as well as South
Koreans living as far away as Europe and Africa. And in 1978, Kim masterminded what is possibly
the most infamous of North Korea's abduction cases.
On the 11th of January 1978, South Korea's most famous actress, Choi Yun-hee,
flew to Hong Kong after having received an invitation from a huge Chinese film studio.
They wanted her to direct a film for them,
and also proposed that Choi run an acting academy in their famous Hong Kong school.
After Choi arrived, she spent three days in meetings, shopping and sightseeing, all on the studio's dime.
She was also introduced to two big hot shots from the Chinese film industry,
producer Lee Yong-sen and his wife, Lee Sang-hee. The two Lees then insisted on taking Choi out for a night on the town,
which started on the beach at Repulse Bay.
What?
Now they told Choi that they were getting a boat from there to a friend's luxury villa.
But as they approached the white boat, a group of men appeared out of nowhere.
They overpowered Choi and threw her on board.
When she asked what the fuck was going on,
one of the men told her,
Madam Choi, we are now going to the bosom of General Kim Il-sung.
Choi arrived in North Korea 11 days later.
There, a man entered the room and introduced himself as Kim Jong-il.
Isn't it so interesting that it's essentially the same plan
as how they got those two girls to kill Kim Jong-nam?
Yeah, they've got a playbook.
It's got one play in it.
It's a play pamphlet.
Naturally, when Choi failed to return to Seoul,
her ex-husband grew a bit concerned.
So Shin Sang-ok, her ex-husband,
a film director known as the Prince of South Korean cinema,
flew to Hong Kong to ask around.
And he found out that Choi had not been seen in the capital for 10 days.
And the last time anyone had seen her
was when she was on her way to meet with two Chinese film executives.
Shin immediately had his suspicions that North Korea were involved. I wonder if it's a thing
where it's like if some Chinese film producers show up and offer you things, it's like when
you see a Jehovah's Witness. No, run. Or if any man comes up to you in the street, it's like,
so I'm a photographer. Oh, God. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Run!
But, suspicious he may have been,
but he was powerless to do anything about it.
Couldn't exactly go to North Korea and get her.
And months passed with the investigation
into Choi's disappearance leading nowhere.
So, eventually, in July 1978,
Shin decided to meet Lee Yong-saeng, the film producer, for himself at the last place that his ex-wife was seen, which was the comically named Repulse Bay.
Somebody with a knowledge of Hong Kong, please explain.
Anyway, Shin was picked up by a white Mercedes.
But after driving for a few minutes, the car came to a halt,
because four men had appeared in the middle of the road.
These men pulled Shin out of the car, held a knife to his throat,
and then put him inside a huge bag and threw him into a speedboat that they just happened to have lying around.
Shin was then transferred to a freight ship called the Sugon Ho,
the same one that his ex-wife had been transported on just months before.
And during the journey, one of the crew members revealed to Lee Young-sang
that the Chinese film executive was, surprise, surprise, not Chinese at all.
He was a North Korean agent.
And when Shin asked if Choi, his ex-wife, was okay,
they told him that she had been killed.
After three days at sea, the ship finally reached land and Shin was greeted by the words,
Welcome to the socialist fatherland.
Which I don't know how to say that in Korean, but I imagine it's quite ominous.
It's ominous enough in English.
I also looked up why it's called Repulse Bay.
Oh, really?
Apparently it has different origin stories, so you don't know the truth of the matter.
But apparently, in the olden timeies, like in the...
Olden days, yeah.
In the olden 1800s, repulse also meant attack.
Oh.
Yes.
So they think it was called that possibly because there were like British fleets there who repulsed pirates. Oh. Yes. So they think it was called that possibly because there were like British fleets there
who repulsed pirates.
Oh.
So attacked pirates.
And, you know, pumped China through it full of opium.
Or it was because there was a British Royal Navy ship called the HMS Repulse, which like
hung out there.
So I don't know.
Don't know.
One of them.
So anyway,
upon their arrival to the socialist fatherland,
Shin and Choi
were kept separate
for five years,
not knowing each other's fates.
Choi was kept in a luxury villa
while Shin was mostly kept in prison.
At the time,
Kim Jong-il was being groomed
as his father's successor
and had taken over North Korea's propaganda and agitation department in 1966.
Propaganda and agitation department. What a title.
Yeah.
As part of that, he also became the director of the country's motion picture and arts division.
Yeah, why not?
Nothing goes together like film and agitation.
Definitely propaganda.
It's definitely all very knowledge is weakness over here.
Now, Kim Jr. was a huge movie buff,
so it was kind of the perfect role for him.
He had his very own blockbuster library
with over 15,000 films.
In a country where it is illegal to watch them,
may we add. Yes. And during Shin and Choi's relative incarcerations, they were forced to
watch and review four films a day from Kim Jong-il's collection. They were mostly Eastern
block films, with a few Hollywood films thrown in now and then. So just real bad stuff.
Real bad stuff.
After five years had passed,
Kim Jong-il allowed Shin and Choi to reunite for the first time.
And remember, Shin thinks Choi is dead this whole time and then suddenly they're just like,
ta-da, here is your ex-wife.
God.
And both of them were invited to a big party in a big mansion in 1983.
But remind yourself that that mansion is in Pyongyang and probably didn't have a roof.
And then, at this party in this big mansion with no roof,
Kim Jong-il revealed to Choi and Shin the reason why they had been kidnapped.
He wanted them to direct films that North Korea could enter into international film contests.
Makes sense.
It kind of does in a way.
Like I can understand why he thinks that's going to work.
Yeah, no, I do.
I do understand.
It's just so.
Oh, it's hysterical.
It's just so.
Yeah, so many things kim jong-il though a moron was aware that the heavy propaganda vibe
that permeated all of his own film projects wasn't going to go down very well on the international
scene it's not really what they play at can or sundance so he forced the actress-director couple that he had kidnapped to remarry each other and then set them to work.
So with guns to their heads, Shin and Choi started In Earnest in October 1983.
And they went on to make a total of seven films for the North Korean regime.
This is like if Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter were abducted and then forced to remarry and then make Sweeney Todd again.
But with communism.
Communist Sweeney Todd.
What is quite interesting and unbelievable is that the films weren't actually that bad.
That is surprising.
Yes.
I am surprised.
So his plan kind of worked because one of the films won first place at a film festival in Czechoslovakia.
Wow.
Is it because he was buying all of the Czechoslovakian films and they were like, all right.
Maybe.
Have it.
But keep forcing abducted film people to review all of our Eastern Bloc films.
Yes.
By the time the pair had finished making their seventh film for Kim Jong-il,
which was a pro-communist Godzilla film
called Pulgasari,
the couple had gained the maniac despot's trust
and communist Godzilla was pretty successful
and actually remains an underground cult classic today.
I bet Seb's seen it.
Seb loves Godzilla.
In 1986, the couple were in talks with kim about making their eighth film but north korea was
essentially bankrupt at this point excuse me china daddy um can i i spent all my money making
a film about a dinosaur and um but the next one's gonna be a huge success yes they just
don't understand me yes i'm sorry they starving, but it's not my fault.
I have to pursue my art
for the sake of the agitation.
So yes, Kim Il-sung
allowed Choi and Shin
to travel to a film festival
in Vienna to find funding
with the added hope
that the world might think
that they defected.
While there,
they were under the constant watch of their North Korean bodyguards.
But one evening, Shin and Choi went for an interview with a journalist at the Intercontinental Vienna Hotel.
They slyly managed to slip a note to a hotel employee telling them to contact the US embassy
and tell them that the couple was seeking political asylum.
It's so Jonestown.
Yeah.
And once in the hotel room,
Shin managed to convince their North Korean minders
to actually leave the room
so that they could do the interview in peace.
Seizing their opportunity to escape
after eight years of being held hostage,
the couple managed to sneak out of the hotel room
and jump into a taxi.
What followed was a high-speed chase to the U.S. embassy.
It always makes me laugh that the North Korean embassy in London
is just a house in Enfield.
It's just like a detached house.
Semi-detached even, I think.
I would love to see inside.
Yeah, me too.
You'll never come out, though.
That's the problem.
Anyway, fortunately, Shin and Choi managed to make it
into the U.S. embassy unscathed,
and they were placed under CIA protection and given new identities.
They lived in Reston, Virginia for two years before moving to LA.
There, Shin continued to make films in the 90s under the pseudonym Simon Sheen.
Back in North Korea, an outraged Kim Jong-il told the world that the US had kidnapped the couple.
Shin and Choi eventually returned to South Korea in the late 90s where they were given a hero's welcome.
And they remained married the second time
until Shin passed away in 2006.
And then Choi died 12 years later.
Which is kind of nice, but kind of horrible at the same time.
Yeah, that's really depressing.
Now under Kim's directions,
countless overseas abductions
were carried out
throughout the late 70s
and mid 80s,
the scope of which
we'll likely never know.
His agents were often told
that if they failed
to capture their targets,
they would be executed themselves.
So suffice to say,
they weren't lacking in motivation.
An example of this was the failed attempt to abduct a famous South Korean pianist
and his actress wife in 1977.
The actress, Yoon Jung-ji, and her pianist husband, Paik Kun-woo,
were married at the home of a famous painter in Paris.
The painter's wife told the couple that a wealthy Swiss man,
Mikael Pavlov, wanted to hire Paik to perform the piano at his home in Zurich.
So they set off, but soon they were told there was a change in schedule.
The plane was diverted to Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia.
They were then driven to a villa guarded by Yugoslavian police officers. It turned out that the Zagreb chief of police had been paid $30,000-y-doos by North Korea
to help them abduct the pianist and his wife.
But the second the couple overheard North Korean accents,
they ran away as fast as they possibly could
and flagged down a taxi.
I've heard a North Korean accent
and obviously spent a lot of time around South Korean accents.
They are so different. You can spot it a mile away. So they somehow managed to make it to a US embassy and
officials escorted them to the airport and they got away. So a happy ending for them. But we can't
say the same for the North Korean agents who are working on that particular thwarted abduction
mission. In news that will surprise absolutely no one, every single one of them was executed by the regime for failing to successfully get their target. I'm surprised if it was just
them, it was probably their whole families too. During this period, people were kidnapped from
Iraq, West Germany, Norway, Paris, Hong Kong, Karachi, Beirut, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria,
Libya and Egypt. Most of these abductees were students or skilled professionals,
selected for their expertise, which the regime would then try to exploit.
Also, by carrying out their abductions overseas,
North Korea had better plausible deniability.
If they were thwarted, they could just say it was the work of rogue agents.
But they didn't completely stop kidnapping South Koreans during
this period. In fact, since the signing of the Korean War Armistice, an agreement to end
hostilities, almost 4,000 South Koreans have been abducted by North Korea. A huge number of these
abductions were actually fishermen who were originally thought to be lost at sea, but now
we know that they were actually kidnapped. These poor fishermen were a favourite target of the North Korean
abduction programme because they were absolutely defenceless. Quite a lot of these South Korean
fishermen were eventually returned after being held hostage for months, sometimes years,
but there are still around 506, we think, still in North Korea today.
And actually, the only podcast series I have ever seen on any sort of North Korean operation outside of the Korean peninsula
is that Australian one about that North Korean ship
that is trying to steal fishermen.
It's the same people who made Hunting Warhead, maybe.
I don't know which one you mean.
Let me look it up.
The Last Voyage of the Pongsu.
There you go.
Sydney Morning Herald.
Oh, very nice.
Now, as we mentioned at the top of the show,
it was discovered that one of the people responsible for blowing up Korean Airlines 858
had been trained in Japanese.
We know of 17 Japanese civilians who were kidnapped from Japan between 1977 and 1993
in order to be trained as spies. But the true number is definitely higher. Like we said,
these abductees were forced to train North Korean intelligence agents in the idioms,
behavior, and cultures of their country. This was to allow North Korean agents to blend in seamlessly in their target country without being found out.
The scene from Inglourious Bastards absolutely comes to mind when Michael Fassbender's character blows his cover by holding up the wrong three fingers when ordering a drink.
Japanese citizens were also the perfect target for these kind of abductions because Japanese passports were easy to forge and gave the holder easy access to pretty much any country on earth.
During this period, people were vanishing left, right and centre
from Japan's coastal towns.
In 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota disappeared
while walking the 800 feet home from school.
She was never seen again.
A security guard disappeared whilst on holiday by the beach the same year.
The following July, a couple who parked their car at a lover's lane
vanished without a trace.
The car was found the next morning with the engine still running
and no sign of a struggle.
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That same month, another couple cycled to Kashiwasaki Beach to see a fireworks display.
And were never seen again either some papers even speculated that
maybe these disappearances were down to alien abductions because that is how bizarre they felt
at the time i saw a tiktok this morning that was like craziest disappearances of all time like
blah blah like top five and i was talking about alien abductions and stuff. And the guy pronounced it
Eliza Lam and
John Bennett Ramsey.
300,000 views.
Let's abduct
him.
And force him to teach us his ways.
Kill me.
You can't really blame people for
speculating that these may have been alien abductions
because the actual explanation that North Korea was abducting Japanese citizens
to teach them how to be spies is almost equally insane.
Quite a lot of the time when the families of the missing went to the police for help,
they were actually told that there was no evidence of foul play,
so there wasn't anything to investigate.
After a while, though, the Japanese government did grow suspicious that North Korea was responsible.
But what could they really do? Japan has no diplomatic ties to North Korea,
nor did they have an army ready to take action. Also, there was a very real risk that if Japan
accused North Korea of anything,
that North Korea would just kill all the abductees to hide the evidence.
They've done it before.
Another couple among the vanishes was 22-year-old law student Karuru Haseake and his beautician girlfriend Yukiko Okudo.
One night, they cycled to Kashiwasaki Beach to see some fireworks.
After locking up their bikes, the couple decided to find a more secluded spot on the beach away from the crowds.
It was there that four men approached them and asked for a lighter,
before jumping on the unsuspecting lovers.
The pair were bound and gagged and placed inside a huge canvas bag,
before being thrown onto a small boat.
So as Saru said, they have a playbook.
And it is the same.
I mean, it really is just like,
we really can't convince anybody with any argument we have.
Just abduct them. Just take them.
Bang them over the head with this truncheon.
Shove them in a bag with this inflatable hammer.
Now Kururu woke up 24 hours later,
hazy from the drugs he'd been injected with.
The abductors had given him antibiotics to stop the injuries they'd inflicted from becoming infected
and also sedatives to knock him out.
Two days later, Kururu arrived in North Korea.
His abductors told him that his fiancée, Yukiko, had been left on the beach
and threatened to kill him if he tried to escape.
The North Korean agent then explained to Karuru that he was going to help reunify the Korean
peninsula and get revenge on Japan for, quote, its historical crimes against Korea. This guy's
a 22-year-old law student who was just at the beach for a fondle and some fireworks.
What is happening? And what crimes
may Japan have committed against Korea, you might ask? A lot. It's a lot. Do you remember when I got
called racist for saying there was anti-Korean sentiment in Japan? There is. I told my friend
that he was Japanese and they just went, ha! So, fuck you. Anyway, Japan took control of Korea when it was still
one Korea in the early 20th century, and they forced Koreans to assimilate. As we said,
they, you know, they learned Japanese, they had to change their names, they had to worship at
Shinto shrines. Korea has spent more time occupied than it has as an autonomous nation. That's why
it's so interesting as a place. Very few places have a similar history. You history. They had to invent their own written language because they didn't have one.
So anyway, this is what the Japanese did.
Korean men were forced into manual labours in the mines and the factories,
some in Korea, some in Japan,
and many Korean women were thrown into sexual slavery.
We did a shorthand on Korean comfort women,
and Japan have never really apologised.
Over 200,000 Korean men were made to fight for the Japanese Imperial Army.
So naturally, both autonomous Koreas were quite committed
to wiping out any Japanese influence.
Anyway, the agents told Kururu that he was going to train spies
to pass as Japanese and possibly even become a spy for the regime himself.
And once Kim Il-sung had taken over Japan, which was the
grand plan, Kururu would be handsomely rewarded. It was the most insane thing that Kururu had ever
heard, but over the following 18 months he underwent a slow process of brainwashing, which
can happen to anyone. He was made to read endless books about Japan's colonization of Korea in 1910,
the labor camps, the sexual slavery, etc. And after a year and a
half inside, his adductors felt that Kururu had been adequately enlightened and revealed that his
girlfriend was living just one mile away, and they were allowed to reunite. And the couple got married
days later. Through trial and error, the North Koreans had settled on 18 months as the sweet spot to crush a person's soul
without robbing them of all hope. It's a fine line. After the wedding, both Kururu and Yukiko
thanked their captors for bringing them to the socialist paradise and allowing them to get
married. They were then given a small cinderblock house an hour south of Pyongyang, in an area known as the Invitation
Only Zone, where many abductees lived. There they were forced to learn Korean and to keep a journal,
which was checked daily. Every day, Kururu heard his captors speaking of an impending and inevitable
war with the US, so he made sure to learn two sentences in English, which he practiced daily.
We are abducted Japanese, please help us.
Karuru and Yukiko would later meet the other couple that we mentioned earlier,
who were kidnapped from their car.
From the same beach.
They had also been snatched, like Hannah said, from the same exact beach,
thrown in a bag, and then taken to North Korea by boat.
Both couples eventually had children in North Korea,
which was exactly what the regime wanted,
plant roots in the hermit kingdom.
It was later found that North Korea had kidnapped an unknown number of women
from Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia,
the fates of whom are all unknown,
but we think it's probably forced marriages, that's what would make the most sense.
Forcing a male abductee into marriage was thought by the DPRK to instill a sense of permanence.
It also gave the regime leverage over the abductees,
as escaping would result in retaliation against the family members that were left behind,
which is what they do if you attempt to defect, they kill three generations of your family.
But North Korean law forbids North Koreans from marrying foreigners,
so they have to find them elsewhere.
In fact, many have suggested that North Korea's global abduction programme
was also a long-term breeding programme,
sometimes much more creepily referred to as a seed-bearing strategy.
And that brings us to our third and final phase of the abduction programme,
the defensive phase, which began in the 90s and continues to this very day.
North Korea's economy all but collapsed in the 90s,
and their ability to carry out these expensive abductions abroad
collapsed with it.
A moribund economy is what I learned.
What's the, like...
I was trying to think about this the other day.
What's the positive version of moribund?
Um, what do you mean?
So if moribund is like constantly looking like it's going to fail,
but never actually does.
What's the opposite?
Yeah.
Like a hyper growth economy?
Yeah, I suppose.
Yeah.
There's lots of different types.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That.
I'm glad your MSsc is doing the work
absolutely i'm so incredibly hungry let me just have a quick chump of this bar
maybe i'll remember something like popeye popeye of economics
sure a hyper growth economy. What you really don't want is stagflation.
Oh, okay.
Is that what happened in the Weimar Republic?
Or was that hyperinflation?
Super hyperinflation.
Okay.
Stagflation is what Japan actually had for a very long time.
May also still have.
Let's have a little look.
Stagflation Japan.
So stagflation is basically when like everything sucks.
It's like quite rare that it
happens but it's quite interesting because Japan is one of the few countries in the world ever to
have experienced this phenomena. Like literally one of the only countries that's ever happened.
And basically it's where you have inflation and unemployment rising at the same time. So you're fucked, basically. Wow.
Prognosis?
Fucked.
Stagflation?
Fucked.
And yeah, interesting.
Interesting, interesting, interesting that Japan,
one of the few places that happened.
Around 2004.
So anyway, back to this.
They're fine now though, right?
Apart from all of the children that don't come out.
Let's have a little look. It was also doing weird things like targeting zero inflation and doing weird shit like that like it didn't really help them but it has apparently recovered here is an article from
four days ago it says how japan regained its superpowers and recovered from recession oh top
marks so getting back to this like we we said, North Korea economy fucked.
They can't carry out these incredibly elaborate, well, hardly elaborate,
they just need a canvas bag and a bunch of heavies, but they still couldn't do it.
So the reason this period is referred to as the defensive phase
is because North Korea now began to focus solely on kidnapping individuals it saw as a direct threat. Over the past couple of decades, North Korea has primarily targeted defectors and anti-DPRK activists,
especially those who made it their mission to aid defectors.
A well-known case during this time is that of Kim Dong-sik,
a South Korean pastor who spent two years in China helping North Koreans escape.
He was befriended by a North Korean woman who said that she in China helping North Koreans escape. He was befriended
by a North Korean woman who said that she wanted out of the regime. She spent months gaining his
trust, only to eventually lure him to a restaurant in China where he was kidnapped by other agents.
Kim Dong-sik was then tortured for months until he died the following year.
In May 2016, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign
Affairs held a meeting with the country's 10 largest travel agencies. They received a number
of threats from North Korea, announcing that they were planning to ramp up their abductions of South
Koreans. This was in retaliation for the mass defection of workers from a North Korean-owned
restaurant in China the previous month.
There is actually a factory, which is really near the border,
that you stop off and have lunch at on the DMZ tour where North Koreans and South Koreans work together.
That's nice. What's it called?
Something Korean. Can't remember.
All Korean. All Korean all the time.
And I had noodles and they were disgusting anyway one report claimed that as many as 300 north korean agents had been deployed to the
border regions of china to hunt down unwitting south korean tourists and activists which is
fucking terrifying like when i remember going to the dmz and being like like because as i said
koreans aren't allowed on the border there's a fucking reason why so these north korean agents had been
trained to spend months even years gaining the trust of their victims before luring them into
abductions and the kidnapping campaign doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon either
there have been an increasing number of north North Korean defectors who have voluntarily returned to the North in recent years.
As of 2016, there were 19 confirmed cases, with some of them being coerced into appearing on state TV, praising the North Korean regime and denouncing the capitalist pigs in the South. Still, everything we've told you is admittedly only one side of the argument,
because North Korea has denied every single instance of abduction over its 76-year history.
That is apart from one.
In the first dialogue in which Japan ever mentioned the word abductees,
North Korea officials literally slammed their fists on the table and walked out. It then took over a decade for the regime to agree
to have a diplomatic discussion with Japan again. The first landmark meeting took place at the DMZ
on the 17th of September 2002, between the then Japanese PM Junichiro Komizumi and Kim Jong-il.
It took place on the understanding that Japan used the phrase missing people, and that Kim Jong-il. It took place on the understanding that Japan used the phrase
missing people and that Kim Jong-il would be open and honest about their whereabouts. And he was,
sort of, a little tiny bit. Because Kim Jong-il admitted that they had indeed abducted at least
13 Japanese citizens, but said that eight of them were dead and handed Koizumi their death certificates.
The causes of death given for these eight abductees
included drowning, choking, heart attacks and car accidents
in a country where private citizens very, very rarely own a car.
Megumi Yokoto, the 13-year-old girl that we mentioned earlier
who vanished on her way home from school, was listed among the dead.
Kim Jong-il claimed that she'd hanged herself in a pine forest near a mental hospital in 1994.
Fewer things make me feel more scared than North Korean mental hospital.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Speaking on the abductions, Kim Jong-il told the Japanese Prime Minister the following.
It is my understanding that this incident was initiated
by special mission organisations in the 70s and the 80s,
driven by blind patriotism and misguided heroism.
As soon as their deeds were brought to my attention,
those who were responsible were punished.
Reid killed.
He then apologised and promised
that it would absolutely
never happen again, in the same way that your housemate might apologise to you after they use
your milk again and leave it open on the side again and probably drink from it. Anyway, not
only did Kim severely downplay the magnitude of the abduction programme, but he also claimed that
he had no previous knowledge of it and as soon as he found out he was like, oh my god how terrible
and shut the whole thing down. But the fact is he was literally in charge of the
espionage operations during the years that most of the abductions happened. But it didn't really
matter. The Japanese PM signed the Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration at a ceremony that
afternoon, an event that North Korea immortalised with a stamp. Japan promised North Korea low-interest, long-term loans,
as well as desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
As we talked about in the Otto Wombe episode,
this is another sentence in the North Korean pamphlet of playbooks.
Because what they do is they love to abduct people,
and then they're like, well, let them go,
if you give us some humanitarian aid. I've got a lot of people in this country who are very hungry
and i've been telling them how this regime's the best thing on the planet and how i scored all the
goals at the world cup and whatnot yeah and uh invented the hamburger and golf and also they're
all quite unwell because i've been letting them use human shit as fertilizer. Yeah.
So it's not going great, but we'll give back these missing people in exchange for some humanitarian aid.
And I can't promise that when I need some more money, I won't do it again.
Yeah.
And also the latest James Bond film, please.
Huge fan of your work.
But just for me.
And in return for this aid, Kim promised that he would halt North Korea's nuclear program
and return the five abductees that he admitted were alive.
But I definitely didn't take them.
And they definitely weren't taken.
They fell into this country.
They fell into the canvas bag and then rolled into the boat,
like the fish in Finding Nemo at the end.
We actually don't even want them.
They're really annoying.
We will give them back to you.
For some money.
He also added the ludicrous caveat
that the abductees would eventually return to North Korea,
which obviously Japan had absolutely no intention
of following through on at all.
But I don't think Kim halted the nuclear programme either,
so I think everyone's just telling big lies.
The five kidnapped Japanese citizens
returned to their home country later that same year,
on the 15th of October 2002, 24 years after they were first abducted.
The abductees who returned included the two couples we spoke about earlier.
The fifth was Hitomi Soga, who'd been forced into a marriage with Charles Jenkins,
a US soldier who'd misguidedly entered North Korea
in 1965 by walking across the DMZ. Charles, what the fuck are you doing? Are there no like signs?
There are these little blue huts where the North and the South meet for negotiations.
And it's very obvious which side is which. I don't know what Charles was up to, but he ends up there. He ends
up in this forced marriage to Hitomi. She eventually goes home. But Charles actually
remains in North Korea so that he could stay with the two daughters he'd had with Hitomi.
These kids and the three children of the Chimera family were allowed to rejoin their parents
eventually in Japan after the Japanese PM's second visit to Pyongyang on the 22nd of May 2004.
The PM then told Kim Jong-il that the abductees would not be returned to North Korea. Kim claimed
that this was a violation of their agreement and refused to continue talks. And that momentous
meeting wasn't the end of things in Japan either. The Japanese people were furious, and the issue
became a key one in the following election. Shinzo Abe became prime minister in 2006,
and made a point to create a headquarters for the abduction issue as one of his first acts.
This department had a lot of power and an enormous budget, with which they produced a
plethora of films, books, and TV shows about the North Korean abductions.
Another activist group with the snappy name The Investigation Commission on the Missing Japanese Probably Related to North Korea
broadcast messages to North Korea.
And these messages tell abductees to keep their faith and that they will soon be rescued.
There are a lot of radio stations in Seoul that are run by defectors for defectors because they can just get over the DMZ, like frequency-wise.
So in the end, Kim's admission, even if it was severely, severely redacted, was a bit of a blunder after all.
He meant it as a gesture of honesty, but it was rightfully met with absolute outrage by the global community.
The allegations up until that point could have
been passed off as a wild conspiracy, but at that moment they were confirmed to be true.
And as soon as the talks ended, Japan set up isolating North Korea by cutting off all trade
and other exchanges. It's unlikely that the North Korean government will ever make any similar
confessions in the future. Not that they were being wholly honest in the first place anyway.
Just furious crossings out in the pamphlet.
Do not make confessions publicly.
World does not like.
In 2019, the Japan Times reported that the number of suspected Japanese kidnapping victims
in North Korea was likely close to 880 people.
An estimated 84,532 South Koreans were kidnapped during the Korean War.
And in addition, about 3,800 people have been abducted since the armistice.
It's unlikely that we will ever know the true number.
But what is clear is that pretty much the entire population of North Korea
is being held against its will
in what is the world's last true totalitarian dynastic dictatorship,
the last of Lenin in the world.
So there you go.
There you go.
Kamsahamnida, which is thank you.
Oh, very nice. Thank you all. There you go. Kamsahamnida, which is thank you. Oh, very nice.
Thank you all very much for listening.
We hope you enjoyed that.
A little bit of a different episode,
but we thought it was very interesting.
And we'll see you next time
where we'll talk about a different story
that's also interesting.
Doggedong ka kajusyo,
which means doggedong,
which is my neighborhood.
Take me there, please.
Except Hannah's not allowed to go back because she's got an unpaid bill don't come get her bye He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry.
The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame industry. Diddy built an empire and lived a life
most people only dream about. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down.
Today, I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment,
charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy,
sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution.
I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry.
Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real.
From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy.
Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus.
They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart.
But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant.
When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983,
there were many questions surrounding his death.
The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who
desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into
the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash
went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime,
The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime,
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