North Korea border disorder and other trivia

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It’s surprising; I know. There are competing accounts of how open North Korea is to outside tourists right now. Koryo Tours, as usual, is cutting through the rumor and gossip to give travelers as real a sense of possible of how, where and when you can go to North Korea.

Border Closings?
Stories have circulated that at least parts of the borders that North Korea shares with China and South Korea have been closed. According to Koryo Tours, the “facts that appear to be established now include [I hate caveats but understand why they need to do it]” Hyundai Asan’s day trips from South to North have been suspended, and the Mount Kumgang resort is still closed. Movement to and from the Kaesong industrial park is limited-hardly surprising since the daily train was canceled.

No Trains for China
On the North Korea/China border, travel by Chinese tour groups into North Korea by train has been restricted. Koryo Tours reports, “this is an easier one for us to clear up.” Apparently, this happens every year in mid-November. The authorities don’t give a reason for this annual decision. The only implication is that tourists from China need to travel by air. For non-Chinese tourists traveling by train … business as usual.

Egyptian to Finish North Korean Pyramid
The Ryugyong Hotel, which was left in disarray 16 years ago, is back under construction. Construction efforts resumed back in May, with Orascom (an Egypt-based company) engaged to finish the 105-storey structure. The property is expected to open on April 15, 2012-the day on which the current (and not exactly alive) president, Kim Il Sung, will not be around to celebrate his 100th birthday.

Hotels and Cell Phones?
Cellular News reports that, in addition to finishing the never-ending hotel, Orascom is developing a 3G network for North Korea-a country famous for limiting communication both within its borders and with outsiders. The network is expected to be finished sometime before the end of the year (if it isn’t already) with an initial cost of US$200 million.

Scatch your itch for North Korea

North Korea Mass Games may happen in 2009

by Tom Johansmeyer on
Rumors earlier this year suggested that the North Korean Mass Games (“Arirang“) were being pushed back to 2012. The magic in that number is that it’s the 100th anniversary of the birth of the deceased but still-serving president, Kim Il Sung. Koryo Tours’ recent newsletter, though, suggests that Arirang my run in 2009 after all. Likely months are August and October-though the specialists in taking westerners to North Korea drive the point home that there has been no confirmation.

Arirang is a 90-minute performance featuring 100,000 coordinated participants in an amazing display of “synchronized gymnastics, dancing and propaganda.” This event, which is held only in North Korea, is the only time when U.S. citizens are allowed to enter the country as tourists.

View photos from the previous Arirang event

Ready to check out North Korea?

Spy games: A look at North Korea’s covert operations (part 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of this post here. And for additional reading, be sure to check out former Gadling blogger Neil Woodburn’s excellent series, “Infiltrating North Korea,” from last year. I also reported from North Korea for The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor this August.

The Blue House raid in January of 1968, although daring to the point of insanity, marked the first of several failures in the North’s efforts to liberate the South by instigating a grassroots communist revolution. The assassin squad had trained two years for the job, with every detail of the mission mapped out, including figuring out the right insignia on their fake ROK uniforms.

Yet they made several simple miscalculations due to these delusions of South Korean communist sympathies. For instance, on the first day in the South, they encountered four woodcutters; they proceeded to spend the next five hours indoctrinating them in DPRK ideology rather than racing to Seoul. Furthermore, the agents released the woodcutters, who immediately reported the incident to the military. As a result, the country was on high alert when the agents entered the capital.
Though they posed as a ROK counterguerrilla unit (the irony is a bit much here), the squad was forced to split up and flee after a confrontation with a police officer. Over the next few weeks, all but one of them went down in vicious firefights, taking the lives of 31 South Korean civilians along the way.

While the last of the Blue House infiltrators were still running free, news broke on January 23 of the North Korean capture of USS Pueblo, a spyship operating under the guise of conducting oceanic research, along with the 82 crew on board (one was killed in the initial skirmish; the rest spent eleven months in DPRK captivity). Historians have since heatedly debated the extent of the link between these two incidents.

Recently declassified Eastern-Bloc documents suggest a direct relationship, with the USS Pueblo incident a ploy to divert attention away from the failed Blue House coup. A statement released to socialist allies by the DPRK read in part, “The US imperialists, who try ever more desperately to instigate a new war in Korea, yesterday allowed an armed spy ship to invade the coastal waters of the DPRK, and commit systematically hostile actions.” This position echoed earlier clashes, instigated by the DPRK but ultimately blamed on the US or ROK.

The largest operation of this period came that October, when some 120 North Korean commandos made an amphibious assault on a ROK seaside village, Kosu-dong. The naiveté of the DPRK agents could be seen in their very objective: to convince the forty hapless villagers to join the communist cause and start a revolution. This operation, known as the Ulchin-Samchok Raid, rivaled the Blue House mission in its harebrained execution; villagers, for instance, were forced to fill out application forms to join communist organizations and to listen to speeches championing the noble DPRK cause. Again, the commandos failed to comprehend the extent of anti-communist sentiments in the South, as villagers quickly escaped to warn the authorities. Most of the agents managed to escape back north.

Ironically, the DPRK’s attempts to undermine the ROK only solidified the South’s anti-communist stance and it was ultimately miscalculation or disillusionment on Kim Il Sung’s part of communism’s appeal that led to the campaign’s failure. In almost every raid, including Blue House and Ulchin-Samchok, South Korean civilians strongly opposed the crude attempts by the North Koreans to start a revolution (and often risked their lives to alert authorities of the incursions).

In response to the recurring DPRK raids, South Korea created, in February 1968, the Homeland Defense Reserve Force, the equivalent of the US National Guards. According to one historian, this program “proved to be the single most crucial step in the Second Korean Conflict … Within 6 months, 2 million enthusiastic Southern citizens, including 15,000 women joined up … While not well armed for some time, they became an invaluable information web and eventually a source of supplemental troops for regular ROK Army formations.”

But as ill advised as the North’s campaign may have appeared to the outside world, Kim Il Sung and his henchmen had struck gold, particular with the USS Pueblo. One crewmember summed it up well: “Our value to them was apparently as propaganda pawns only.” And for eleven months, the DPRK government kept the “American spies” in the public spotlight, with frequent news of their trips to the theater, concerts, and circus and confession letters printed in the Pyongyang Times.

Spy games: A look at North Korea’s covert operations (part 1)

by Jerry Guo on

In celebration of the latest James Bond flick (granted, it was Die Another Day that featured blatant stereotypes about North Korean goons) and a longish piece in this week’s Harper’s on North Korea’s propaganda machine, I thought I’d give a history lesson into a period of time when North Korea was even crazier than it may seem today (for instance, did you know some 30 North Korean spies managed to get all the way to Seoul and almost assassinated the South Korean president?).

But first, some blatant plugs for additional readings. Be sure to check out former Gadling blogger Neil Woodburn’s excellent series, “Infiltrating North Korea,” from last year. I also reported from North Korea for The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor this August. And if you’re truly as obsessed about all this stuff as Neil and I, check out for part 2 tomorrow.

Anyways, so the North Korea of today, with its Lone Ranger worldview and its detachment with reality, can be traced back to the North Korea of the late 1960s, when it embarked on an unprecedented military and propaganda campaigns. But while the DPRK temporarily caused a fallout in US-ROK relations, the North failed to unify the peninsula as its heavy-handed military forays, following the “Vietnam Model”, only solidified South Korean anti-communism sentiments. Yet perhaps the most important detail of all rests in not what was, but what might have been. Quoted in the summer of 1968 in the New York Times, a top US official exclaimed, “Few people realize how close we came to war.”

Although the period 1967-1969 saw massive turmoil in Vietnam and China, the forgotten conflict on the Korean peninsula left an equally lasting legacy. North Korea permanently escaped the orbit of its two stronger communist brothers, China and the USSR, with Kim Il Sung exploiting the momentary power and attention vacuum in an attempt to become the head of the “anti-imperialist small states.”

Life is stranger than fiction. In one of the most daring covert operations of the Cold War, thirty-one North Korean agents crossed the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on January 17, 1968, on a top-secret mission to assassinate Republic of Korea (ROK) President Park Chung Hee in his own bedroom. As Lieutenant Kim Shin Jo, the only captured agent, later explained, success “would agitate the South Korean people to fight with arms against their government and the American imperialists.”

Although the commandos managed to reach within 800 meters of Park’s residence in Seoul, the Blue House, they were eventually detected and a national manhunt mobilized to track down the fleeing intruders. This audacious guerrilla operation was just one of a series between 1967-1969 when Kim Il-Sung reneged on the decade-old ceasefire.

With international attention diverted to China and Vietnam, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) renewed its military offensive as a means of forcing a US-ROK split, with the goal of hastening national unification. Although Kim saw this campaign as a diversion from the country’s stalling economy and an opportunity for him to be crowned leader of the “anti-imperialist small states”, the reunification efforts ultimately failed because he did not anticipate the extent of anti-communist sentiment in the South.

Known as the “Second Korean War,” this period of aggression is often treated as an ephemeral blip on the geopolitical radar. After all, the real war had ended 14 years earlier when the peninsula became locked into a seemingly permanent stalemate. There were, granted, the occasional clashes; statistics for 1966, a typical year, included 50 North Korean DMZ crossings, 35 UN casualties, and 19 exchanges of fire.

So why was it that the very next year, military intrusions increased ten-folds to 566, UN casualties quadrupled to 122, and exchanges of fire increased six-folds to 117? The jump in border conflicts-and a new breed of well-coordinated covert operations, from the Blue House assassination attempt to the capture of a US spyship and an attempted amphibious invasion-turned out to be part of a coordinated DPRK offensive against the ROK and US. It was anything but a blip.

The escalation of conflict between 1966 and 1967 saw the sharpest jump in casualties and clashes, and arguably marked the beginning of the “Second Korean War.” One of the first major incidents was the North Korean attack and sinking of a South Korean naval patrol boat on January 19, 1967, which killed all 40 crew members.

In a trend that would continue throughout the conflict, the DPRK shifted blame to the opposing party, in this case, complaining to the United Nations Command, “Your side has used South Korean fishing boats as a shield to cover up your espionage activities … and to find a pretext for unleashing another war in Korea.” The ROK subsequently relented and restricted its own fishing boats to below the 38th parallel, a victory that emboldened the DPRK for its boldest covert operation to date.

Part 2 tomorrow!

I stand corrected: Air Koryo planes are not made of bamboo

by Jerry Guo on

So last month, fresh out of detention in North Korea and noticeably high from the experience, I went on NPR and claimed, among some other rather dumb stuff, that “Air Koryo [the official North Korean airline] was literally made out of bamboo.”

Yes bold claim, especially with that underscored “literally.” And now an angry NPR listener has called me out on it.

I just returned from a trip to North Korea, traveling with Koryo Tours. We flew Air Koryo, the national airline, both directions, and it is not “literally held together with bamboo”. Our plane from Beijing to Pyongyang was a new Tupolev model airplane, cleaner than most planes I’ve been on recently in the US. Our flight out was on an older Ilyushin model aircraft, which was again clean and well-maintained. Both flights were right on time, and had good service.

After extensively research, and by that I mean Googling “Can I make a plane out of bamboo?” and coming up with zero hits, I’ve decided to issue a PUBLIC RETRACTION. That’s right.

I am officially backing down from my seditious statement that Air Koryo is a crappy airline. Heck, they even give you The Onion, North Korean edition The Pyongyang Times free of charge.