‘More than ever, money talks,’ said Chun Ki-won, a minister in Seoul who told me that between 2000 and 2008 he helped more than six hundred North Koreans cross into China and make their way to South Korea.
By the time Shin crawled through the electric fence, there was a well-established human smuggling network with tentacles that reached deep inside North Korea. Chun and several other Seoul-based operatives told me that given enough money they could get virtually any North Korean out of the country.
Using word of mouth, brokers in Seoul offered ‘planned escapes’. A low-budget version cost less than two thousand dollars. It involved months or years of travel through China, via Thailand or Vietnam, to Seoul, and it could require treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and weeks of waiting in an unsanitary Thai refugee camp.
A first-class planned escape, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an air ticket from Beijing to Seoul, sold for ten thousand dollars or more. From start to finish, brokers and defectors said, going first class could take as little as three weeks.
Activist pastors from South Korean churches invented the escape trade in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hiring border operatives who greased the palms of North Korean guards with cash donated by parishioners in Seoul. By the time Shin hit the road, defectors, many of them former North Korean military and police officers, had taken over the trade and were quietly running profitable operations.
This new breed of brokers would often receive advance payment in cash from affluent or middle-income South Korean families seeking the release of a relative. They sometimes worked on an instalment plan, taking little or no money up front from a defector or his family. When an instalment-plan defector arrived in Seoul, however, and had access to some of the forty thousand dollars or more that the South Korean government gives to new arrivals from the North, brokers usually demanded far more money than their basic fee.
‘My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay bribes to get someone out,’ said a Seoul-based broker and former North Korean military officer who worked for a smuggling operation based in China. ‘But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service.’
By 2008, many North Korean defectors were so deeply in debt to their smugglers that the South Korean government changed the way it distributed its cash support. Instead of offering lump-sum payments, the money was paid out over time, with incentives for those who found and held jobs. About a quarter of the money also went directly on housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker.
Using their personal and institutional contacts in the North, brokers hired guides to escort people from their homes in North Korea to the Chinese border, where they were handed over to Chinese-speaking guides, who drove them to Beijing Airport.
Outside Seoul, I talked to a North Korean defector who had paid twelve thousand dollars to a broker to smuggle out her eleven-year-old son in 2002.
‘I didn’t know it could happen so fast,’ said the mother, who did not want to disclose her name because she and her siblings were paying another broker to smuggle out their mother at the time. ‘It took only five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China. I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport to tell me my son was here.’
At the border and inside the country, the North Korean government has tried to crush these smuggling operations — and periodically it succeeds.
‘A lot of people get caught,’ Lee Jeong Yeon, a former North Korean border officer, told me. ‘The policy is for one hundred per cent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions. The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards,’ he said. ‘Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed.’
Lee, whose identity was confirmed by South Korean intelligence officials, worked for three years along the China–North Korea border. He supervised undercover agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade. After his defection to the South, Lee told me he had used his contacts in the North to smuggle out thirty-four people to freedom.
Shin did not have the awareness, the money, or the contacts to use smuggling networks, and he certainly did not have anyone outside the country to engage professionals on his behalf.
But by keeping his mouth shut and his eyes open he entered the slipstream of smuggling, trading and petty bribery that had become North Korea’s post-famine economy.
Traders showed him haystacks where he could sleep, neighbourhoods where he could break into houses and markets where he could trade stolen goods for food. Shin often shared food with them in the evening as they all huddled around roadside fires.
As he walked out of Bukchang that day, wearing his newly stolen coat and carrying a small cache of cookies, Shin joined a small group of traders that, by chance, was going north.
17
Unless he could get far away — and quickly — Shin feared he would soon be caught.
He walked nine miles to a small mountain town called Maengsan, where traders told him that a truck would show up near the central market. For a small fee, it hauled passengers to the train station in Hamhung, the second largest city in North Korea.
Shin had not yet learned enough geography to know where Hamhung was. But he did not care. He was desperate to find a means of transportation other than his aching legs. It had been three days since he crawled through the electric fence, and he was still only about fifteen miles from Camp 14.
After queuing up with traders waiting for the truck, he managed to pile into the back. The road was bad and the sixty-mile journey to Hamhung took all day and into the night. In the back of the truck, a couple of men asked Shin where he had come from and where he was headed. Unsure who they were or why they were asking, Shin feigned confusion and said nothing. The men lost interest and ignored him.
Unknown to him, the timing of Shin’s travel was excellent.
Intercity travel in North Korea had once been impossible without a travel permit, which would be stamped or folded into a ‘citizen’s certificate’, a passport-sized document modelled after the old Soviet identification card. Camp-bred prisoners like Shin were never issued a citizen’s certificate.
For North Koreans who did not have them, travel permits were hard to come by. They were usually issued for work-related reasons or for a family event that could be confirmed by bureaucrats, such as a wedding or a funeral. But systematic police checks of these documents had largely ended by 1997 — with the exception of travellers bound for Pyongyang and other restricted areas[25] — when the rules eased as famine drove people out on the roads in search of food. Since then, bribes from traders have kept police and other security officials from enforcing the law. Put bluntly, the greed of North Korea’s cash-hungry cadre seemed to enable Shin’s trek.
In all probability, the truck he rode in was a military vehicle that had been illegally converted into a for- profit people mover. The system, known as
In North Korea, vehicles are owned not by individuals but by the government, the party and the military. Savvy operators within these organizations diverted trucks and colluded with smugglers to import fleets of secondhand cars, vans and buses from China. After the vehicles were registered in the name of state entities, private drivers were hired and wanderers like Shin were offered low-cost, no-questions-asked transport around much of the country.
Insurgent capitalism frightened the government of North Korea, which fretted publicly about a slippery slope to regime change and catastrophe. But periodic attempts to discipline bribe-takers, restrict market activities, force
