Inside a North Korean Commando Raid

Chun Chung-nam had tried to kill himself by biting off his tongue. The first time I met him, faint traces of his failed attempt were still evident on his face—a healing cut on his left lip where a South Korean soldier had forced his jaw open.

Chun, twenty-seven, was the leader of a two-man North Korean commando squad intercepted while trying to contact one of the communist North’s resident agents near Tadaepo, a seaside resort west of Pusan (also spelled Busan), South Korea’s largest port. Minutes after he and his comrade-subordinate, Lee Sang-gyu, twenty-three, landed from a semi-submersible submarine, South Korean soldiers captured them. Earlier encounters with northern commandos’ suicide-by-tongue training had prepared the southerners: they shoved into their captives’ mouths special gags designed to lock their teeth apart.

Through a South Korean intelligence officer whom I had befriended in Hong Kong, I requested interviews in Seoul with both men. My encounter with them was one of the oddest experiences of a long career as a foreign correspondent in Asia. It offered strange echoes of the Second World War, especially Japan’s god-emperor cult and its suicidal kamikaze warriors, and of the tumultuous self-destruction with which Islamist jihadists are now confronting us.

Tensions created by the apparent advent of a North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) have reached an ominous plateau. Perhaps we have just got to adjust to the idea of a nation given to blood-curdling threats becoming one of the world’s nine nuclear powers.

We are left, though, with a dangerously militarised peninsula. This is, of course, especially concerning for South Koreans. Their more immediate threat than nuclear annihilation is the North’s recent expansion of the Korean People’s Army Special Operation Force (NKSOF).

The NKSOF has existed for many years. Western military observers first became familiar with it on January 21, 1968, when a thirty-one-man commando unit infiltrated Seoul in a foiled attempt to assassinate the South’s President Park Chung-hee. All but two of the commandos died in gun-battles that followed their assault on the Blue House, Seoul’s presidential palace.

Over the years northern commandos have intermittently terrorised southerners. Perhaps their most successful exploit was in Rangoon in October 1983 when a three-man squad succeeded in exploding a bomb that killed seventeen people, including four South Korean cabinet ministers in Burma on a state visit.

Understandably, the NKSOF stays most of the time in the North’s murkiest shadows. In August this year, however, Pyongyang suddenly publicised the appearance of a large detachment of fierce-looking black-and-green-camouflaged elite troops wielding AK-47 attack rifles equipped with grenade-launchers. The NKSOF commandos goose-stepped through downtown Pyongyang together with a vast array of other military units taking part in the nation’s annual Day of the Sun tribute to the late “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung. Alongside them canisters were paraded containing what was reported to be two kinds of nuclear ICBM capable of reaching the US. Analysts believe that this reminder of NKSOF potency is linked to the crisis created by the new ICBMs’ advent.

Pyongyang will have noted Washington’s effective use of its SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) commandos in a clandestine strike in 2011 against fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Senior voices in Washington’s ruling Republican Party have been advocating a similar assault on North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Ohio’s Governor John Kasich, a rising anti-Trump Republican prospect for the 2020 presidential election, told a public meeting in August: “The North Korean top leadership has to go and there are ways in which that can be achieved.”

A military analyst with South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says the NKSOF’s appearance at the parade is Pyongyang’s declaration that the force is on standby to repel “elite US soldiers who are practising to ‘remove’ Kim Jong-un from power should war arise”. The North has complained vigorously about US plans to move a squadron of missile-capable Gray Eagle attack drones to Kunsan air base near Seoul early next year. Said Sung-Yoon Lee, Korea expert at Tufts University: “One intended message for the Kim Jong-un regime must be: ‘Watch out. We may track you down and take you out’.”

When my interviews with Chun and Lee took place in Seoul, the men had been in custody for about five months. A sceptic could rightly point to the interval between capture and our conversation as time enough for successful South Korean brainwashing. But the southerners are open about their standard operation procedures for “reorienting” new northerner arrivals. Not long after their capture, both men were taken on a tour of Seoul and the capital’s abundance of well-stocked supermarkets.

Their jailers have found that the shock of seeing thousands of ordinary citizens buying locally-made goods of a quality and variety not even remotely matched in Pyongyang is the best antidote for a lifetime of Kimilsungist propaganda about the “impoverished” South. To this extent, reindoctrination—at least enough to cure the urge to bite through their tongues—had clearly taken place. Their stories, nevertheless, were as convincing in the telling as they were disturbing in content.

The two men were members of a commando/espionage/terrorist force. According to Lee, a commando must undergo six years’ training before being sent to South Korea. Preparation began with three years of academic work—ordinary tertiary subjects, Marxism-Leninism and Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s Juche (self-reliance) ideology. Then came Taekwondo (Korean karate); long-distance underwater swimming; handling of small arms; methods of disguise; how to get rid of such obstacles as barbed wire; clandestine communications; and crewing the semi-submersible twenty-man mother ships in which the North sends its men south.

The school from which the two terrorists graduated was in the Pyongyang suburb of Shinmi. Restrictions on movement in this area were severe, even for Pyongyang. Party orders regarding security were treated as absolute. Once when a forest fire swept through the mountains here the Pyongyang fire brigade sent eleven fire-engines to fight it; all were stopped at a checkpoint between the city and the suburb. Even though the fire eventually caused much damage, guards refused to open the barricades because, says Lee, “the firefighters were just ordinary people”.

Shinmi’s commando graduates, however, were clearly considered special. According to Lee, the ordinary North Korean workers were paid seventy won per month; a one-star general, 250 to 300 won. Says Lee: “We were given almost as much as a general—226 won. We earned much more money than we could spend.”

In return, such young men were expected to be the Great Leader’s most loyal acolytes. They were taught that Kim Il-sung (who remains the de jure leader of the Korean Workers’ Party despite having died in 1994) was and is the world’s most respected statesman, and it would be wrong to endanger his image by being captured alive, and that capture alive would anyway endanger state secrets.

Central to this indoctrination was the Great Leader’s theory of two lives. Says Chun:

The Party cadres taught us that every person has two lives—his physical life and his political life. One’s political life was lived in service to the Great Leader and the Party; our physical life was therefore less important. If captured by the South’s authorities, you would be protecting your political life, continuing to live politically, by killing yourself.

Anyone disloyal enough to remain physically alive after capture—and thus politically dead—created special problems for any immediate family they might have in North Korea. “We understood,” says Chun, “that if we failed to kill ourselves, our families would not be fit for normal human society and would be excluded, isolated.”

United Nations officials estimate that between 80,000 and 120,000 people are imprisoned in North Korea’s political prison camps. Apparently resigned to their fate as “physically alive, politically dead” defectors, Chun and Lee feared that these camps now held their families.

Wouldn’t the state allow for the fact that Chun did try to kill himself by biting off his tongue? The young man was not sanguine. “Anyone captured alive is regarded as ideologically imperfect and therefore a traitor,” he told me in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. “We are taught that a traitor’s family is not fit for normal human society and must be isolated for the rest of their lives. There is no allowance for failure.”

The final pre-mission ceremonies were held in the Party’s Regional Liaison Office in Wonsan, an east-coast port. All twenty crew-members were assembled. Cadres led them in a final review of their mission, a discussion frequently interspersed with exhortations to be successful for the Great Leader’s sake and to glorify their political lives by suicide if failure seemed imminent. Standing before Kim Il-sung’s portrait, Chun, as leader, sang a self-destruction oath on behalf of his five-man commando squad:

So dear to all our hearts is our Leader’s glorious name:
Kim Il-sung!—of undying fame. 

Some hours later Chun, the four subordinates in his commando squad and fifteen crewmen of the semi-submersible spy ship set off for Tadaepo from Wonsan. Although designed to look like a Japanese fishing trawler, the eighty-ton vessel carried four heat-seeking ground-to-air missiles, two twin-barrelled 107mm rocket-launchers, four twin-barrelled machine-guns, two radars, a healthy arsenal of small-arms and a five-ton launch, also heavily armed.

At 5.20 p.m. off Japan’s Tsushima Island, Chun, Lee and three other squad members climbed into this smaller spy ship and headed for Tadaepo. Some five hours later, Chun and Lee donned wetsuits, dropped into the water and, using snorkels, swam below the surface towards a beach near the resort.

The area seems to have been a popular infiltration spot for the North. Chun had been there before to land an agent; now their mission was to pick one up. This time, Chun found himself uneasy. Since his previous visit, changes had been made. There was a fence which had not been there before. From the moment he came ashore, Chun had the feeling they were being watched.

Contact point for the agent was a small hill about 150 metres from the seashore. They skirted the fence and made towards a public lavatory between the shore and hill. But the South Korean army had prepared an ambush: sentries had spotted the infiltrators. As the North Koreans entered the toilet block, rifle butts knocked them unconscious.

For days, Chun and Lee were strapped to beds in Pusan military hospital before their South Korean Counter-Infiltration Operations Command interrogators felt able to let them move freely around their rooms. South Korean army and navy units found and destroyed the infiltrators’ launch. Three commandos aboard it were believed to have been killed. The agent the team failed to pick up, a man in his mid-forties, was thought to have escaped.

Nations other than North Korea have been known to teach death-before-dishonour to young soldiers. In the twentieth century, however, the concept has usually been reserved for periods of intensive warfare. Death by one’s own hand before dishonour, in circumstances other than war, is behaviour which only the world’s more peculiar societies—Japan under a militarised emperor system, for example—have encouraged.

And therein is probably the explanation for North Korean agents’ willingness to self-destruct. As Nam Jae-hee, a South Korean constitutional scholar, told me, “The North may be understood when you remember that Northerners have known nothing other than such discipline for many generations.” For thirty-five years to 1945, he said, all Koreans were brought up in a colony which demanded that the individual honour the Japanese emperor with absolute obedience, including suicide, if necessary.

Nam continued:

Since 1945 the South has been evolving as an industrial nation with more or less modern political and economic forms. In the North, Kim Il-sung replaced the emperor with himself. His personality cult has meant that in many important ways and especially with regard to military discipline, the system Northerners inherited from the Japanese has not changed very much.