“Whenever I visited the North, I knew my life was on the line,” said Park Chae-so, a South Korean spy who met with the then-leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il.
Credit...Woohae Cho for The New York Times

The Wily Spy Who Risked His Life to Meet North Korea’s Secretive Leader

Park Chae-so was so successful in infiltrating the North that Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic ruler, once gifted him blueberry wine. So why was the celebrated undercover agent later jailed by South Korea?

by · NY Times

When the South Korean spy met with Kim Jong-il, he declined the late North Korean leader’s offer of a toast, citing a promise to his mother that he would never drink.

But the undercover agent, masquerading as a businessman, vowed to break his abstinence when the two Koreas reunified, until recently an overriding policy goal of the leaders of both countries.

Park Chae-so, the spy, amused Mr. Kim when the North Korean dictator gave him a bottle of blueberry wine as a parting gift. He asked for another.

“Mr. Chairman, don’t we Koreans say one is one too few?” he said.

Mr. Park’s 1997 meeting with Mr. Kim, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, lasted only 35 minutes. But it was a​ coup for South Korea’s intelligence community: He was its only known undercover agent to penetrate the security cloaking the world’s most secretive regime and finagle an audience with its enigmatic leader.

Until then, Mr. Kim was so reclusive that even his own people had heard his voice only once, in 1992, when he shouted one sentence into the microphone while inspecting a military parade: “Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People’s Army.”

But Mr. Park was impressed with Mr. Kim’s speaking style.

“There was a flow — and not a single repetition,” Mr. Park, 70, said of his conversation with the supreme leader.

Mr. Park’s identity and his meeting with Mr. Kim, who ruled North Korea from 1994 to 2011, were exposed in a political scandal in 1998, turning him into a celebrated — but former — spy in the South.

These days, the ex-spy is a cautious but vivid storyteller, and this account is based on his version of events, which have inspired a book about his life and a movie, “The Spy Gone North.” While parts of his story have been corroborated by officials and associates, neither North Korea nor his former spy agency has officially commented on his work.

Mr. Park visited North Korea more than a dozen times, convincing North Korean officials that he could get them badly needed cash, including by helping them sell porcelain and other ancient North Korean artifacts abroad.

He said that whenever he was there, he folded his clothes — and left a couple strands of hair in his bag — in such a way that he would know whether his belongings were searched while he was away from his hotel. When the searching stopped, he knew he had gained the trust of his minders.

A senior North Korean official once put a gun to his head when he refused to cooperate with a plan to have him sleep with a North Korean woman and have a baby in the North, he said during an interview in Cheongju, where he lives, one of a few conversations he had in Cheongju and in Seoul with The New York Times. Mr. Park was told that Mr. Kim had already named the prospective baby: Tongil, or “Unification.”

“Whenever I visited the North, I knew my life was on the line,” Mr. Park said. “When the plane took off from Pyongyang and was up in the air, I could breathe again, relieved that I had survived another trip.”

A son of a farming family in Cheongju, south of Seoul, Mr. Park was an army major in 1990 when he was recruited by the Defense Intelligence Command. He began creating a new reputation as part of a carefully choreographed plan to eventually have him infiltrate North Korea. He borrowed money, squandering it in real estate deals gone wrong, and often got into trouble with superiors. He added a few criminal records to his file.

Three years later, in 1993, he was tapped by the country’s top intelligence service, the Agency for National Security Planning, just as North Korea’s clandestine nuclear program ​had turned into an international crisis.

By this time, he was known among his friends and former military colleagues — and hopefully among the North Korean spies in the South who would check up on his background — as a disgruntled former military intelligence officer, heavily indebted and dabbling in various private business enterprises.

For agents spying on North Korea, the famine there in the 1990s created rare opportunities. The North’s elites traveled to China to trade and earn badly needed cash. There, they met South Korean businessmen, some of them undercover agents who piggybacked on business deals to meet North Korean officials and establish an intelligence-gathering foothold.

Mr. Park had his first breakthrough when he learned that one of North Korea’s biggest players in such deals was a nephew of Jang Song-thaek, Mr. Kim’s brother-in-law and at the time one of the country’s most powerful figures.

To get the nephew in trouble with his Chinese creditors, Mr. Park arranged for a shipment of walnuts and pine nuts to be confiscated at a South Korean port. He then gave the nephew $160,000 to pay off his debt, and the grateful Jang family began pulling strings for Mr. Park and doors started to open.

One of his new contacts, Ri Chol, a North Korean Workers’ Party trade official, later introduced him in turn to a senior official from the Ministry of State Security, the North’s secret police, in Beijing. After learning that the security official had a son and daughter about to get married, Mr. Park delighted him with a pair of expensive watches as a wedding gift.

Such episodes convinced him that money talked among the elites of the impoverished North.

“My mission was to penetrate as deep inside the Pyongyang leadership as possible to learn what they were thinking,” Mr. Park said. “If I had any success, it was because I figured out their taste for money.”

As his contacts expanded up the hierarchy, the scrutiny increased. No matter how good his cover story, Mr. Park’s North Korean contacts would have known that anyone doing business with them was at least being watched by South Korean intelligence.

North Korean officials once showed him photos of his mother working at a garden and his two daughters going to school in South Korea. The message: Don’t betray us or else.

By the time Mr. Park met Mr. Kim, he had already crafted a lucrative business deal for North Korea that involved bringing a film crew to the North to shoot South Korean TV commercials. Mr. Park said Mr. Kim personally had blessed this proposal.

Surprisingly, the leader also asked Mr. Park to “read his face,” having heard from his aides that Mr. Park practiced the Asian art of fortunetelling based on facial features.

But Mr. Kim also had a more serious plan for Mr. Park.

North Korea wanted him to help with its scheme to block Kim Dae-jung, the longtime opposition leader in the South, from winning its 1997 presidential election. Pyongyang instead wanted the South led by a less-experienced conservative leader.

At home, Mr. Park’s spy agency also did not want Kim Dae-jung, a former dissident whom it once attempted to assassinate, to win the election either. His agency and North Korea, sworn enemies of each other, both plotted separate smear campaigns designed to depict Kim Dae-jung as an untrustworthy communist.

Mr. Park personally opposed such interference. He tipped off aides to Kim Dae-jung so they could prepare against such plots, while urging North Koreans to embrace an opposition victory.

After the opposition leader won the presidency, Mr. Park’s bosses at the spy agency went to prison for illegally meddling in the election. Before they did, they leaked classified intelligence reports that mentioned an undercover agent code-named “Black Venus” who had met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang. There was enough detail for journalists to figure out who Black Venus was.

Mr. Park was preparing for a trip to North Korea in 1998 when South Korean media identified him as Black Venus. His agency discharged him with a $224,000 bonus.

“I had no regrets,” Mr. Park said. “I could not let an enemy country interfere with an election in my country.”

He then made a second fateful decision.

He reconnected with Mr. Ri, the North Korean trade official, and worked as a freelancing agent for inter-Korean projects — a genuine businessman this time. In 2005, he and Mr. Ri arranged the filming of a Samsung cellphone commercial in Shanghai, the first of its kind, that featured two female celebrity entertainers from both Koreas.

After the political mood changed in South Korea with the conservatives taking back power in 2008, his old agency caught up with him. In 2010, agency officials arrested Mr. Park on charges of illegally contacting North Koreans and sharing sensitive military data with them. Mr. Park argued that none of it was secret, but he was sentenced to six years in solitary confinement.

Since he was freed in 2016, he has not had a formal job.

Although Mr. Park has no plans to reconnect with his North Korean contacts, he often wonders if they might reach out to him as he had helped them hide money abroad when he was a spy.

“They need my help to access the money,” he said.

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