From Pyongyang to Washington, a lot of very important people were asking the same question. Hwang’s defection was not just a crack, but a gaping chasm in the faCade of North Korea’s regime. Hwang was one of the chief architects of North Korea’s homegrown philosophy of juche, or self-reliance. He was a confidant of Kim Il Sung, the late Great Leader, and helped ensure the smooth succession of his son Dear Leader Kim Jong Il in 1994. He ghost-wrote some of the supremos’ great thoughts, and even airbrushed history–helping change the Dear Leader’s birthplace from Siberia to the hallowed slopes of Mount Paektu. If he were to tell all, it would be a disaster for the North.
Pyongyang already had enough calamities. Many of its 23 million people are on the brink of famine, reduced to rations of just 3.5 ounces of grain per day. Russia and China are no longer willing to subsidize their hard-line neighbor, as they did during the cold war. Even before the latest intrigue, the White House had singled out North Korea’s crisis as one of the most pressing foreign-policy matters. Outgoing CIA Director John Deutch told a Senate hearing in December that the regime could lash out and risk a new war on the peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops help protect the South along the world’s most heavily armed border. It could ““implode because of incredible economic problems.’’ Or, he said, it might pursue peaceful reunification. Deutch expected the question to be resolved within ““two or three years.''
Hwang disagreed with that assessment last week in a handwritten memo issued from South Korea’s consulate in Beijing, where he was holed up. ““There is no risk of North Korea collapsing because it is politically very united,’’ he wrote. But diplomats wondered if that message might have been intended to mollify his former masters and help his relatives weather the storm back home. The North Koreans clearly were furious at the defection; they charged that South Korean intelligence agents had kidnapped Hwang. And Pyongyang wanted him back. Chinese People’s Armed Police sealed off the streets around the consulate after at least two attempts by North Koreans to get inside the compound.
Hwang was perhaps North Korea’s most important internationalist, a man intensely curious about Western intellectual life. Selig Harrison, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, met Hwang four times and remembers him as surprisingly pragmatic. During a dinner discussion of Korean politics in 1987, Harrison asked if he thought South Korea was about to erupt in revolution–a central tenet of North Korean propaganda. ““Absolutely not,’’ Hwang answered boldly. ““Things have changed a lot since the Korean War.’’ In 1992 and 1994, Hwang told Harrison he wanted to visit America and meet such playwrights as Arthur Miller and (the long-deceased) Tennessee Williams.
Escape thoughts: But on a visit to Pyongyang in 1995, Harrison was denied permission to meet Hwang, who seemed to be ““no longer in the loop.’’ Hwang had been close to Kim Il Sung, but not to Kim Jong Il, even though he had served as the boy’s tutor. Diplomats speculated that Hwang had probably been mulling over his own escape since at least last year, when he felt the political tide turning against him. He was a member of the powerful Secretariat of the Workers’ Party of Korea, and had been elected three times to head the Supreme People’s Assembly. But his rank in the hierarchy had dropped from the low teens to 24, and he may have worried that he’d soon be purged. One senior official in Seoul told NEWSWEEK that Hwang had been in touch with South Korean agents months before his defection.
The immediate concern in Washington and Seoul was whether the defection would disrupt their attempts to achieve a ““soft landing’’ in the North. The aim is to entice Pyongyang into negotiations to replace the 1953 armistice agreement with a full-fledged peace treaty. Washington and Seoul seem prepared to grant North Korea food aid under U.N. auspices, which might allow Pyongyang to save some face. ““We have to show a kind of magnanimity in dealing with North Korea now,’’ says Kim Suk-Woo, the vice minister for unification.
Hwang’s defection put the Chinese government in a difficult spot. Beijing has growing commercial and diplomatic ties with South Korea, but it has historic and ideological ties with the North, and its marginal leverage over Pyongyang has proved useful in the past. So for the time being, Hwang was ensconced in a small room on the second floor of the consular office, ordering takeout food from a nearby Korean restaurant. ““My remaining life is not that long,’’ he wrote. ““I failed in politics … If possible, I just want to offer some help for reconciliation and unification between North and South.’’ For the moment, however, he had only made the situation murkier.
