SEOUL—We know that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is a very prickly sort of dictator, mercurial, narcissistic, and with very little sense of humor. (Remember when his hackers tore up Sony in retaliation for the 2014 Seth Rogen comedy The Interview?) But such vanity and pride may be a key source of vulnerability.
At least that’s what some North Korean defectors here believe as they wage what must be some of the most asymmetric warfare ever: their balloon-borne leaflets up against the arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles that Kim holds like a club over the South, and potentially the United States as well.
“As long as Kim Jong Un continues to threaten South Korea with nuclear arms, we will continue to send leaflets,” declared Park Sang-hak, talking to foreign reporters here.
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Having defected 20 years ago, Park now leads a group called Fighters for Free North Korea that promises to keep bombarding the North with leaflets.
Their campaign poses a direct challenge not only to Kim, but to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s drive for renewed dialogue with the North, and also to President Donald Trump’s dream of a fourth séance with the Kimster in an 11th-hour bid for a publicity bonanza before the presidential election in November.
Incredibly, while Fighters for Free North Korea were gearing up for another balloon barrage, Trump told Greta Van Susteren on Gray Television in Washington that one more summit with Kim would “probably” be helpful in view of their “very good relationship.”
Kim’s outspoken younger sister Kim Yo Jong, having denounced the perpetrators of the leaflet campaign as “traitors,” “human scum” and “mongrels,” said a summit “will not take place this year,” according to Pyongyang’s Korea Central News Agency. Another gabfest would be “unnecessary and useless this year and in the future,” she was quoted as saying, while the U.S. sticks to sanctions as a bargaining chip for denuclearization.
She erupted after Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, visiting Seoul and then Tokyo as the U.S. negotiator on North Korea, said the North Koreans would “find us ready” to talk whenever Kim Jong Un names “a counterpart to me.” Eager to establish common ground with South Korean President Moon, Biegun said the “vision” of Trump and Kim in their meetings over the past two years “is what guides our team.”
As long as the Fighters for a Free North Korea vow to launch more leaflets, that vision may be as illusory as Trump’s claim of success at his first summit with Kim in Singapore two years ago, which touted the vague goal of “denuclearization” on the Korean peninsula.
If Kim Jong Un shows no sign of giving up his nukes, Park Sang-hak, 52, and his younger brother, Park Jung-oh, 51, aren't about to give up their leaflets. They are determined to upset Kim with nasty messages wafted north on wind currents carefully monitored on their computers. No way, they say, will they back down.
President Moon sees the leaflet campaign as a threat to lingering chances for rapprochement. He's just appointed a new team composed of figures known for their close ties to North Korean officials. David Maxwell, a veteran of five tours in Korea as a special forces officer, writes that Moon evidently “plans to double down on his ‘Peace Strategy’" and “attempt to engage Pyongyang regardless of the U.S. position.”
Kim Jong Un was looking very aggressive a few weeks ago when his government blew up a liaison office built at huge South Korean expense on the north side of the Demilitarized Zone. But then Kim seemed to pull back. But Park and his band of leafleteers are not impressed by a belated promise of “no military action” against the South. Nor were they much concerned when the North announced a plan to launch balloons laden with 12 million leaflets in retaliation for the balloons from the South. Kim finally called that operation off.
President Moon's people, meanwhile, have threatened to put Park behind bars. “There are forces who want to put me into jail, but going to jail in this heat is not bad,” he said on a blistering summer day. “It would be cool in there.”
Younger brother Park Jung-oh said the leaflets sought to clarify just who initiated the Korean War 70 years ago. “North Koreans are forced to believe the U.S. started the war,” he told The Daily Beast. “We try to tell them who actually started it,” beginning with the invasion of the South by North Korean troops on June 25, 1950.
More recently, the Park brothers are sure the most powerful truth that Kim does not want his people to hear is that he ordered the assassination of his older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, at the airport in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur more than three years ago.
“The Devil Kim Jong Un Has Murdered His Own Blood Brother,” runs the headline over the news printed on waterproof vinyl paper featuring photographs of Jong Nam, including one of him sprawled on the ground after his poisoning. A VX nerve agent had been smeared on his face by two young women whom North Korean agents had put up to playing what they believed was a prank.
“If you think about North Koreans killing your own blood, this is something North Koreans can’t even imagine,” said older brother Park Sang-hak. “If you talk to defectors, they understand the killing of about 480 high-level officials on Kim’s orders, but they can’t believe he would have assassinated his brother.”
The Park brothers say they’ve received reports that leaflets from balloons bearing that sensational bit of family history drifted down on Kim and his entourage while he was enjoying the hot springs at a resort he opened last year in the mountains east of Pyongyang.
“Because he is so overweight, he frequently visits the hot springs,” said Park Sang-hak, who claims he got word through his network of sources inside North Korea about Kim’s angry reaction when he saw the leaflet.
“Thousands of defectors communicate with their sisters and brothers and parents by mobile phone,” Park told The Daily Beast in a separate conversation. North Korea bans international calls, but they still get through at considerable risk on Chinese networks. “Whatever happens up there, in three days we will find out,” he said. “We know what’s going on in North Korea.”
One look at the leaflet was enough to spoil Kim’s holiday, or so Park was told. “His mood turned bad,” said Park. “It unnerved him. He was supposed to stay two more days but returned immediately to Wonsan,” the port city on the east coast where he lives in splendor in a sprawling compound near another resort area that he’s having built.
None of that can be confirmed independently, but North Korean fury about the leaflet drops leaves no doubt they’ve hit a nerve.
Park Sang-hak says it was after the leaflet raid at the hot springs spa that Kim’s younger sister Kim Yo Jong launched into her “mongrel dogs” rant while ordering “the department in charge of affairs with the enemy to decisively carry out the next action.”
It was presumably at her behest, with her brother's approval, that the North Korean military blew up the sparkling liaison office building on the north side of the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
President Moon's reaction has been to rush to make amends, to jump-start the dialogue, to get on Kim’s good side again.
First things first, the South Korean government has said sending leaflets into North Korea violates an agreement reached between Moon and Kim on inter-Korean cooperation. The newly appointed unification minister, Lee In-young, who was a leftist firebrand as a student combatting former military-led governments in the South, said flatly, “Any acts that could cause military tensions are never desirable under any circumstances.”
To which Park Sang-hak responded, “Moon Jae-in’s pro-North administration” is “against free democracy and freedom of speech for the people.” More charitably, he believes South Korean leaders are “mired in the Stockholm syndrome”—the affection that those who are abused may feel for those abusing them.
