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Last Updated: May 4, 2009 - 7:31:59 AM |
Meet Inspector O, a detective with North
Korea's Ministry of People's Security. He is a man who loves his
country but harbors a knowing skepticism about its leadership.
He rolls his eyes at the communist propaganda and balks at wearing the
red lapel pin of founder Kim Il Sung that is de rigueur for North
Koreans. He struggles to keep his humanity in an authoritarian and
increasingly corrupt society.
But Inspector O isn't real. He is the fictional protagonist of a series
of detective novels by a former Western intelligence officer who uses
the pseudonym James Church.
Church is convinced that in his frequent trips to Pyongyang, he has met
many Inspector Os -- that is to say, modern, clear-thinking people
whose very existence proves there is intelligent life within the North
Korean system.
"Inside the regime, whose face people see only through stereotypes,
there is in fact a society of individuals who behave in recognizable
ways," Church said during a recent trip to Beijing.
What Church will allow to be published about himself is this: He is a
little over 60. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley and now lives
somewhere between New York and Washington. He got hooked on North Korea
in the 1970s when a colleague at an intelligence agency approached him
about a post analyzing the country's propaganda.
"But I don't know anything about North Korea," Church protested at the
time.
"That's OK. Nobody else does either," his colleague replied.
So Church spent about 20 years reading the famously vitriolic
editorials produced by the Pyongyang-controlled media, parsing the
subtle differences between a "shameless gangster" and a "brazen-faced
hooligan." He later served in other foreign policy jobs that allowed
him to travel frequently to North Korea. He says he's made about 30
trips.
A few years ago, Church was waiting for a visa to North Korea while
sitting in one of the dusty overstuffed chairs of a dimly lighted North
Korean consulate when the thought struck him that the country was so,
well, mysterious, that it really deserved to be the setting for a
mystery novel. The result was "A Corpse in the Koryo," published in
2006. The fourth installment (and possibly last, according to Church)
is due out this year and might address the question of who will succeed
the nation's ailing leader, Kim Jong Il.
The hero of these stories, O (a common Korean surname, usually
Romanized as Oh), is a Pyongyang cop working behind a worn wooden desk
in a cold, dimly lighted office so poorly funded that there is no
kettle for tea. Or, for that matter, gasoline or camera batteries.
Assigned to investigate homicides (the first being that of a guest
staying in Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel), O stumbles into the thick of
international intrigue.
Government missile sales, abductions, nuclear proliferation, drug
running -- Church doesn't need to make anything up; it all comes
straight off North Korea's rap sheet.
The first novel touches on North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens
during the 1980s. The plot of "Bamboo and Blood," the most recent work,
revolves around an Israeli effort to persuade North Korea to stop
selling missiles to Arab countries in return for economic assistance.
All three novels feature struggles between O's Ministry of Public
Security (basically the police) and Big Brother-like agencies wielding
political power.
It is perhaps the most explicitly political of the novels so far, set
during the 1990s famine.
"Two meals a day, very healthy. Isn't that what they say on the radio?
If two is healthy, what do we call one meal a day? Or does hot water
count as nourishment now?" O complains to his boss.
Later in the book, O meets with a cigar-smoking North Korean diplomat
who tells him about his instructions from Pyongyang for the latest
round of arms talks in Geneva.
"My job is to bluff and to stall. And when that doesn't work, I have
backup instructions to stall and to bluff."
North Korea is such an indescribably strange place that few works of
nonfiction have come close to capturing it the way Church manages to in
his novels. His descriptions of this most dysfunctional country
("fields of rotting brown stubble") have delighted North Korea junkies
who have struggled to find their own words.
"He's got the atmosphere dead on," said Donald Gregg, former CIA
station chief and later ambassador to South Korea.
Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute, a nonproliferation
think tank, wrote in the group's newsletter that Church's first book is
the "best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has
survived all these years when the rest of the communist world
capitulated to the global market a decade ago."
Readers have speculated that the novels contain clues to sensitive
intelligence information. In his commentary, Hayes discussed a
long-running joke in the first novel in which Inspector O kept trying
to score a cup of tea.
"Is the shortage of thermoses in the novel actually a code for missing
centrifuges that used all the aluminum tubes in the country?"
For the record, the books were submitted for vetting to his former
intelligence agency. Nothing was deleted, he said.
"They don't take fiction too seriously, and they shouldn't," Church
said. "A lot of this I just made up."
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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