The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot
In the late 1950s, Kim expanded the scope and severity of his Stalinist purges, punishing about a hundred thousand ordinary people suspected of being “hostile and reactionary elements.” Some were executed without a trial. As the world has learned in recent years from defectors and satellite photographs, he also built a vast network of labor camps for political prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of “wrong thinkers” and their families have perished in this gulag, which continues to operate, cleansing society of those who pose a risk to “Kim Il Sung nation.” In the camps, guards breed prisoners like farm animals and then raise the resulting children to be slaves and snitches unaware of the outside world. Guards have license to murder, rape, starve, and torture prisoners without consequence.
Kim also created a caste system that ranked the entire population based on perceived political reliability. The “core” class lived close to him in the capital, Pyongyang, where they had access to government jobs and plenty to eat. They and their heirs became the elite. The “wavering” and “hostile” classes were shipped off to the countryside, where access to food was unreliable.
Kim borrowed, too, from the madness of Mao, imitating the Great Leap Forward and forcing the entire population to do unpaid labor. By the end of 1958, the Chollima movement (named for a flying horse of Korean legend) required North Koreans to do up to five hours of work a day, pulling weeds, digging ditches, and building roads. This forced labor was tacked on at the end of an eight-hour workday. These “campaigns” continue up to the present day, with urban residents sent every year to the countryside to plant seed, spread fertilizer (often human excrement, as chemical fertilizer is frequently in short supply), and harvest crops on cooperative farms.
As the Great Leader expanded the machinery of repression, he narrowed his intellectual base, closed his circle of advisers, and supercharged his cult of personality. Cartoonish histories of Kim and his partisans in Manchuria became required texts for indoctrination sessions in the late 1950s. In a country that then had about ten million residents, nearly a hundred million of these books were printed. As the status of the “guerrilla state” grew, the role of the Soviet Union and China in creating, arming, and defending the country was excised from public memory.
The reality was that Kim had entered North Korea in 1945 with only about 130 guerrilla comrades who had fought with him in Manchuria. Having come of age in a murderous civil war, these men were unschooled, conspiratorial, and ruthless. Outside his family, they were the only people the Great Leader ever trusted. Starting in the late 1950s and continuing until their deaths, they dominated the party’s ruling Central Committee and held the most important jobs in the government. After they died, their children and grandchildren took over, as the government became increasingly inbred, caste based, xenophobic, Kim-centric, and corrupt.
The guerrillas and their children were largely incompetent as stewards of the economy, presiding with the Kim family over a collapse of the country’s industrial base (excepting weapons production), the deterioration of infrastructure, and a declining ability to grow food or buy it from the outside. In the late 1990s, after the old Soviet Union disappeared and Russia cut off subsidies, about a million North Koreans starved to death. It was a rare peacetime famine in an industrialized state.
In the final four decades of his life, Kim’s self-glorification and taste for luxury grew rapidly, like an untreated and aggressive tumor. An estimated thirty-four thousand monuments to his wonderfulness had been erected by the 1980s. He had at least five palaces. His birthday became the most important public holiday. When he traveled, his aides brought along a special toilet equipped to analyze the character of his stool. On penalty of being sent to the labor camps, all North Koreans were required by his government to celebrate his genius. Adults were obligated to wear his picture on their lapels, hang his portrait in their houses, and build (or at least pretend to build) their emotional and intellectual lives around “burning loyalty to the Leader.”
For all his egotism, cruelty, and incompetence, Kim’s populist touch lasted as long as he did. He traveled frequently around North Korea, giving guidance at factories, posing with children, and smiling his fatherly smile—and being photographed while doing so. These photographs never showed an unsightly, baseball-sized, inoperable calcium growth visible on the right back of his neck since the 1970s. The growth, called a hok in Korean, is often caused by poor childhood nutrition. Photographs also failed to capture what eyewitnesses said was his eye-popping obesity. Sidney Rittenberg, an American who worked as a translator in Mao’s China, recalls being “astounded by the sight” of Kim in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. “I have never seen a public figure so fat, his vast round stomach blending seamlessly into a thick jowly neck. He looked nothing like his pictures.”
When he died peacefully in 1994, at age eighty-two, millions of North Koreans wept for weeks. His corpse, like those of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, was specially embalmed and put on public display under glass. By the time he died, North Korea was on the brink of collapse, with mass starvation soon to sweep the country. The Great Leader’s competition with South Korea had been lost: an average South Korean salaryman lived a more comfortable life than all but a few of the elite in Pyongyang.
Yet if greatness is measured by a leader’s enduring stamp on a country, Kim is perhaps the greatest of the past century. No totalitarian state has survived as long as the one he invented, and only his became a family dynasty. In a sense, he and his heirs have succeeded in stopping time itself.
Kim’s grandson Kim Jong Un, in an attempt to legitimize his rule, has gone to extraordinary lengths to look like the Great Leader, with a porcine physique, a Mao suit, and a military haircut with no sideburns. His uncanny facial resemblance to his grandfather is widely attributed to plastic surgery. Even Kim Jong Un’s wife bears a resemblance to his grandfather’s first wife.
Kim Jong Un also has the family knack for purging. He ordered the killing of his uncle Jang Song Thaek for “dreaming different dreams and involving himself in double-dealing behind the scenes.” Since he took over from his father in 2011, Kim Jong Un’s speeches have echoed classic Great Leader themes, calling for “absolute trust, single-minded unity, and monolithic leadership.” His denunciations of his enemies sound as if they had fallen from the lips of his grandfather: “The United States and other hostile forces, ignoring our magnanimity and goodwill, are viciously stepping up their maneuvers in order to annihilate our republic politically, isolate it economically, and crush it militarily.”
Kim Jong Un was not yet thirty when he became leader, but he quickly mastered the family recipe for wielding power. It blends Stalinism with militarism that frightens the masses with warnings that American bombers will return unless North Korea arms itself to the teeth and citizens prepare for the worst.
When Kim Il Sung died—and again in 2011 when Kim Jong Il died—outside experts predicted that the Kim family would lose its grip. Yet as Kim Jong Un steps into his grandfather’s shoes, the foundations of the family dynasty remain in place. China supports and subsidizes North Korea as a buffer between itself and a South Korea closely allied with the United States. Pyongyang continues to develop potent military capabilities—nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, legions of special forces—that make it a formidable enemy, especially as viewed from South Korea and Japan, where any conflict could produce hundreds of thousands of casualties. Finally, the Kim family has lost none of its capacity for cruelty to its own people. The border with China has become harder to cross since Kim Jong Un came to power. Recent satellite photographs show new construction in the political labor camps.
Americans, meanwhile, remain largely ignorant of the mass death and vast devastation that their air force caused during the Korean War—and of the bogeyman role that they continue to play inside North Korea. As a forgetful superpower, the United States often gives the Kim family exactly what it needs to whip up anti-Am
erican hysteria and legitimize itself. When Kim Jong Un was making noisy but empty threats to bomb the United States in the spring of 2013, the U.S. Air Force responded by flying nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers over the Korean Peninsula.
II
Ken and Clara Rowe were married in New York City in 1960. They soon had three children, two boys and a girl. Their daughter, Bonnie, became a lawyer, concert musician, and music teacher in Toledo, Ohio. Their elder son, Raymond, is mentally handicapped and works at a rehabilitation center in Daytona Beach, Florida. Their younger son, Edmund, became an aerospace engineer, like his father.
In raising his family and organizing his life, Rowe has been profoundly influenced by what he learned during his first six months on Okinawa. His interrogators and minders told him to immerse himself in American culture and not to associate with Korean people. It was easy advice to follow when he arrived in the United States, as there were few Koreans to associate with. But after immigration law changed in the mid-1960s, South Korea became one of the top five countries of origin for immigrants coming to America. The number of people of Korean descent surged to 1.7 million, making the United States second only to China as a destination for Koreans living outside the Korean Peninsula.
By then, living apart from Koreans had become a habit for Rowe, influencing his choice of friends, employment, and housing. He stayed away from big Korean communities and did not read Korean newspapers or books, and his children did not grow up speaking Korean in the house or anywhere else. They do not understand the language, which Rowe rarely speaks to his wife. Neither he nor his wife eats much Korean food. Rowe has no regrets for moving so far away from his language and culture. He thought and dreamed about escaping to America almost from the moment the Soviet army marched into Korea, and he regards his distance from all things Korean as a measure of his success.
A notable exception to all this is television. South Korean soap operas have hooked Rowe’s wife and his daughter, and he watches South Korean historical dramas. The programs, which are well made and wildly popular across East Asia, showcase impossibly beautiful Korean women and handsome Korean men. In the soaps, nearly everyone is rich, adulterous, driving fast cars, and living in fabulous houses. To understand the plots, the Rowes watch programs that have English subtitles.
Rowe had a long, successful, and peripatetic career. After DuPont, he found jobs at Boeing and General Dynamics. After becoming an American citizen in 1962, he obtained a security clearance for work on government weapons systems. Then, as a contract engineer, a position that allowed him to make considerably more money, he worked at General Electric, General Motors, Lockheed, Grumman, Westinghouse, and Pan American Airways. He moved often and lived everywhere from San Diego to Seattle to Saudi Arabia. Near the beginning of his career, he taught engineering for two years at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. At the end, he taught thermodynamics for seventeen years at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, a school that Time magazine has called the “Harvard of the sky.” He retired there at age sixty-eight, six years after the Great Leader died.
To keep fit in his eighties, Rowe gets up at 5:15 every morning, walks a mile, and does calisthenics, including sixty push-ups. He cut back to sixty when he was in his seventies, after having done a hundred push-ups every day since his time at the North Korean Naval Academy. Rowe keeps his hands and forearms strong with the help of a pair of spring-loaded hand grippers, squeezing each one a hundred times a day. Over the years he has worn out these grippers while they were still under warranty. When he returned them to a sporting goods store for free replacements, a clerk told him it had never happened before.
Rowe’s mother, who came to America in 1957, lived with her son until his marriage to Clara. Then she followed Ken as he and his family moved from city to city, renting a nearby apartment and visiting them two or three times a week for the rest of her life. She never learned much English and spent several months a year back in South Korea visiting friends. Rowe and his mother got along well, except when they talked about religion. His mother was a devout Catholic, especially later in life. Rowe had turned away from religion in middle school in North Korea; it was the only Communist teaching that ever stuck. Rowe’s mother died in Daytona Beach in 2004 at age ninety-three, having spent more than half her life in the United States.
After settling in America, Rowe was reluctant to return to South Korea; he worried about safety. In 1968, thirty-one North Korean commandos attacked the presidential residence in Seoul, killing sixty-eight South Koreans before they were all tracked down. Pyongyang has also sent assassins to Seoul to try to kill prominent defectors. Rowe waited until 1970 to travel to Seoul for the first of half a dozen visits. On that first trip, with the help of the South Korean air force, he met four other defectors who had escaped North Korea in military aircraft. It was from one of them that he learned—seventeen years after the fact—of the vengeance that the North Korean government had taken for his escape. His best friend, Lieutenant Kun Soo Sung, was executed in 1953, along with four other air force officers.
Rowe had often dreamed about Kun before he returned to Korea. In those dreams, the two young pilots looked at each other but never spoke. When Rowe learned that his friend was dead, he was saddened and angry. But seventeen years had gone by, too much time for him to be overwhelmed by guilt. After he learned of the execution, he stopped dreaming about Kun. He never dreamed about Uncle Yoo.
Twenty years after he first went to Riggs National Bank in Washington, Rowe revoked the trust fund from Operation Moolah. He wanted to invest his money a bit more aggressively than Riggs had done. Since 1974, his investments of the original $100,000 reward—combined with savings from his earnings as an engineer—have made him a multimillionaire. Although he keeps most of his money in conservative mutual funds, he enjoys playing the stock market and every year makes a few trades.
It took sixty-one years before Rowe learned—from the author of this book—of the presidential fingerprints on Operation Moolah. Rowe now believes the trust fund that Eisenhower insisted on helped keep his windfall safe while he learned how to manage money. Still, there was never a risk he would squander it. He is not a frivolous spender. He and his wife have lived for thirty years in a modest three-bedroom Daytona Beach tract house. For decades he mowed his own lawn, pruned his shrubs, and sharpened the blades on his lawn equipment. In 2014, he finally hired a lawn service because of his age.
Rowe is grateful for the U.S. government’s help in making him rich. But it still irritates him that he was called Moolah Man. More maddening was the assumption that he stole the MiG out of a desire for money. As a free man in the land of his childhood dreams, he believes he needed no one’s help to become successful.
In the fall of 2008, Rowe received devastating news about his son Edmund, who had worked for nineteen years as an engineer at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. Edmund shot his wife with a .45-caliber revolver and then shot himself. The shootings occurred on September 21, the anniversary of his father’s escape from North Korea.
When a Georgia newspaper reporter telephoned Rowe to ask about the deaths, he said he was so shocked he could not think straight. His forty-two-year-old son was newly married. “I thought everything was going well,” he said.
Since the shootings, Rowe and his wife have continued to grieve. They did not approve of their son’s marriage to a thirty-five-year-old base secretary who was less educated than Edmund. The wedding took place four months before the shooting, and they did not attend. Edmund, who was an avid gun collector, left no note to explain what happened or why. Rowe does not know the significance, if any, of the date of the shootings. He thinks it is probably a coincidence that his son died fifty-five years to the day after his escape.
During his first decades in the United States, Rowe never imagined that the land of his birth would become a Stalinist kingdom. When Kim Il Sung died, Rowe expected the regime to die with
him. It seemed possible that the Korean Peninsula could be united under a democratic government, which he hoped to be able to visit. Like most expert outside observers of North Korea, he assumed that at the very least the North’s political system would evolve in some fundamental way. It had happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin and in China after Mao. So when Kim’s son Kim Jong Il became the leader in 1994 and North Korea stumbled on as a totalitarian state, Rowe was sick with disappointment.
When Kim Jong Un took over in 2011 and began imitating the Great Leader, Rowe’s disappointment turned to disgust. He believes Kim Jong Un is worse than his father or grandfather—and much less intelligent. Nothing will change, Rowe has concluded, until the North Korean people find a way to rise up. But he knows, too, that the Kim family will imprison or kill all those who try.
If Rowe had stayed on, he believes, he would have been executed by the government for his mother’s flight to South Korea or died of starvation in the 1990s famine. He has never regretted his decision to fly away.
No Kum Sok, age three, wearing a pith helmet, with his father, No Zae Hiub (left), an all-star pitcher for his company’s baseball team, in Sinhung, Korea, in 1935.
No Kum Sok, age four, with his mother, Veronica, in Sinhung. The family was well off, and his mother was one of a handful of Korean women who owned a Singer sewing machine.
Kim Il Sung, age fourteen, in 1926, while in school in Manchuria. In his memoirs, Kim says he read The Communist Manifesto at this time; historians doubt it.
Kim, seated, in Chinese dress, in Manchuria circa 1926. This photo was taken before he was expelled from middle school for anti-Japanese activities.