The South Korean navy boat, one of the new Chamsuris, took them on board, and two seamen offered blankets. A third tied their waterlogged skiff to the stern. The helmsman powered up the engine and turned the prow south, towards Kaul-li. The young captain with the southern accent keyed in his radio and spoke to base. This was an incident; there would be an inquiry. Successful defections were impossible overland, extremely rare by sea. He needed to cover his back. No delay in checking in. He asked for names.
The older man, the one who had bribed the fishermen to bring him south despite the risks, sat under his blanket, still shivering. The chill? Fear? More like the relief that replaces the certainty of interrogation and death. The crew had established that three of their refugees were penniless fishermen. One of the navy men approached the man under the blanket.
‘What is your name?’ he asked, clipboard in hand.
The fourth man looked up. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Li Song-Rhee.’ The blanket slipped. The shoulder boards of his uniform, the dress that had secured him passage through the checkpoints on the road from Pyongyang to the coast, gleamed in the weak sun. This was not a frantic corporal looking for a better life in South Korea. This was a four-star general of the army of the DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, one of the ultra-elite of Kim’s dictatorship.
The captain listened to his crewman and checked the shoulder boards of the sea-stained uniform. Then he returned to his radio. They would not bypass Kaul-li island. It has a heliport. A chopper would be coming up from navy HQ at Incheon. The history of the peninsula of the two Koreas was about to change.
Nine hours and the same number of time zones to the west, it was also dawn when a phone rang in a modest apartment off Admiralty Arch. Sir Adrian picked it up.
‘Yes, Prime Minister.’
‘There has been a development. You recall what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago? Well, it seems a four-star general of North Korea has defected to South Korea. Something to do with Kim’s missile programme.’
From his years with SIS, Sir Adrian knew there was a procedure whereby matters considered of sufficient importance could be sent to Downing Street ahead of the usual morning briefing, the ‘flimsies’ which prime ministers read over breakfast. If the incoming news was pressing enough, the PM could be woken at any hour, not that it seemed to make any difference with this one. Her staff wondered when she ever slept anyway.
‘I’ll ask our people over there to keep on top of it,’ she said.
‘Very wise, Prime Minister.’
The phone went down. Sir Adrian sighed and replaced the receiver. He knew she meant the head of station of the British SIS team in the embassy in Seoul, South Korea. He rose, pulled on a robe and went to make himself buttered toast. And coffee. Of course coffee, his favourite strong black arabica.
There was no point in telling even the PM how many hours he had spent with the best brains on North Korea that the Royal United Services Institute could furnish. He had listened to hours of briefings before settling on General Li Song-Rhee. Even then, it had been a long shot that the mastermind of the missile programme would receive the phoney email, let alone believe it. Still, as they say, nothing ventured …
It was Luke Jennings who, once again bewilderingly, had secured the access codes to the North Korean mobile-phone database. They were very obscure and heavily guarded and, when it came to cyberspace, the North Koreans were no beginners. Indeed, they were brilliant, constantly attacking the West with malware, Trojan horses and every trick in the book. But they were not an eighteen-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome.
In this paranoid dictatorship, there are only 1.8 million landlines, and these are confined to the topmost layers of government and administration. Phones may be the source of plots, conspiracies; they are not for the masses. Even the trusted must fill out many forms to secure one, and all are permanently bugged. Checks on ownership of mobile phones are even more stringent.
The nationalized service is Koryolink, a partner with Egyptian-owned Orascom. An estimated 400,000 people are allowed a mobile phone, and these 400,000 consist almost entirely of the privileged living in the capital. Among the really elite there is an even smaller service. This was what Luke Jennings, after weeks of work, had penetrated. Then the fluent Korean-speakers of RUSI, the Foreign Office and SIS had taken over, prowling the database to discover the personal phone number of General Li Song-Rhee.
It was a North Korean defector, sequestered in a safe house under guard, who had composed the message. In 2013, Kim had ordered the arrest and execution of his uncle and mentor Jang Song Thaek, possibly the most powerful man in the state after himself, on trumped-up charges of treason. The mandarin was torn apart by heavy machine-gun fire. The message to General Li, anonymous but evidently from a friend inside the elite, warned him that this fate was planned and pending for him too.
No, there was no need as yet to tell the PM all this, mused Weston as he sipped his arabica. Need to know, and all that. The Americans would take Li, of course. He would be crazy to stay in South Korea. A safe house close to the CIA at McLean would be safer and just as comfortable. Hours and hours of careful debriefing in the Korean language.
What would General Li reveal? And would the Americans let a Britisher sit in? It had been so long, many of his best friends in the Company were, like him, retired. Or supposed to be. But some of the old alliances, forged behind the Iron Curtain, ‘back in the day’, as the expression has it, still ran deep. Hazards shared, toasts drunk. As the veterans said at the bar of the SF Club, we had some fun. He would have a word with a few.
Sir Adrian’s instincts turned out to be accurate. From the South Korean navy base at Incheon, the defector was rapidly flown the short distance to the capital, Seoul. No local commander wanted to be in charge of this potential grenade for any longer than necessary.
The same applied to the South Korean government. This was supposed to be a time of détente between North and South, massively publicized and lauded worldwide, and now the government of the South had found itself in possession of a diplomatic bomb that could blow the whole process from détente back to open war.
The loss of face in Pyongyang would be staggering, and the Northern government learned of its loss in the late morning. The demand that General Li be returned to the North was immediate. Far from being affronted, the South Korean regime was relieved when the CIA moved in, and in strength, from the US embassy in Seoul. Still in his salt-stained uniform, the general agreed with the Americans that he did indeed wish to be transferred to America.
The transfer, in a US Air Force jetliner, took place that very evening. Within an hour, while General Li was still airborne and, as it happened, fast asleep, Seoul was putting it about that the entire operation had been organized by the CIA. The Agency showed zero energy in denying this. Were it true, it would have been a masterstroke.
On his second private prediction the British veteran also turned out to be prescient. Within hours of landing, General Li Song-Rhee was lodged in very comfortable quarters, and heavily guarded by SAD hard men within the huge agency complex at Langley, Virginia.
Experts in North Korea, in its government, its weapons programme, its culture and language, culled from the Agency, the Pentagon, the State Department and academia, were hastily assembled to form the core interrogation team and its attendant body of observers. The general did not need to be advised, even delicately, that full cooperation would be the fee for his salvation and protection. He was no fool.
The White House demanded no delay.
Whatever the man at the very heart of the North Korean power and armaments machine had to reveal, the POTUS wanted it, and now.
The diplomatic and media worlds were in torment. It was soon impossible for the USA to plan for any more head-of-state-level summits. The palaver that had attended the meeting between the President and the Korean dictator on a small island off Singapore began to fade. Of more concern than another showbiz spectacular was the curiosity as to what the defecting general would have to say.
Menacingly, the government of North Korea went silent. The hermit state, after a single denunciation of the West and all its tricks, and a lame attempt to claim the defector was a phoney, lapsed into an enraged shutdown. Clearly, as Western media analysts told the world, the primary concern of Pyongyang was that the North Korean people not learn of the disaster. It worked for a while but, slowly, word spread.
The actual interrogation of General Li, politely referred to as a debriefing, began at the CIA base in a rigorously sealed environment guarded by SAD security forces two days later.