The Teacher Who Spent 6 Months Undercover in North Korea transcript

December 19th, 2011, just past noon. A knock at a door inside Pyongyang. He's dead. For 1 second, the American woman thinks they mean God. In this country, that's almost the same thing. Her name is Suki Kim. For nearly 6 months, she has been living inside the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the walled campus where North Korea educates the sons of its ruling class. 270 boys, the heirs to the regime. She is a missionary English teacher.

To the missionaries who vouched for her, she is a fellow believer. She is neither. She is a [music] writer, and months of hidden notes are riding on tiny USB drive she keeps on her body. The state she has been deceiving reads [music] every letter that enters this campus. It approves every lesson before she teaches it. Seats monitors in her classroom, searches rooms, records conversations, >> [music] >> and now its God is dead.

Within hours, her students will be marched away sobbing into a national mourning that seals the country like a vault. Checkpoints hardening by the hour. Foreigners suddenly suspect. An impostor is standing in the middle of it holding the most complete record of North Korea's future masters that has ever existed outside its borders. If anyone opens those files, she doesn't go home. Maybe ever. How did a fake missionary talk her way into the regime's most guarded classroom?

And what happens to the woman carrying its secrets when history slams [music] the door shut behind her? To understand why she's standing in that room, you have to go back to a train platform in 1950. The family story goes like this. Seoul is falling. The platform is a crush of bodies and bundles, everyone pushing south ahead of the front. Her grandmother's eldest son, 17, the pride of the house, gives up his seat on a packed train fleeing the city.

A small courtesy in a stampede. He never makes it out. The war rolls over the peninsula. The ceasefire freezes the border into the most fortified line on earth, and the boy is somewhere on the wrong side of it, forever. Her grandmother spends the rest of her life searching for a son the border swallowed whole, and she dies without a grave to visit or even a rumor to chase. Suki Kim is born into that silence and soul, and carries it to America at 13.

The missing uncle becomes the family's phantom limb. North Korea becomes the question she cannot put down. A locked room with her own blood sealed inside it. In February 2002, she gets her first look through the keyhole. She joins a delegation visiting Pyongyang for Kim Jong-il's 60th birthday celebrations, the kind of trip the regime tolerates because it scripts every frame of it. Her passport is confiscated at the airport.

A minder sleeps in the room next door. The itinerary accounts for each waking hour, and the ordinary citizens she meets turn out to have been chosen, briefed, and rehearsed before her plane ever touched down. She sees a capital arranged like a stage set, [music] and learns precisely nothing about the people living behind it. But one exchange survives the trip. A party official pulls her aside with a dare. Go home and tell the world the truth about North Korea.

He means the regime's version of the truth. She takes the dare at face value, goes home, and publishes what she saw. Under her own name. Remember that byline. It sits in the open, searchable by anyone with an internet connection, for the next 11 years. A landmine buried under everything that follows. February 2008. She tries the front door one last time, returning with the New York Philharmonic, the largest American delegation to enter North Korea in decades.

Historic access, official credentials, cameras everywhere. She sees nothing, Again, two trips, maximum access, zero truth, and the arithmetic she brings home is brutal. To see anything real, a foreigner would have to live inside the sealed state. Eat there, sleep there, stay. And exactly one place allows that. A single door in the wall of a country that admits almost no one, cut and paid for, of all things, by a church.

That door exists because the regime once arrested the wrong man, or depending on how you count, exactly the right one. 1998. A Korean-American businessman named James Kim is delivering food aid into a North Korea still reeling from famine when the regime arrests him as an American spy. Six weeks in a cell. Execution on the table. And as the story goes, he made a strange peace in there. Telling his captors that if they shot him, they should bury his body in North Korean soil and let it feed the country he'd come to serve.

[music] Three years later, the same state does something that shouldn't be possible. In 2001, Pyongyang authorizes the man it nearly executed to build it a university. An actual campus, 240 acres on the edge of the capital. 17 buildings, $35 million raised largely from Evangelical Christians around the world. The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Free elite education taught in English by foreign volunteers >> [music] >> inside a state that opens its own citizens' mail.

One rule governs everything. No proselytizing. Ever. The believers who fund this place, build it, and staff it may not so much as whisper about God to their students. Why would either side sign that deal? Because each believes it's buying something different. The regime gets a world-class technical education for its heirs, English, computers, the tools of the outside world, paid for entirely by foreigners it officially despises at zero ideological risk because the faith comes pre-muzzled.

The founders get presents, serve quietly, ask for nothing, [music] and wait for a door that might open in 10 years or 50. Each side is certain it's using [music] the other. Neither is imagining a third player. In October 2010, PUST opens its gates to 160 hand-picked young men, and within a year fresh cohorts push the role toward 270. Sons of officials, sons of the elite, the generation being raised to run the state. [music] Their fathers deliver them to a campus funded by Christians and ringed by guards, and within a year the arrangement has stopped striking anyone on either side as strange.

And buried in the mechanics is the moment the regime signs its own blind spot into [music] existence. To fill this campus, the school must recruit teachers from abroad. Volunteers vetted [music] through faith networks, recommendation letters, people vouched for by other believers. Think about what that means. The most paranoid state on the planet [music] has just outsourced the guest list of its inner nursery to a church.

It built the hole in its own wall and assumed only the harmless would come through. And in the stack of applications from missionaries and church volunteers sits one from a secular Seoul-born American novelist with a book contract filed under the same name that has been printed above her North Korean journalism since 2002. Will anyone on either side of that wall think to look? She chases that door for 2 years. Applications, references, waiting.

Then, in April 2011, the call. She's in. Summer term. English composition, the sons of the elite. Here's what you need to understand about the cover she's about to live inside. Everyone at PUST is running one. The missionaries themselves are working a quiet deception of their own, softening their faith for a regime that would expel them over one prayer too many, presenting themselves as harmless volunteers while waiting decades for a door to open.

She's simply the only person on that campus pretending to be someone else entirely, a lie run against two watchful audiences at once, the state and the church, either of which could end everything with a single phone call. And the vetting that decided her application? A recommendation, an interview, faith taken on faith. But her byline is still out there, 11 years of North Korea journalism under her real name, one Google search away, and she has no way of knowing whether anyone at PUST or in the ministries that stamp its visas has already typed it in or will on any bored afternoon of her stay.

She walks in anyway. The rules arrive like a countdown of future violations. Boil all drinking water. No jeans. Pray only with your eyes open. Closed eyes look like worship, and worship belongs to the leader alone. Never fold, crumple, or sit on a magazine bearing his face, and assume the rest as a permanent condition of your life here. Your room searched, your journal read as evidence, every conversation recorded. One orientation warning says it plainly, living in Pyongyang is like living in a fish bowl.

Every rule on that list is a scene from her future. She just doesn't know it yet, which leaves the problem her whole mission hangs on. How does a writer take notes inside a room that never stops watching? Answer wrong, and the mission dies quietly. Answer badly, and it dies in an interrogation room. She'll have to solve it on the inside, and the clock is already running because on June 27th, 2011, the regime abruptly empties its universities, shipping students across the country to construction brigades for a year of labor on a rising leader's projects.

One campus keeps studying. P U S T Some 270 of the state's most precious sons gathered behind a single wall waiting for their foreign teachers. And so, on the morning of July 4th, 2011, America's [music] Independence Day, a writer carrying a secret book contract walks through the guardhouse gate [music] past the centuries into the sealed campus where the regime keeps its heirs. Her first morning in class, 26 boys bolt upright in unison.

Back straight, eyes forward, a wall of identical haircuts and pressed uniform snapping to attention for an English teacher. Portraits of the leader and the general watch from the wall, the way they watch from every wall in this country. In the buildings hang scrolls carrying three blessings. Leader luck, general luck, captain luck. Two of those titles belong to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The third belongs to a successor the outside world has barely glimpsed.

His luck already hanging on classroom walls before most of the planet can put a face to his name. The days run on rails. Exercises at 5:30 in the morning. Meals the boys march to in two straight lines singing always the same song. Without you, there is no motherland. [music] Without you, there is no us. The you is Kim Jong-il. They sing it the way other 20-year-olds hum pop choruses, automatically, sincerely, on the way to breakfast.

She eats every meal beside them, three a day, every day, and a few weeks in she catches the melody leaking out of her own throat. The hymn to Kim Jong-il hummed over lesson plans in an empty room. She stops mid-bar. Nobody argued her into anything. The country just repeats itself morning after morning until the song starts singing on its own. The watchers have faces. 15 North Korean counterparts, 13 men, two women, must approve every lesson before she's allowed to teach it.

Monitors sit in on classes. The campus guards are young women with rifles. And in one of the stranger arrangements of her stay, she teaches the counterparts English, too. Tutoring the very people assigned to police her sentences. So, how does she write? Notes camouflaged inside the harmless paperwork of teaching, drafts written and deleted the same night, the real files copied onto tiny USB drives she keeps on her body and nowhere else.

Nothing incriminating on a shared computer. Nothing on paper that can't pass as a lesson plan. Each evening she erases her own thoughts from every machine, then carries the only surviving copy in her pocket, past the portraits to dinner with the heirs of the regime. Every night for months. One lapse, one file left open, one draft undeleted, and everything after this sentence never happens. One of those inspections up close, a counterpart reads her lesson plan line by line, hunting for ideology in a grammar exercise, pen hovering over every sentence she wrote, while the drive in her pocket, a few feet from his hand, holds weeks of everything he is paid to prevent.

He reads. She waits. Doing the silent arithmetic of what happens if he asks her to turn out her pockets. The pen comes down on nothing. Approved. The surveillance never sleeps. It never improvises, either. Exercises at dawn, approvals after lunch, lights out on schedule. A fully scripted life is a fully predictable one. And she maps that script the way a burglar maps a guard's patrol route, learning hour by hour exactly where the eyes are and when they blink.

Then she writes in the gaps. Then one night at dinner, the rhythm snaps. A boy mentions, casually smiling, that he once spent a birthday listening to rock music. No speaks. Forks hang in the air. The boy goes pale. Actually pale, the color leaving his face while she watches. And his eyes pinned to his tray, his shoulders lock. And for one long moment, a table full of classmates who are expected to report exactly this stares at a teenager turned to stone by his own words.

The table lets him hang there. Then conversation closes back over the moment like water over a dropped coin, and he doesn't speak again all meal. She doesn't understand what she just watched. Not yet. Decoding it takes days. Rock music is foreign pleasure. Foreign pleasure is contamination, and admitting it in front of witnesses is a confession. One his classmates are required to pass up the chain. [music] That's the rule no orientation list mentioned.

When a line gets crossed at this school, the foreign teacher gets a flight home, and the students get a file. She came in believing her own exposure was the worst case. The notes found, the byline discovered, arrest, deportation. Wrong. Darker. In North Korea, punishment flows downhill. Her mistakes don't land on [music] her. They land on 19-year-olds, on their families, on everyone those families touch. And then there's what the boys believe.

These are the sons of the elite studying at the country's flagship science school. It's brightest, most trusted minds. They tell her as settled fact that a North Korean cloned a rabbit. >> [music] >> In one version, the genius responsible was a fifth-grader. They tell her kimchi has been named an official food of the Olympics. That Korean is spoken in England, in China, in America. The whole world speaks their language.

They've been taught because the whole world envies them. She plays a classroom game, truth or lie. Her sentence, [music] "I visited China last year." Lie. 26 voices in unison instantly. [music] Think about what that means. These boys will believe a fifth grader cloned a rabbit before they'll believe their teacher took a trip because in their world no one leaves ever [music] and a casual visit to China sounds like science fiction.

And these are the lucky ones, the view from the very top of the system. Now imagine everyone below them. These are computer majors and most of them have never heard of the internet. >> [music] >> They've only ever touched the state's sealed internet, a photocopy of the web with the world removed. Once from a bus window on a supervised outing the staging cracks, gaunt figures at the road's edge picking through bare fields in a country that is still hungry.

The minders keep talking, the bus keeps moving. By the next bend the fields are scenery again and the moment has simply been erased. The real cargo was never her notes on the country. It was the boys themselves. The only outside record of who the regime's heirs actually are. Brilliant, obedient, curious young men sealed inside lies so complete that not one of them has ever practiced telling fact from invention. So she stops just observing.

Fall term, she will teach for real. She is going to build a weapon out of freshman composition. Strip an essay down to its frame and you get this. A thesis, evidence, a conclusion that follows, a claim you must prove. In most of the world that's homework. In North Korea it's contraband. Because this is a country built on assertions that must never be questioned and critical reasoning is precisely the skill the system exists to crush.

Teaching it openly would end her stay in a day so she runs it through the approved gate instead handing the counterparts a stack of readings that look like nothing at all. Harmless English articles, [music] vocabulary practice, comprehension questions at the bottom of the page. One is about Bill Clinton wiring American schools to the internet. One is about a college kid named Mark Zuckerberg building Facebook from a dorm room.

The counterparts read them, find no ideology, and sign. What they've just approved is a set of windows. Kids their students age in a world that works differently building things nobody authorized. Then, the letters assignment. Write a letter to anyone, she tells them. And the boys pour out what has no other exit. Fed up with the sameness of every scheduled day, homesick for mothers they cannot phone, tender and funny and 19.

Their mail is read, their rooms are watched. The only uncensored channel in these boys lives runs through their English teacher's homework folder, and she reads them at night in a room she assumes is bugged. The most dangerous mail in North Korea filed under homework. One evening a student approaches her quietly and asks how leaders are chosen in other countries. She answers honestly and as vaguely as she dares. Elections, choices.

Then he's gone. She walks back to her room testing every word she just said for the weight of evidence. Was that a test? Is he an informer? Has she just talked her way into a file with her own name on it? For days she reads every glance in that classroom like a verdict, and at night she lies still in the dark replaying her own syllables counting the hours between his question and any knock that might follow it. No knock comes.

The relief curdles anyway because the explanation left standing is worse. The boy is simply curious, genuinely curious in a country where a question can be evidence. And her honest answer is inside him now, carried into rooms she will never see, repeatable to people she will never meet. There is no taking it back. The signals multiply. A whisper about a roommate, he's with us. A class discussion about war in which they tell her matter-of-factly that if it came, they would kill every American.

Then, softer. But not you. You're different. You're our teacher. By December, 400 hidden pages ride in and out of that classroom on a drive the size of a thumbnail. She is one thorough room search from an interrogation cell. They are one careless sentence from something worse. December. Finals week. Snow settling over the campus. And at 8:30 on a Saturday morning on a train somewhere beyond the city, a heart stops. For the next 51 and a half hours, an entire country will not know.

December 17th, 2011. 8:30 in the morning. By the state's own later account, Kim Jong-il dies of a heart attack aboard his private train. Then, nothing. No broadcast. No sirens. The regime tells no one. Not even itself. Factories run. Anthems play. 24 million people spend the weekend obeying a man who no longer exists. You know, she doesn't. And neither does anyone else behind that wall. The counterparts approve lesson plans for a term that will never arrive the way anyone planned it.

The girls at the gate shoulder their rifles through ordinary rotations. Her students cram English idioms for Monday's exam. For 51 and a half hours, she is surrounded by people serving a dead man. And she thinks the biggest secret on campus is the one in her pocket. She proctors finals, grades papers, eats her assigned meals, packs slowly for a flight booked long ago, the scheduled end of term, the ordinary exit. Nothing hurried about it.

While snow comes down outside the exam room windows and something rides toward Pyongyang under a black flag. Monday, December 19th, just past noon. On state television, an announcer in black, voice cracking. Somewhere on campus, a knock at a door. He's dead. For 1 second, she thinks they mean God. Here, that was the same job. Then, the campus comes apart. Doors bang open down the corridors. The boys, her boys, the ones who marched singing to breakfast, who shouted lie at the idea of visiting China, who wrote her letters about mothers they couldn't phone, spill out weeping, faces buckled, some gripping each other's sleeves to stay upright, grieving the man whose system sealed their minds shut as if they had lost their own father.

Within the hour, they are formed into columns and marched off to mourn on the state's schedule, and she stands at the edge of the path in the falling snow while they pass. Close enough to touch, close enough to say any one of the things she has been saving for the last day of term. Their eyes, she would write, didn't see her. Not one head turns. Boots crunch past in the snow. And the sound that carried them to breakfast every morning of her stay, "Without you, there is no us." has been replaced by ragged, gulping sobs multiplied by 270 receding down the path.

There is no goodbye. The state has already scheduled its grief, the columns, the routes, the approved hours of weeping. And a foreign teacher's farewell appears nowhere on that schedule. Whatever she meant to say to them, after two terms and 400 pages and 100 small planted doubts, goes unsaid. Permanently. The next morning, she rides toward the airport through a country collapsing into ritual mourning. Wailing crowds, checkpoints.

The drives ride where they have always ridden, on her body, months of notes, the names, the lies, the letters, the frozen boy. One thorough search stands between the regime and the biggest leak in its history. She watches the checkpoint slide past. One by one. Each one a search that doesn't happen. The search never comes. Every soldier who might have opened her bags has been swallowed into the machinery of mourning. The state has exactly one priority this week, and it is burying its god, not frisking school teachers.

The plane lifts toward Beijing. She's out. They're sealed in with everything she taught them. But her name is still out there. Years of journalism printed in the open, searchable the entire time. It catches up with her two years later in New York. New York. Two years of silence, she writes, rebuilding two semesters from 400 smuggled pages while the captain from the scrolls becomes a name every newscast knows, Kim Jong-un.

And in December 2013, he executes his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek. She publishes an op-ed about it in the New York Times, and the landmine finally goes off, 11 years late on the wrong side of the world. In 2002, North Korea never read her name. In 2013, PUST does. The school realizes exactly who it let sleep inside its walls, demands to see her manuscript, >> [music] >> and asks her to cancel the book entirely. She refuses.

Then she does the one thing the regime never managed to make her do. She censors herself. Every student's name changed, identities scrambled and merged until no boy can be traced through her pages. The only way to publish the truth about the heirs is to partially erase them from it. October 14th, 2014. Without you, there is no us hits shelves, titled after the song her students sang on the way to breakfast, the hymn to a dead god.

For the first time, the outside world can read who North Korea's future masters actually are, homesick teenagers. Then the bill arrives and other people pay most of it. One of PUST's leaders goes on record against her. And the charge lands in the plainest words available. She lied to us. She cheated us. Her answer, "No promise bound her. She went in as a journalist and did what journalists do." is one she is still defending [music] in June 2016 in an essay called The Reluctant Memoirist after her own publisher stamps memoir on her act of undercover journalism.

And in Pyongyang, the regime pulls in the founder himself. James Kim, the man who once told his captors to bury him in North Korean [music] soil, sits for questioning about the writer his school let through the gate. 13 years after his cell, a suspect again. This time for someone else's lie. The colleagues who vouched for her learn the believer they sponsored never believed. And the boys, all 270 of them, are unreachable.

Whatever her lessons cost them, she will never know. So, here's the answer this story has owed you since the knock on that door. [music] For 6 months her byline sat in the open. 11 years of North Korea journalism under her real name. One search away from any counterpart, any minder, any board official with a suspicion. Why did the trap never spring? Nobody ever typed it. 6 months inside the most paranoid state on Earth and no one on either side of the wall, the church that vouched for her, the regime that read her mail, ever ran her name through a search engine.

The system vets paper, never [music] people. That's the whole heist. Almost everything the world knows about the young men who will run North Korea, the marching songs, the cloned rabbit, the letters to unreachable mothers, survives because one lie held for two semesters paid for by people who never agreed to the price. North Korea watched everything except who she was. And she wasn't the last blind spot. While she was grading essays in Pyongyang, another American was already years deep into something even longer.

Six years inside feeding what he found to the CIA from within the regime itself until the day his own network turned on him. The only American who ever pulled that off. That story is next.