Mr. Park told Tom, “Ask him to say something that he knows. Ask him what this place is and to tell you about it. Ask him for a couple more secrets. I’ll be able to tell if he’s lying.”
Sara knew why they were going through this exercise. She remembered reading that over one thousand people defect from North Korea each year. These people come from all walks of life. Some worked for the government, some were in the military, and many were ordinary people. The problem was that sometimes the government sent in spies this way. They would “defect,” be granted South Korean citizenship, and would then live in South Korea, recruiting assets and hunting down other defectors. She knew the South Korean NIS took careful precautions to counter this. Interviews where the defector was asked about sensitive information was the primary technique. Someone sent over to spy would be hesitant to actually give away any sensitive information, whereas real defectors would be more than happy to share everything they knew. The spy might try to leave out important facts or outright lie, and the NIS knew how to catch them doing this. She looked over at Mr. Park. He stared at the screen without blinking.
Captain Kim paused when Tom asked for information about the base. But he soon started talking. “This facility belongs to Room 39. Room 39 is the group tasked with generating cash for the leaders. It makes hundreds of millions of US dollars per year. It is the largest drug making and drug smuggling organization in the world. It sells drugs all over Asia and also to Europe and America. Some of this cash is brought back here to North Korea but some is also laundered through restaurants and several other legitimate businesses Room 39 operates. There are four main ways the cash is used. First, it is used to purchase all of the luxuries and food that our leaders want. Second, it is used to provide luxuries for those who are loyal in the upper ranks of the military and the government. Those people might be rewarded with a refrigerator manufactured in Europe or a cell phone made in South Korea. This keeps them in line. Third, some of it is sitting in foreign banks so that if the leaders need to flee, they will have plenty of cash to live well abroad. And last and most important, they have used the cash to purchase several nuclear weapons, which you probably saw in the other room.”
“How did they buy those nukes?” Tom interrupted. “Where did they get them?”
“That I don’t know. Even my father was not told.”
Tom seemed to take the role of interrogator from Mr. Park, “So your leaders bought those bombs. But where do they do nuclear research? How close are your leaders to making their own weapons? Can they build their own nuclear bombs?”
Captain Kim slowly shook his head. “No. My father told me that we are not even close to building a nuclear weapon. Do you really think that we live without even working radios and without electricity, but we can somehow perform advanced research in nuclear physics? It’s a strange contradiction. Our leaders want to make sure that they maintain their power. So they allow students here to only study some basic math and history. Students spend most of their time learning about the leaders and their philosophy. Because of this, we have a very uneducated populace in this country. Because of this, we don’t have many people who are even close to understanding nuclear physics, forget trying to build a nuclear bomb. Because of that, it will be a very long time before we actually develop a nuclear weapon. So our leaders have become weaker. Do you see? They tried to become more powerful by not allowing anyone to learn anything from the outside world, but it ended up in them losing power because they can’t build nuclear weapons. That’s some kind of contradiction.”
“That’s a paradox,” Sara almost shouted.
Tom asked, “But we always see images on TV of your nuclear research facilities. We see scientists walking around in protective suits. What is that?”
Kim smiled, “You really think you can believe what our leaders say? They will gladly tell you that we have nuclear weapons. They will gladly send your media a film of ‘nuclear scientists’ working. But it is all staged. All actors. It’s like when tourists come from your country and we show them stores that are fake but set up to look real.”
Mark tapped Sara. She turned around. He was looking at her wide-eyed and started whispering. “Sara, that’s the Totalitarian Uncertainty Principle you came up with. They say they can produce nuclear weapons. We went in and observed that they cannot produce nuclear weapons. What they say does not match what we see.” She had not even realized it. Of course, she thought, if they say they can make nuclear weapons, we should have expected to see something completely different when we went in. She almost forgot that totalitarian regimes will say anything at all. They will say anything to scare the rest of the world and protect their power.
Kim went on, “Of course we have a few scientists. Our leaders send them abroad to study. But they only want to let people study abroad for a short time, to prevent them from defecting. I was only allowed to spend three months in China to study Mandarin. So we have a few scientists with some knowledge, and they are trying to do nuclear research. But I don’t think they can build a bomb. Our leaders realized this a long time ago. So they thought it would be easier to buy a few bombs, which in itself is difficult to do. I don’t know how or where they were able to do it.”
One question had been bothering Sara for a few minutes now. “Tom, can you ask him about the nuclear tests we always read about? Sara constantly heard about underground nuclear tests that North Korea was conducting. She did not understand how they could be performing those if they effectively had no nuclear research program.
After Tom asked, Captain Kim replied. “Well I think once in a while they take one of the bombs they bought and detonate them underground. They know that your navy is nearby testing for radiation. They will detonate these nuclear bombs, say they have conducted a successful nuclear test, and your navy will measure an increase in radiation levels. That is what is powerful. They can get you to start telling yourselves that we have nuclear weapons.”
Tom interrupted again, “So your leaders spend what, hundreds of millions of dollars on a nuclear bomb, just to detonate it? They are fine with seeing that much money blow up underground?” Sara enjoyed hearing Tom’s tone with this soldier.
Kim replied quickly, “Isn’t it worth it? If you were our leaders and you worried everyday, if you could not sleep, if you were constantly wondering if America and Europe would invade your country and hang you, what do you think? Wouldn’t it be worth it to spend a couple hundred million dollars to scare the West into keeping back? Especially if the money was so easily made? I also think some of the nuclear tests were not nuclear at all. Some of the tests were just large explosions designed to make you believe we are conducting nuclear tests.” Kim pointed his hand at the shelves of drugs as he replied.
Then Kim said something that made Sara feel queasy. She wasn’t sure if it was what he said, or the fact that he smiled while saying it.
“Sun Tzu: All warfare is based on deception.”
In this moment, Sara realized the aptness of the name Devil’s Fork for this mission. She had always thought of a devil’s fork as an object that could be conceived but at the same time could not. It could be drawn, but then again it really could not. It perplexed anyone to watch the two legs of the fork turn into three. In a similar light, she mused about what the screen before her revealed. Was North Korea a nuclear state? It was, but it was not. Was this a powerful nation, to be feared? It was, but it was not. Like the fork, she sat perplexed as she saw a threat turn benign and turn into a threat again. She saw that this country could be understood, but it could not.