North Korean Abductions of South Koreans - Background

Background

During the war time, North Korea kidnapped South Koreans in order to increase its human capacity for rehabilitation after the war. It recruited intelligentsia that was exhausted within North Korea and kidnapped not only those needed for postwar rehabilitation, but also technical specialists and laborers. There was also intention to drain the intelligentsia of South Korean society, exacerbate societal confusion, and promote communization of South Korea by making postwar rehabilitation difficult due to the shortage of technical specialists and youth. They also had the intention to guise the abductions as voluntary entry for the advancement of their political system.

• In his "Complete Works, Volume Ⅳ", dated July 31, 1946, Kim Il Sung wrote: "In regards to bringing Southern Chosun's intelligentsia, not only do we need to search out all Northern Chosun's intelligentsia in order to solve the issue of a shortage of intelligentsia, but we also have to bring Southern Chosun's intelligentsia."

In the case of post war abductees, Yoichi Shimada, a Fukui University professor in Japan, North Korea appeared to abduct foreign citizens in order to:

1. eliminate witnesses who happened to run into North Korean agents in action
2. steal victim's identities and infiltrate agent back into the countries concerned
3. force abductees to teach their local language and customs to North Korea agents
4. brainwash them into secret agents; the fishermen hardly had access to valuable intelligence, but they still could be trained as spies and sent back to the South
5. utilize abductees' expertise or special skills
6. use abductees as spouses for unusual residents in North Korea, especially to lone foreigners such as defectors or other abductees

These 6 patterns are not mutually exclusive. Especially numbers 2, 3, and 4 derive from Kim Jong-il's secret order of 1976 to use foreign nationals more systematically and thereby improve the quality of North Korean spy activities, contributing to his "localization of spy education" Further, better-educated people could be employed by the institutions responsible for waging propaganda campaigns against the South in, say, their broadcast facilities.