Author: Doug Struck
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: November 27, 2002
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43573-2002Nov26.html
Legislature Cancels Testimony on
Nuclear Claims
Kenki Aoyama complains he is the
spy no one wants to hear.
A self-described double agent, a
man with roots in two countries and a passport from a third, a man who
uses a pseudonym and talks from the shadows, he says he has now come out
of the cold.
He wants to tell the stories that
the Japanese Foreign Ministry has been buying ever since he escaped to
China from North Korea four years ago, wading across a river with his family
after working 38 years for the secretive government.
Some of those stories are blockbusters:
Aoyama says North Korea has developed a nuclear bomb. He says it has a
phalanx of missiles dug into a hillside, some aimed at Japan. He says North
Korea kidnapped dozens more Japanese nationals than it has admitted.
But the party chiefs in the government's
ruling coalition abruptly canceled Aoyama's scheduled testimony before
the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives last week.
The party leaders said they cannot be sure enough of Aoyama's background
to allow him to speak. Opposition politicians cried foul; they said the
government fears being embarrassed by what Aoyama would say.
In particular, say the critics,
the Foreign Ministry does not want to explain why it did not raise earlier
and louder alarms about Aoyama's nuclear and missile claims.
"There are lots of things [the ruling
parties] don't want out," said Masaharu Nakagawa, of the opposition Democratic
Party. "We want to know what facts he gave the Foreign Ministry, and whether
they neglected the information."
Masahiro Imamura, a senior ruling
party member of the committee, said the testimony was canceled because
Aoyama's background is too murky. "We don't know what kind of person he
is," Imamura said. By uninviting him, "we've protected the honor of the
Parliament."
The Foreign Ministry, already embroiled
in controversy over its political ties to legislators, is trying to distance
itself from the issue. "We had no involvement" in the decision to cancel
his appearance, said a Foreign Ministry spokesman. He would not comment
on why the ministry had helped Aoyama get into Japan and why it had bought
his information. The matter is secret because of intelligence-gathering,
he said.
Other Foreign Ministry sources said
privately that Aoyama's background as a North Korean engineer-turned-spy,
and the details he has provided from his long career, have not been discredited.
But they say his more sensational claims also cannot be proved -- and could
complicate delicate diplomacy with North Korea.
"We just don't know for sure" about
Aoyama, insisted a high-ranking official.
Aoyama is not his real name, the
confessed spy acknowledges, although that is on his Japanese driver's license.
He was born in Japan, to Korean parents, in 1939 under a different name,
and lived in North Korea under yet another. He revealed the names to a
reporter, but asked that they not be used.
"The North Koreans don't know who
I am. They smell me, but they haven't confirmed it. If they learn my real
name, all my relatives in North Korea will be" -- he drew his finger across
his throat.
Aoyama, a slight, pale man, chain-smokes
nervously. He talked to a reporter in a "safe" hotel outside Tokyo. He
wore a toupee, and would not agree to be photographed. He illustrates his
points with schematic sketches on a scratchpad, like the engineer he says
he is, and tells his story in painstaking detail.
After 21 years in Japan, where Koreans
were denied Japanese citizenship rights and suffered discrimination, Aoyama
joined a "return to the homeland" movement then popular and left for North
Korea in 1960.
There, he met and married his wife,
also a Japanese-born Korean, and earned his way into a prestigious engineering
college. Many engineers, he said, were being sent after graduation to Yongbyon,
a backwater town that was the site of North Korea's fledgling nuclear program,
but he was lucky. He was assigned to an engineering unit in the capital,
Pyongyang, that did research, communications and work related to missiles,
Aoyama said. Through his job and network of school classmates -- a lifelong
bond in Korean society -- Aoyama followed North Korea's missile and nuclear
pursuits, he said.
"Kim Il Sung's ambition to develop
nuclear was burning," Aoyama wrote in a recent article in a Japanese magazine,
referring to the founder of North Korea.
Work proceeded with Russian help,
though slowly, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Then, more
than 40 scientists and engineers -- most of them Russians but also some
East Germans and Czechoslovaks -- moved into apartments in Pyongyang to
work on the program.
In about 1996, Aoyama said, his
fellow engineers were celebrating the arrival of centrifuges that could
process the country's abundant natural uranium into nuclear weapons fuel.
Two years before that, Aoyama said, he ran into a group of 30 to 40 visiting
Pakistani engineers, and his classmates confirmed the connection.
"They were there to exchange technologies,"
he said. "The Pakistanis came to learn our missile technology. Pakistan,
naturally, gave North Korea nuclear technology in return."
The United States has said it has
evidence that Pakistan aided North Korea's nuclear program in exchange
for help in making missiles that could target India. Pakistan has denied
it.
North Korea's nuclear capabilities
have long been a source of speculation. The CIA estimates North Korea could
have developed one or two nuclear bombs, and Chinese estimates put the
number higher. But those estimates are unproven; North Korea has neither
tested a bomb nor outright claimed to have one.
Aoyama said his suspicions were
confirmed around 1997. He was working as an industrial spy in Beijing,
and he met an old friend, a North Korean nuclear scientist, at a bar there.
The man looked terrible, thin and
wan. His eyebrows had disappeared from accidental radiation, Aoyama said.
"I said, 'Are you still working
on it?' " Aoyama recalled.
"No," came the reply. "It's done.
We succeeded."
"It" was a nuclear bomb, and Aoyama
said the man told him that Pyongyang's long quest to obtain an atomic weapon
had been achieved.
"I've been telling them [Japanese
authorities] North Korea has a nuclear weapon for three years," Aoyama
said this week.
Aoyama turned from scientist to
spy starting in 1994, he said. His technical expertise and fluency in Japanese
earned him an assignment in Beijing as an industrial spy.
Aoyama said he pocketed large profits
from his efforts. But in the spring of 1998, he was abruptly summoned back
to Pyongyang, where he learned he had fallen under official suspicion,
a likely death sentence. Within two days, he said, he and his wife and
three children were on a train to the northern border, where they bribed
guards to let them wade across the river into China at night.
With more bribes, he had earlier
obtained a Chinese passport, though he said he does not speak Chinese.
He took some of his information to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, he
said, and in March 1999 was brought to Japan by the Foreign Ministry.
Aoyama said he gave 32 reports detailing
what he knew of North Korea to the Japanese Foreign Ministry. He received
$1,500 per month, or less, in return -- barely subsistence in Japan.
But after more than three years,
Aoyama said, he became angry that the Japanese government was not more
alarmed by his reports, particularly those about the nuclear and missile
programs.
"I've given them information they
couldn't buy with any money," he said.
He wrote a book, published in September,
mostly about life in North Korea. Then he published his more volatile charges
in an article this month in the Monthly Gendai magazine, resulting in his
now- revoked invitation to testify. Instead, he met last week with opposition
party members. Speaking from behind a screen, he spurred the growing controversy
with additional allegations.
There is more to North Korea's missile
and nuclear programs than Japan or the United States recognize, he said.
He said North Korea has an extensive
biochemical warfare program -- though he said he does not know details
of it.
He alleged that a kingpin of Japan's
ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the late Shin Kanemaru, had received unmarked
gold bullion from North Korea for secret negotiations with the isolated
regime. The story fit the discovery of unmarked bullion in Kanemaru's home
in 1992, but this charge was indignantly denied by the ruling party officials.
Two high-ranking Foreign Ministry
officials privately acknowledged in interviews that payments were made
to Aoyama. But both insisted that this did not lend Aoyama credibility.
"We pay for lots of information,
but we don't believe all of it," one official said.
