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Defector From N. Korea Creating a Stir in Japan

Defector From N. Korea Creating a Stir in Japan

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.
 


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