Black Venus – the S. Korean spy who met Kim Jong-il
SEOUL: Before meeting North Korean leader Kim Jongil, Southern spy “Black Venus” was told to stay up late, shower, and dress neatly. He also hid a micro recorder in his penis.
Few spies have ever got as close to the leader of an enemy state – let alone one as reclusive as the isolated North – as Black Venus, real name Park Chaeseo.
In the 1990s he posed as a disgruntled former South Korean military officer turned businessman looking to film commercials for Southern companies in scenic Northern locations.
Along the way to meeting Kim, he claims to have sold antique ceramics for millions for members of the North’s ruling family, and seen Northern military officials counting huge bribes paid by Southerners in political plots.
Now his story has been turned into a book and a film that shines new light on the murky connections that run across the Demilitarised Zone dividing the peninsula.
With North and South engaged in a rapid diplomatic rapprochement, The Spy Gone North has been an instant bestseller and box office hit, the film attracting five million viewers in just its first three weeks on release – around 10% of the South’s entire population.
“It was extremely stressful living as a spy,” Park, 64, said in a rare foreign media interview. “I might be exposed by the slightest mistake, like a stupid slip of the tongue.”
But unlike Northern agents sent south, he was not issued with suicide pills.
Instead, he explained, “we were trained to kill ourselves with our own fingers” using “some critical points in the body”.
Park started in military intelligence in 1990, tasked with gathering information on the North’s nuclear programme, then in its early stages.
He befriended a Chinese nuclear physicist of Korean ancestry who – in exchange for a milliondollar payment – later revealed that the North had made two lowlevel nuclear weapons.
When he joined the South’s spy agency in 1995, then known as the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP), he was assigned the codename Black Venus.
Based in Beijing, he worked for a South Korean company importing Chinese agricultural products, disguising them as tariffexempt North Korean goods, and built up a net work of North Korean contacts and other informants.
He also bribed his way towards higher North Korean authorities, once providing the acting head of Pyongyang’s spy agency with topquality counterfeit Rolex watches when he visited Beijing.
His big break came, he says, when he allegedly helped arrange the release of a nephew of Jang Songthaek – the influential uncle of current leader Kim Jongun who was executed as a traitor in 2013 – from a Chinese prison by helping pay off US$160,000 (RM664,383) of debts the nephew owed to Chinese traders.
A grateful Jang family invited Park to Pyongyang and he seized the chance to sign a US$4mil (RM16.6mil) deal between his advertising company and a North Korean tourism agency to film TV commercials at locations including Korea’s spiritual home, Mount Paektu, and Mount Kumgang, where the two sides hold reunions of divided families.