허황된 공산 할리우드의 꿈, 김정일에 납치된 '신상옥 최은희' 커플 재조명 The movie stars kidnapped and drugged by North Korea..(VIDEO)
The movie stars kidnapped and drugged by North Korea... to create an insane communist Hollywood
- 1954년 최은희, 마릴린 몬로와 함께
- Director Shin Sang-Ok and actress Choi Eun-Hee were once South Korean golden couple
- The pair were kidnapped and held by North Korea for almost a decade
- Kim Jong-il wanted them to help launch the country's movie industry
- In 1986 they dramatically escaped during a trip to Vienna and were given asylum by the US
[관련자료링크]
Shin Sang-Ok closed his eyes. For two years he had lived in brutal, monotonous captivity, in a prison where he didn’t know a soul. Like his fellow inmates, Shin was instructed to sit in his cell in a cross-legged position, head down – and not move.
The slightest flicker was met with a beating, the prisoner most commonly being asked to put his hands through the bars on the door to be smashed with a guard’s baton. This was the ‘torture position’, from which Shin heard other prisoners arbitrarily being taken out to the yard and executed.
He was 55 years old, and divorced with four children. As he sat, he thought of the years when he had been South Korea’s most famous film-maker and of the moment four years earlier when his former wife, Choi Eun-Hee, the country’s most glamorous actress, had disappeared while supposedly discussing a movie project in Hong Kong.
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Shin and Choi on Shin's 34th birthday in 1960, during the happiest years of their first marriage - once South Korea's golden couple, the pair spent almost a decade as prisoners of North Korea
Now he found himself in Prison Number Six, two hours outside Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. If he didn’t know the full facts of why he was there, at least he knew who had ordered his abduction...
For two decades, Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee were South Korea’s golden couple, the luminous stars in a vintage era for this country’s cinema. But by 1977, their crown had slipped. Choi filed for divorce after Shin fathered two children with a younger actress.
Shin, meanwhile, faced bankruptcy, his career in ruins after a run-in with the country’s film censors. Yet someone else had plans for them; while they could hardly have known it, they were being watched.
Kim Jong-Il, the son of Great Marshal Kim Il-Sung, founder and Supreme Leader of North Korea, dreamed of seeing his country become a global cinema force.
Career highlight: South Korean actress Choi pictured alongside movie star Marilyn Monroe in 1954
He did not have the talent at his disposal – but all that was about to change. In late 1977, Choi Eun-Hee was visited by a man calling himself Wang Dong-Il, who told her he ran a studio in Hong Kong and offered her a huge fee to direct a film.
Choi agreed to fly to Hong Kong in January 1978 to discuss the project. For two days, Wang played the movie mogul, showing her his expensive offices and taking her to the finest restaurants. On the third day, however, Choi went to his office and was met by a company executive, Lee Young-Seng, along with his wife and a little girl.
They explained Wang was detained and that Lee’s wife would entertain Choi until he returned. ‘She talked non-stop,’ Choi recalled later. ‘She wanted to introduce me to her many acquaintances, especially an older man who was interested in culture who lived an hour’s drive away.’
Choi agreed to the meeting and they called a taxi. After a seemingly interminable journey, Mrs Lee asked the taxi to stop beside a small strip of beach. ‘We’re getting out,’ she said.
Choi and the young girl wandered toward the sea while Mrs Lee stood about 40 yards away talking to a group of long-haired men. She motioned to Choi to come over towards a small motor launch which she explained would ferry them to her friend’s villa across the bay.
Choi hesitated, convinced she was about to be robbed. In an instant, she was grabbed and thrown into the boat, which roared out toward the open sea. One of the long-haired men said solemnly: ‘Madame Choi, we are now going to the bosom of General Kim Il-Sung.’
She remembers only being carried up a gangway and someone giving her an injection. She woke in the captain’s cabin of a freighter, a portrait of Kim Il-Sung smiling down at her.
Film buff: The late Kim Jong-Il dreamed of seeing his country become a global cinema force
She was under 24-hour guard. Six days later, on January 22, 1978, the ship pulled into Nampo harbour, North Korea, and a short man in his mid-30s met her on the pier.
‘Thank you for coming, Madame Choi,’ he said. ‘You must be exhausted from the journey. Welcome. I am Kim Jong-Il.’
She was taken to a villa with the utilitarian title Building Number 1. Every day Kim Jong-Il sent fresh flowers and her favourite cosmetics, lingerie and dresses tailored to fit her perfectly.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, Kim Jong-Il invited her to a dinner party – the first of many in the years to come, always in a building known as the Fish House because of its floor-to-ceiling aquarium.
Often the guest list included 50 or so members of the People’s Republic’s elite, together with the girls of the Joy Brigade.
They were the most beautiful women in Korea, hand-picked by Kim Jong-Il. Each girl was given the rank of ‘Lieutenant of the Bodyguard Division’ and assigned to one of three ‘pleasure groups’: the ‘dancing and singing group’, which entertained guests; the ‘happiness group’, which provided massages; and finally the ‘satisfaction group’, which provided sexual services. Kim Jong-Il himself never touched the girls at these functions, nor did he dance or sing.
He preferred to sit, drink, smoke his Rothmans Royals and direct.
Back in South Korea, Shin reported his ex-wife’s disappearance. His house was searched and the police and press were suggesting that he was responsible. He felt he had no choice but to follow her trail to Hong Kong and meet Lee Young-Seng, who offered to take him to the same villa on the coast.
As they neared the water, the car stopped and four long-haired men yanked open the passenger door, pulled Shin out and put a bag over his head. Shin panicked as he felt a knife slicing the fabric next to his nose. One of the men sprayed a liquid in Shin’s face. Within seconds he had passed out. He woke on the same freighter and was told he too was being taken ‘to answer the call of the Great Leader’.
Once in North Korea, Shin, too, was given a luxurious villa. But he was forced to attend daily political indoctrination sessions, where he had to memorise the key victories of the North Korean army. He asked for a map to help him remember the battlefields.
His real reason for the request was to study his options for an escape route. The obvious way was south to South Korea, but Shin reckoned if he could escape north to China, crossing the border over a frozen lake, he might wrongfoot the authorities.
A poster for Shin Sang-Ok's cult film Pulgasari - which the director made while being held captive by North Korea
Furthermore, he noticed the villa’s chauffeur was away from his Mercedes every evening when he came inside for dinner. Crucially, he left the keys in the ignition. All Shin had to do was wait for winter.
On December 29, 1979, the countryside was frozen. The regular card game was under way and Shin crept out of the front door and into the Mercedes. He turned the key and drove past the gatehouse, where a sentry saluted sharply.
He drove through the night, until the Mercedes suffered a puncture near a railway bridge. Shin walked along the tracks to the next station and slipped inside a freight wagon. Three stops later, guards opened the door and Shin was taken to see a policeman. ‘Are you the man who ditched the Mercedes?’ he said. What Shin also did not know was that the North Korean railway posted guards every half-mile to watch for illegal passengers. He was less than ten miles from the Chinese border.
Shin’s inquisitors couldn’t believe that he wanted to escape after Kim Jong-Il had treated him so nicely. He was taken away by helicopter and then bundled into a jeep bound for Prison Number Six. After two and a half years of torture and beatings, Shin went on a hunger strike, determined to attract Kim Jong-Il’s attention or die in the process.
It was a desperate ploy, but it worked. He was moved to better quarters and on February 23, 1983, he was taken to a house, made to take the oath of loyalty and given new clothes, a medical check-up, and a haircut. On March 6, he was told to prepare to meet the Dear Leader. He was going to his first Kim Jong-Il party.
Shin was tense as the car drove up to the Fish House. When he entered, the packed banquet hall burst into deafening applause. Pulse racing, desperately trying to think of what to say, Shin steeled himself as he was led forward to meet Kim Jong-Il. It was only then that he caught sight of Choi. Shin hadn’t seen her since she left for Hong Kong nearly five years earlier and hadn’t even been sure she was still alive. He was agonisingly aware of the dozens of eyes glued to them as she was pulled toward him. ‘What happened to you?’ Choi finally managed to say. Shin smiled weakly.
Kim Jong-Il lingered nearby, an enormous grin on his face. ‘Well, go ahead and hug each other!’ he said. ‘Why are you just standing there?’ Shin and Choi hugged, awkwardly at first, and then sank into each other’s arms. Cheers and applause broke out. Flashbulbs popped.
Placing Shin on his left and Choi on his right, Kim Jong-Il made them pose for a picture – ‘Relax,’ he joked, ‘this won’t end up in the South Korean papers’ – and then turned to the crowd. ‘Comrades!’ he announced to deafening applause, ‘from now on Mr Shin is my film adviser. And Madame Choi is now a representative for our Korean women!’
Kim Jong-Il believed Shin and Madame Choi had been successfully indoctrinated and their loyalty bought
Kim Jong-Il looked from Shin to Choi. ‘Let’s have a wedding ceremony – on April 15, the Great Leader’s birthday.’
The Dear Leader had directed his little scene to perfection. Back at Choi’s villa, the couple were terrified that the rooms were bugged and their conversations recorded. They whispered to each other in the bathroom, with the taps on full blast. ‘Darling,’ Choi said, ‘we have acted and directed the lives of others in films. From now on, let’s act and direct our lives ingeniously.’
Five years after they disappeared from the face of the Earth, Shin and Choi resurfaced. Despite his infidelity and their divorce, Shin had always adored Choi. Now their love was rekindled. They had remarried at the Dear Leader’s request and were promoting a new film they had made together.
They found their return to filmmaking exhilarating, but Shin and Choi secretly talked about little else but escaping. The only way to do so, they knew, was to skip to the West.
They bided their time, enduring endless ideological lessons while learning much about Kim Jong-Il and his habits. He spent ￡500,000 a year on French brandy. He rarely travelled by car, preferring to use his bulletproof train, which ran on private tracks. The villas he used were heated to 72F whether he was there or not and sprayed with his favourite perfume shortly before he arrived.
He ran the country like a criminal syndicate, creaming off the most profitable parts – the export of ginseng, opium and cocaine netted millions, as did the production of counterfeit American dollars that fooled even Las Vegas casinos.
For Choi, acting the brainwashed North Korean revolutionary was the greatest role of her career. Shin busied himself making six movies for Kim Jong-Il to great success. But Shin knew he needed something more if his plan to escape to the West was to succeed – a film Kim Jong-Il would want to show off to the world. So he came up with Pulgasari, a copy of one of the Japanese Godzilla franchises. It would be North Korea’s entry into the international cinema marketplace.
When Pulgasari was released in 1985, several North Koreans were crushed to death in the stampede to see it. Kim Jong-Il, too, was thrilled, and flushed with success, the Dear Leader gladly agreed to Shin’s proposal to establish an office in Vienna, which would export North Korean films around the world.
Kim Jong-Il believed Shin and Madame Choi had been successfully indoctrinated and their loyalty bought. ‘He trusted us 100 per cent,’ Shin recalled later. ‘He thought with the house, the money, and the studio, that there would be no reason to escape. That is the weak point of growing up in a socialist country: it is easy to fool oneself.’
When, on March 12, 1986, Shin, Choi and three North Korean bodyguards walked into the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, they fought back their excitement. There were no connecting rooms so, unlike on a previous visit to East Berlin, Shin and Choi would not be sharing with their guards.
They saw, too, that one young receptionist was Japanese. Later Shin called down to the front desk and asked for the young man to come upstairs. When he knocked on the door, Shin quickly pulled him inside, whispered that he was seeking asylum in the United States and slipped a note into his hand that said, in English: ‘We are Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee, husband and wife. We want to take refuge in the US Embassy.’
Shin then called Akira Enoki, a Japanese journalist friend, and asked him to meet them outside the hotel at 12.30pm the following day.
At 12.30pm, Shin and Choi, their minders at a respectable distance, stepped out of the Intercontinental and found Enoki standing next to a taxi. Shin shoved them into the taxi and ordered the driver to get going.
Their minders dashed to the kerb, flagged down their own cab and gave chase.
While Choi looked out of the rear window at the car behind, Shin explained to Enoki that they wanted to escape from their kidnappers and go to the American Embassy.
By pure luck, their taxi was the last to squeeze through traffic lights before they turned red: this was their chance.
Escaped: After many years as prisoners of North Korea, the couple fled their captors outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna in 1986
‘Choi’s face was white as a sheet of paper. My heart was racing like a motor,’ Shin wrote a year later. ‘The US Embassy was five minutes away. It felt like five hours.’
The situation became desperate when their cab ran into a traffic jam at Boltzmanngasse, 50 yards from the Embassy’s front door. Without even saying goodbye, Shin pushed his door open. Choi did the same. They ran as fast as they could, reached the Embassy door at the same time, burst through, and told the receptionist their names in broken English.
Shin handed him a business card with his Pyongyang address and asked to see the consul. Luckily, they were expected. The hotel receptionist had passed on Shin’s message.
The embassy official produced a pink rose and said with a big smile: ‘Welcome to the West.’ Choi Eun-Hee burst into tears.
Shin and Choi were wary of returning to South Korea. Many there refused to believe that Shin and Choi were abducted and it was not uncommon for Koreans who had been taken by force to the North to be imprisoned as traitors on their return. However, America welcomed them with open arms – and three years of round-the-clock protection, paid for by the State Department and the CIA.
It was not until 1999 that they returned home for good, to a South Korea transformed from a tightly censored military dictatorship to a prosperous, peaceful democracy.
Even then, they were detained by the South Korean security agency as soon as they set foot in Seoul. Foolishly, they were wearing Rolex watches given to them by Kim Jong-Il. Both were confiscated. After a day-long interrogation, they were released on condition they host a press conference in which they were to deny allegiance to the North.
The event was a disaster: Choi wore her customary elegant dress and sunglasses, Shin was in a sharp French suit. Both looked comfortably wealthy – hardly like people who had been kidnapped. The South Korean people remained sceptical – it was hardly the triumphant return home the pair had anticipated.
They rented a small house in Seoul and tried to get back to work. Despite the fact that Shin’s North Korean masterpiece Pulgasari had become a stupendous hit in Japan and a cult favourite elsewhere in the world, he never saw a penny in royalties. He directed one more movie in South Korea – A Story of Winter – a film about dementia. It was never released.
At least he kept his sense of humour. Asked about the impact of Kim Jong-Il on his life, he playfully nudged his wife. ‘He played a positive role for us,’ he smiled. ‘She was so keen to get back together, perhaps she told Kim to kidnap us.’
A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Incredible True Story Of North Korea And The Most Audacious Kidnapping In History, by Paul Fischer, is published by Viking on February 26 at ￡14.99. To get yours at ￡12.74 until February 22, order at www.mailbookshop.co.uk – p&p is free for a limited time.
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