For James Bond, spying was an endless succession of glamorous women and dry martinis, but for a real-life South Korean commando who undertook secret missions in the reclusive North, life was far harder.
Now aged 59 and the father of three daughters, Yoon Kyung-chul spends his days fixing up old bicycles for a charity in downtown Seoul, the South Korean capital.
That is a far cry from the day in 1973 when the 21-year old Yoon was summoned for duty to go and infiltrate North Korea, which is still technically at war with the South.
Photo: reuters
“It was 4am and three men in black suits came to my house. I didn’t have [a] chance to say a goodbye to my family,” Yoon said of the day he was recruited for the South’s Headquarters of Intelligence Detachment.
It wasn’t an official conscription. Yoon wound up on an isolated mountain without a name tag or badge of rank.
Yoon said many of the men in his new unit were enticed by the 30 million Korean won (US$25,148 at today’s exchange rate) on offer to join.
The 21-year old was trained in demolition, long-distance hiking, shooting and knife-hurling under tough conditions that included beatings for poor performance.
“There was no leave. For more than six months in a year, dressed in North Korean army uniforms, we were trained. Many people died during the training and many were injured,” he said.
Although overt hostilities between North and South Korea were stopped with a 1953 armistice, both sides conducted low-level hostilities.
About 13,000 men were trained like Yoon through to the early 1990s and more than 7,000 who worked until the early 1970s have been listed as missing or dead, according to government data. Several hundred of them are believed to be in the North.
When Yoon left the special forces in 1976 after three years’ service, he found he could not get a job and, even worse, that his own country was monitoring his activities.
“I was neither a civilian nor a soldier,” he said.
A protest movement by the former military agents saw rioting in Seoul in 2002 when several hundred of them set fire to gas canisters, eventually winning compensation and government recognition of their work.
Even so, many people still consider the ex-servicemen to be gangsters or extremists and nicknamed them “canister men.”
They still attend protests and the adverse public reaction prompted Yoon and another ex-commando to open a free bicycle repair center, donating the cycles to schools and daycare centers.
Beneath a sign on the wall of his workshop saying “What have I done for the Motherland today?” Yoon and his staff labor on.
“We said to ourselves, let’s not use our fists anymore ... Then, we picked up bicycles on streets. Our goal is to donate 600 bicycles next year,” he said. “I need to get rid of my dark past and show something better to my daughters.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to