Kenneth Bae knew he was in trouble when he opened his briefcase for a North Korean customs official and saw a computer hard drive he meant to leave behind in China.
He had no idea how much trouble: He would go on to spend the next two years in detention, including in a labor camp where he was ordered to plant soybeans in sweltering heat and dig sewage lines in frozen ground.
As difficult as that time was, he says, it also gave him a greater understanding of the isolated nation.
“Even though I was in and out of North Korea 17 times prior to that, I only stayed a short period,” he said in an interview ahead of yesterday’s release of his memoir. “By staying as a prisoner for two years, I learned their culture, their way of thinking, how the ordinary people live in their day-to-day lives.”
Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea is appearing as North Korea holds two other Americans in custody. One, Kim Dong-chul, was sentenced on Friday last week to 10 years of hard labor on charges of espionage and subversion.
North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government.
Outsiders say North Korea seeks to use its US detainees to wring concessions from Washington.
Bae, 47, of Dallas, was born in Seoul and came to the US with his family in 1985. After attending the University of Oregon and a seminary in St Louis, he moved to China in 2006, where he began missionary work. In 2010, he began leading small tour groups into North Korea.
The hard drive that landed him in custody contained files about his missionary work, as well as a documentary video showing emaciated North Korean children scrounging in the dirt for something to eat — materials the North Korean officials considered subversive.
Agents brought him to a hotel in northeastern North Korea.
There, he writes, he was held in seclusion for the next month as officials grilled him about his family, about who had sent him to the country, who had given him the files and why he was in North Korea.
He was given little to eat — generally a few bites of rice and some wilted vegetables, he says — and was forced to watch government propaganda every evening, but was not beaten, he says.
He eventually confessed one of the documents was a plan for what he described as “Operation Jericho,” an effort to bring tourists into North Korea to pray and spread the love of God.
The government sentenced him to 15 years in prison, but his weak health — including a bad back, diabetes and gallstones — made it difficult for him to perform hard labor. He spent some of his time resting in a hospital room.
In 2014, following negotiations handled with the help of the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, US Director of National Intelligence James Klapper traveled to retrieve him, along with another detained American, Matthew Miller.
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