Lee Min-bok’s house, fashioned out of two shipping containers, is monitored by 12 police surveillance cameras. Plainclothes detectives check his mailbox and tag along wherever he goes to protect him from possible assassins sent by North Korea, which openly threatens to kill him.
However, that has not stopped him.
On days when the wind blows to the north, Lee, 59, ventures out with his secondhand 5-tonne truck, hauling a large hydrogen tank to the border with North Korea, an hour’s drive away. There, he fills dozens of 7m and 12m barrel-shaped balloons with the gas and lets them drift away.
The balloons carry special payloads: radio sets, US$1 bills, computer memory sticks and, above all, tens of thousands of leaflets bearing messages that Lee says could debunk the personality cult surrounding North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“My leaflets are a poison for Kim Jong-un’s regime, because they help North Koreans wake up to his lies,” Lee said during an interview at his home.
Sailing between 3,000m and 5,000m above sea level, Lee’s balloons waft across the world’s most heavily guarded border, high enough that North Korean soldiers have little chance of shooting them down. Then his patented “timer” devices click, unfastening vinyl bundles. Leaflets fall out like snowflakes over the North, where Kim struggles to keep his people under a total information blackout, blocking the Internet and prefixing all radio and TV sets to receive only his government’s propaganda-filled broadcasts.
In South Korea, there are 50 “balloon warriors,” many of them defectors from the North like Lee, who seek to breach the wall with leaflets.
Lee is their godfather. When he started floating large balloons in 2005, with others following suit, he received credit — and blame — for reigniting the leaflet battle the two Korean armies had waged until it petered out with the end of the Cold War. He now launches between 700 and 1,500 balloons a year, each carrying 30,000 to 60,000 leaflets.
To anyone who will listen, Lee says that the best way to reform North Korea and end its nuclear weapons program is to subvert Kim’s government from inside North Korea’s boarders.
And the surest way to do that, he says, is to infiltrate it with outside information through leaflets, radio broadcasts and DVDs filled with South Korean TV dramas and smuggled through the North’s border with China.
“Leaflets are the cheapest and safest,” Lee said. “No border guards, no radar, no radio jamming signals can stop them.”
With years of negotiations and sanctions failing to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Washington and its allies have begun paying more attention to waging an information war. After the North’s fourth nuclear test in January, South Korea restarted front-line loudspeakers to send blaring propaganda broadcasts across the border. Last month, Washington announced a US$1.6 million budget for projects to “foster the free flow of information into, out of, and within” North Korea.
Pyongyang calls the leaflets an act of war and threatens to direct an artillery attack at their launching sites near the border.
This year, it began retaliating in kind, floating to the South leaflets that called South Korean President Park Geun-hye a snake and a prostitute.
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