The Guide to North Korean Secrets: What Google Maps is Hiding from You
By William Dunleavy
Superchief Managing Editor
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died on a train on Monday, December 19, 2011. He had been in complete control of the isolated communist nation since his father, and founder of North Korea, Kim Il Song died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 82.
Not much is known about the successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un. We do know some things about him though: Un is in his early twenties and he attended a Swiss boarding school under a false identity. He is also believed to have orchestrated the bombardment of a South Korean warship in 2011, and like his father- he enjoys the finer things in life: expensive clothing, watches, televisions, and women.
Kim John Il’s death came as a surprise to many experts around the world, and may not have been anticipated even by those in his inner circle. Throughout his career he kept the nation under a tightly controlled net of secrecy, preventing influence from the outside world from entering, and preventing information and people from crossing the borders. Relying heavily on these isolationist tactics and an omnipresent propaganda campaign to keep people under control, North Korea managed to secretly develop nuclear weapons amid several famines, and has faced economic sanctions for years.
Nobody seems to know exactly what to expect from the bizarre nation now that the Great Leader is dead – which has me thinking that there’s never been a better time to visit.
Finding the Map
It’s always seemed a little strange that Google, the multinational corporation that photographs my front door once a year and records a neurotic list of all the my pornographic preferences, would leave something unmapped. In this case it’s just a big empty, white box on Google Maps, plainly labeled “North Korea.” As far as a political map, there’s nothing to see here, unless you want to spend the entire day scrolling around unlabeled satellite photos, following roads and rivers through the mountains; looking for secret fortresses, abandoned villages, shipwrecks, and dingy towns in the middle of nowhere. It’s possible to explore this way, but I still had no idea what I was looking at. So I began searching for the loophole.
It didn’t take long to find the ‘North Korea Uncovered’ project. On April 4 2007, Curtis Melvin—a PhD student at George Mason University decided to start a Google Earth plugin dedicated to mapping North Korea. Thousands of amateurs, as well as defectors and escaped prisoners pooled together their sources and discoveries, and now the map has become the most definitive map of North Korea available to the public.
Download: The ‘North Korea Uncovered’ plugin for Google Maps
This Google Earth project offers an extensive mapping of North Korea’s economic, cultural, political, and military infrastructures. Through the topic menu, users of this program have easy access to geographical information on North Korea’s agriculture projects, aviation facilities, communications, hospitals, hotels, energy infrastructure, financial services, leisure destinations, manufacturing facilities, markets, mines, religious locations, restaurants, schools, and transportation infrastructure. In addition to locations of economic interest, this map also displays anti-aircraft locations, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Northern Line Limit Line (NLL), incarceration facilities, political monuments, political residencies, military bases, and nuclear facilities.
Concentration Camps
Pointing to a satellite photograph, an escaped former guard of ‘Camp 22′ – one of North Korea’s most notoriously horrid work camps, describes the building layout. (Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children.)
“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.
“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.” Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in a pond.”
There are many work camps around the country- and there are reports that a lot of the industrial production is dependent on forced slave labor. Many escaped prisoners have reported a system of hereditary punishment for families. So if one member of a family is accused of a crime, their entire family is relocated to a work camp. Even the industrial production for the DPRK’s nuclear program has been attributed to slave labor in the camps.
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea believes that 400,000 people have died in North Korea’s labor camps during the last three decades.
Escape from Camp 18 (told through maps)
This is just one of many amazing tales of escape featured by freekorea.us:
At Camp 18, Kim Yong lived in this hut for three years. He worked in a shop indicated by the second yellow arrow, repairing coal cars.
In 1996, at the height of the Great Famine, Kim Yong’s mother was in the forest gathering edible weeds when she passed out from hunger. Caught in the woods after curfew, she was accused of trying to escape and beaten so brutally that she was rendered an invalid. By 1998, knowing that death was near, she spoke to her son about the most forbidden of things — hope and freedom:
“Mother, how would you live without me?”
From my question she seemed to have read my determination and answered:
“If you think of the trivial things, you will never become a big man. Just think of how wonderful it would be if you could only go to South Korea. Your uncle went south during the war and some of your father’s friends must still be there, too.” With these words and a long sigh she tried to encourage me. [Kim Yong]
Kim, who repaired the rail cars that shipped the coal away from Camp 18, discovered a hatch at the bottom of the cars that he could prop open with a piece of coal. In this manner, he could hide himself under tons of coal, in an air pocket large enough to breathe for a few hours.
There are only a few ways Kim could escape the camp. Across the footbridge over the river, which was out of the question because he would be spotted and shot by the guards. Another way would be hiding underneath the coal inside the train, and escaping through a checkpoint across the Taedong River and out through the camp’s western gate.
There, Kim Yong would have to escape the notice of guards who would inspect the coal cars, and who would look down into the coal cars from this observation tower.
This was not the end of the dangerous road facing Kim Yong. Ahead would be a long journey with no travel permit or resources through the world’s hungriest, most heavily policed state.
He’d have to cross North Korea, and then its border into China, and finally, he would have to evade police patrols there. He would have risked betrayal by informers, and even by South Korean consular personnel. Against all odds, Kim Yong made it out alive to tell his story.
As underground networks inside the country have grown, more and more people escape North Korea every year. The BBC put together an excellent documentary on the subject, Escaping North Korea.
Axis of Evil
One of Kim Jong-Il’s former chefs published a book under the pseudonym ‘Kenji Fujimoto,’ called I was Kim Jong-Il’s Chef. He was a Japanese man, and Kim’s private sushi chef from 1988 to 2001 when he escaped from North Korea.
Kim Jong-Il and Kenji Fujimoto became companions, and regularly went shooting, horse riding and water-skiing together. He has described Kim Jong-il as having a “violent temper.”
He was also privileged enough to meet Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-un.
Dressed in a military outfit, the young Jong-Un “glared at me with a menacing look when we shook hands” the first time they met, Fujimoto wrote in Kim Jong-Il’s Chef. ”I can never forget the look in his eyes which seemed to be saying, ‘This one is a despicable Japanese.’”
Fearing that he was being spied on, Fujimoto said he would travel to Hokkaidō to buy some sea urchin, to which Kim replied “That’s a great idea. Go for it!” On travelling to Japan, Fujimoto never returned and has lived in hiding since, after allegedly being targeted by North Korean agents. [Wiki]
Aside from Kenji’s testimony, the closest we can get to the palaces of the ruling elite, military bases and nuclear secrets of North Korea comes from satellite photos. He is the only publicly known person to have been to these places and lived to tell the tale.
A map showing the underground blast radius from DPRK's nuclear tests
Note the propaganda monument, "Work faster better"
Ghost Towns and Ghost Cities
For twenty years, North Korea has been systematically decimated by famine. Often just a few years apart, huge famines strike, and the country fails to produce enough food to distribute to its citizens. It’s estimated that between 900,000 and 3.5 million people died from starvation or hunger-related illnesses during the largest famine of the 1990s.
The reason for this statistical variance is complex, as the North Korean government denies the famine outright. Aside from that, it’s sad to consider that maybe nobody inside North Korea is keeping accurate figures on the lives lost.
Above: A Chinese village (top-left) faces a North Korean ghost town (bottom-right) across the border
There are a lot of abandoned looking towns in North Korea, and very little conclusive information about any of them. It’s likely that industrial cities that had once thrived during wartime now lie abandoned and rusting, as inhabitants were either forced to leave or died of famine.
It’s hard to tell which towns are truly abandoned, as electricity is sporadic even in the capital. Many outside cities and villages have never had electricity.
After searching around on Google Earth for awhile, I realized something amazing. Those little photo icons on the map are automatically geo-tagged photos plotted on the map where they were taken. I started scouring every inch of North Korea’s borders looking for photos taken through zoom lenses across the border- into the bizarre, isolated world of the DPRK.
A photograph of a North Korean village from the China side of the border
Continued in Part II:
THE GUIDE TO NORTH KOREAN SECRETS: 100 RARELY BEFORE SEEN PHOTOS OF NORTH KOREA
