An Invitation to Pyongyang
Regime change in Pyongyang? The very idea struck Yoo Jae-won as utterly absurd. Could this be some dream world? Was that why even the most outlandish stories felt so real? He reached for the bedside pitcher, poured himself a glass of cold water, and drank it down in one go before he could finally accept that he was awake. After that deal, he had not dreamed once. There was no reason for a dream to appear without warning.
“So… why Pyongyang all of a sudden?”
“Prime Minister Kim just returned from the North. He’s been throwing himself into the job—almost as if he’s decided Jeon Myeong-heon is his new role model. It looks like he’s determined to follow the same path the old man took to the presidency. Not many people his age would be so flexible, but Kim Dae-jung has always been remarkably adaptable. I give Jeon Myeong-heon high marks for his willingness to share power as president, too.”
The Tongil National Party had been created for Jeon Myeong-heon’s own presidential ambitions, yet after two general elections and with local elections looming, it had become a properly organized political machine. Having produced a president, its lawmakers and members naturally hungered for another term in power. Normally that would mean filling the prime minister’s post with someone from their own ranks or a friendly faction. Instead, Jeon Myeong-heon had personally proposed a coalition government to secure a majority in the National Assembly. He had even granted the prime minister more authority than President Kim Young-sam had ever given him—especially the power to audit, discipline, and dismiss cabinet ministers. A formal contract had been signed to that effect.
The constitution already stated that the prime minister “shall direct and coordinate” the executive ministries. Legally the authority had always existed, but no president before Jeon Myeong-heon had ever allowed a prime minister to exercise it. Until now, the office had been little more than the president’s shadow and scapegoat. Kim Dae-jung, however, moved with far greater energy. He traveled constantly to the provinces and appeared frequently on television. Jeon Myeong-heon never tried to rein him in; on the contrary, he gave him every possible support. That was how the visits to neighboring countries and North Korea had come about. In return, Jeon Myeong-heon focused on the structural reforms needed to escape the IMF crisis. While Yoo Jae-won wielded the White Tiger Fund in the private sector, Jeon Myeong-heon led the public-sector overhaul—privatizing several state-owned enterprises and orchestrating the mergers and dissolutions of major banks. Donghwa, Dongnam, Daedong, Gyeonggi, and Chungcheong Banks were designated for the first round of closures; their assets and liabilities were transferred to healthier institutions through the P&A method. The one difference from past practice was that employment succession was guaranteed, though only up to the deputy-manager level so the acquiring banks would not be overburdened.
The process was not without friction. At Donghwa Bank, a systems administrator who refused to accept the closure sabotaged the servers and fled, paralyzing the entire network. Donghwa had been founded by displaced northerners pooling their resources; many of its executives and staff were from the same background. The man who caused the incident was one of them—rough-edged and hot-tempered after losing his home and starting over in the South. Jeon Myeong-heon, himself a displaced northerner, exploded with fury and ordered the culprit punished without mercy. No one dared suggest the punishment was discriminatory.
Jeon Myeong-heon’s performance at the Labor-Management-Government Innovation Committee was equally impressive. The labor-law revisions begun under President Kim Young-sam were completed early in Jeon Myeong-heon’s term, and the final package clearly favored workers. Although the new law introduced the non-regular employment category that businesses had long demanded, the number of such positions remained smaller than expected because the arrangement proved less advantageous to companies than they had hoped. Jeon Myeong-heon therefore pressed the labor side to share the pain as well, extracting a major concession: the eight-hour workday. Ordinary citizens were baffled at first—how was working only eight hours a day a sacrifice? Yet the compromise forced significant give-and-take from both labor and management. To Yoo Jae-won it looked less like negotiation and more like coercion.
Even during the IMF crisis, workers at large corporations, state-owned enterprises, and government offices enjoyed stable positions. They had willingly worked overtime to earn extra money. Jeon Myeong-heon’s solution was to cut the workday at eight hours and require companies to hire from the pool of unemployed rather than overwork existing staff. If the prevailing trend of the twenty-first century was to pile two people’s work onto one employee while raising wages only a pittance, then Jeon Myeong-heon’s policy ran directly against the current. Labor leaders could not openly oppose it, but they made their displeasure clear; shorter hours meant thinner wallets. Businesses felt the same way—hiring more workers was a burden. Yet Jeon Myeong-heon’s bulldozer momentum carried the measure through the committee and into a social consensus. It would first apply to production lines where shift work was feasible, then be extended to office workers as quickly as possible. Civil servants and public-sector employees would follow. Jeon Myeong-heon did not stop at words; he inserted a new-hire budget line into the following year’s fiscal plan.
The outcome of the Labor-Management-Government Innovation Committee had taken even Yoo Jae-won by surprise. Forcing through the eight-hour workday was nothing short of remarkable. Korea’s chronic shortage of jobs existed precisely because everyone—from college students to the elderly—competed for work and accepted overtime without complaint. If the eight-hour compromise took root, daily life in Korea would change dramatically. The remaining problem was that wages would shrink along with working hours, and the new jobs must not be lost to illegal foreign workers.
Thanks to these achievements, Jeon Myeong-heon’s presence remained undiminished even while Prime Minister Kim stayed constantly in the spotlight.
“The North wants to receive you as a state guest.”
The bundle Prime Minister Kim had brought back from Pyongyang ultimately belonged to Jeon Myeong-heon as well. Kim’s meeting with Kim Jong-il made for a single day’s news, but the personal letter and the summit proposal it contained would dominate headlines for weeks.
“What’s on the agenda? Don’t tell me they just want to eat Pyongyang cold noodles together.”
“Of course not. We have to commemorate the opening of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and the start of gold-mine tourism. And Kim Jong-il added something else—”
“Ah, I’ll hear that part in person.”
Yoo Jae-won cut Jeon Myeong-heon off before he could continue. Even though the line was secure, it was too risky to discuss the contents of a letter between heads of state over the phone.
“Understood. So you’ll attend?”
“Yes. If you’re going, Grandfather, then so am I.”
Yoo Jae-won felt no hesitation. Traveling to the North with Jeon Myeong-heon meant he had nothing to fear for his safety. Meeting Kim Jong-il under those conditions was not merely acceptable—it was an opportunity.
Yoo Jae-won already knew a great deal about Kim Jong-il. Any master plan for the peninsula had to account for the man who wielded the greatest influence over its future. At the time, however, his only sources had been books, videos, and internet materials—fragmentary, heavily subjective, and often outdated. The declassification of U.S. documents under the Freedom of Information Act had helped, but nothing compared to facing the man in person. That was why Yoo Jae-won accepted Jeon Myeong-heon’s invitation without reservation.
Two days later.
“Grandfather, do you know where Jae-won is going the week after next?”
“Hm? Where is he going?”
Tiffany dispensed with greetings the moment she met her grandfather, Fredrick Taylor II, and launched straight into her question. Their weekend meeting had been scheduled weeks earlier; today Fredrick had arranged for them to cruise the waters near Channel Islands National Park aboard his yacht, enjoying marine sports. True to his style, the vessel was enormous—several thousand tons displacement, four decks, a crew of more than thirty, complete with a smaller fishing boat and even a helicopter. Instead of boarding from the pier, Yoo Jae-won’s party flew directly from Fredrick’s residence by helicopter and landed on the yacht’s helipad. The ship was named Bucephalus, a nod to Fredrick’s enduring love of horses. Even Yoo Jae-won, who had seen many of Fredrick’s luxurious properties, found his jaw dropping at the sight of the yacht. He had no desire to own one, however; the cost of a single Bucephalus could easily buy a Boeing 737 and leave change.
Tiffany, who had sailed on such vessels since childhood, showed no surprise and headed straight for her grandfather.
“North Korea. Jae-won’s been invited. Please talk him out of it.”
“North Korea?”
Fredrick, who had been personally steering the yacht through the waves and showing off his vigor, reacted at once. His expression darkened at the mention of the country. Prejudices, it seemed, were powerful things. Objectively comparing the national power of the United States and North Korea was pointless; even if the North launched an all-out war, a single U.S. Seventh Fleet deployment would end it. Having no viable conventional options, Pyongyang had concluded that only asymmetric weapons—nuclear arms—offered any hope. To stabilize its regime it had cast the United States as the axis of evil and carried out endless provocations: nuclear development, the Panmunjom axe murder, even state-sponsored counterfeiting of U.S. dollars. Each incident further soured American opinion. Even Tiffany, a Stanford graduate now heading Chevron’s geological data analysis team, instinctively viewed North Korea as a pariah state one should never enter. When Yoo Jae-won told her of the trip she had protested vehemently, and the argument had continued until now.
Fredrick handed the helm to the captain and turned his full attention to the conversation. The mention of North Korea had clearly piqued his interest.
“He’s really going?”
“Yes. There will be an official announcement soon.”
Yoo Jae-won spoke calmly. He had known for some time that Kim Jong-il was curious about him. When Jeon Myeong-heon had visited the North during his prime-minister days to deliver cattle, he had asked Yoo Jae-won to prepare a computer as a gift for Kim Il-sung. Yoo Jae-won still remembered rushing to customize it—special hardware, the Android operating system localized to North Korea’s cultural language, and a discreetly installed rootkit that would report the user’s identity and search history once connected to the internet. He had been startled to see Kim Jong-il type his own name into a search engine, and had quietly increased his security detail afterward. Fortunately nothing had come of it, and the rootkit had eventually gone silent—probably because the computer had become obsolete and been replaced rather than because its existence had been discovered.
“Is that so? And what business does my granddaughter’s husband have in North Korea? What could possibly exist in that impoverished, prideful country? It doesn’t sound as though you have any particular task to perform there either.”
Fredrick seemed to know something about the North, though his understanding did not extend far beyond the typical American view.
“It’s a land with not a single drop of oil, so I can see why you’d think that, sir. But I see opportunities there that others don’t. That’s why I want to go and confirm them myself.”
“Opportunities? Big enough to justify setting foot in that dangerous place?”
“I believe so. And you needn’t worry about safety. I’ll be traveling with President Jeon Myeong-heon. Nothing will happen. If anything befell a state guest, North Korea would lose face—and they care about nothing more than face.”
Fredrick nodded. “If that’s what you think, Jae-won…” He shrugged at Tiffany, who, though still worried, no longer insisted on stopping him.
“By the way, has anything come out of the area Tiffany identified?”
It was Yoo Jae-won’s turn to ask. Tiffany’s geological data analysis had flagged a promising site in Texas—an area already surveyed by other companies. Her team’s results, however, indicated it sat atop a significant reservoir, provided one drilled deeper than before. Advances in technology had removed that obstacle. Although the discovery was Tiffany’s, Yoo Jae-won had played a major role in optimizing the data-analysis techniques and designing the parallel-processing system that harnessed tens of thousands of PCs. When the system’s performance soared, Tiffany had been delighted; Yoo Jae-won had teased her that a mere thank-you was insufficient and expected a proper kiss. Instead she had run straight to her grandfather.
Fredrick’s reaction exceeded expectations. Not only had ID Technology secured the contract for Chevron’s next-generation geological-analysis computers, but the federal government had granted exploration permits for the candidate site and test drilling had begun immediately—with dozens of rigs operating simultaneously rather than a single exploratory well.
“Hmm. So far they’re only bringing up smelly mud,” Fredrick said with a shrug. “Nothing to be disappointed about. Oil exploration is a business where one success in ten thousand attempts is considered good.”
Yoo Jae-won did not believe this attempt would fail. Once the scale of the search had grown, he had quietly applied his future knowledge. He had not done so solely for Tiffany’s sake or Chevron’s; the contract clearly stipulated that if oil were found, Tiffany and Yoo Jae-won would receive their rightful shares. Fredrick had even promised to grant a wish if the well succeeded. Yoo Jae-won intended to collect every benefit without exception.
Having steeled himself inwardly, he joined Tiffany and Fredrick in enjoying the rest of the day. “Come, let’s do some proper deep-sea fishing.”
They transferred to a smaller fishing boat launched from the yacht. Each took a rod; Alfred the butler handled the wheel. The scale of even ordinary fishing felt entirely different. After a thoroughly satisfying holiday, Yoo Jae-won returned to his routine and began preparing for his return to Korea.