Park Chae-seo would do anything to gather information on the enemy North – including hiding a micro recorder in his penis. His story will shock people on both sides of the DMZ
Before meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, South Korean spy “Black Venus” was told to stay up late, shower and dress neatly. He also hid a micro recorder in his penis.
Few spies have ever got as close to the leader of an enemy state – let alone one as reclusive as the isolated North Korea – as Black Venus, real name Park Chae-seo.
In the 1990s he posed as a disgruntled former South Korean military officer turned businessman looking to film commercials for Southern companies in scenic Northern locations.
Along the way to meeting Kim, he claims to have sold antique ceramics for millions for members of the North’s ruling family, and seen Northern military officials counting huge bribes paid by Southerners in political plots.
Now his story has been turned into a book and a film that shine new light on the murky connections – some financial, some political – that run across the demilitarised zone dividing the peninsula.
With North and South engaged in a rapid diplomatic rapprochement, The Spy Gone North has been an instant bestseller and box office hit, the film attracting five million viewers in just its first three weeks on release, about 10 per cent of the South’s entire population.
“It was extremely stressful living as a spy,” Park, 64, said in a rare interview with foreign media. “I might be exposed by the slightest mistake, like a stupid slip of the tongue.”
But unlike North Korean agents sent south, he was not issued with suicide pills to ensure a quick end if captured.
Instead, he explained, “we were trained to kill ourselves with our own fingers” using “some critical points in the body”.
Park started in military intelligence in 1990, tasked with gathering information on the North’s nuclear programme, then in its early stages.
He befriended a Chinese nuclear physicist of Korean ancestry who – in exchange for a million-dollar payment – later revealed that the North had made two low-level nuclear weapons.
When he joined the South’s spy agency in 1995, then known as the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP), he was assigned the code name Black Venus.
Based in Beijing, he worked for a South Korean company importing Chinese agricultural products, disguising them as tariff-exempt North Korean goods, and built up a network of North Korean contacts and other informants.
He also bribed his way towards higher North Korean authorities, once providing the acting head of Pyongyang’s spy agency with top-quality counterfeit Rolex watches when he visited Beijing.
