Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

A tallish, stocky man, broad across the shoulders, Vollersten looked and, at times, sounded like one of the hippy protestors who had taken to the streets against Vietnam and, later, the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Some people called him “a little crazy”; others said the world needed more men like him. Vollersten accepted their plaudits the way he dealt with his detractors: with that same slow smile, the flick of a hairstyle rooted in a bygone generation. “It made him disarming even when he would continue to argue his point until there was no point left to argue,” his Mossad file noted.

Vollersten’s student life in Düsseldorf had encompassed politics and journalism until he became a medical doctor, married, and fathered four sons. But on the eve of a new millennium all that was soon to change. He argued with the German health authorities how community care should be run. Ignored, he organized his patients to publicly demonstrate—the first time a doctor had done this in Germany. He was again ignored. He organized more patient marches. His Medical Association in the conservative city of Goettingen disowned him. Finally his wife divorced him, claiming he was “crazy.” With his long blond hair and full moustache, he looked like an aging rock star. Finally he joined an organization called “German Emergency Doctors”; it sent physicians anywhere there was a need for humanitarian aid. Vollersten was offered either the baking Sahara of South Sudan or North Korea. He read several travel guidebooks about Sudan. But there was not one available for North Korea. He decided that was where he should go.

Shin had come from South Korea to California as a twenty year-old. But the knowledge of what was happening in North Korea had followed him, and by the time he became a pastor, all he had read and heard made a decisive impact on him. He began to lay down the tracks for what became New Exodus and plugged into other human rights organizations around the world.

Meantime, in North Korea, Vollersten had repeatedly encountered the terrified silence of patients asked about their lives. Leaving North Korea at the end of his contract, he mounted a ferocious campaign against the regime. He sought out North Korean refugees and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: journalists, politicians, other human rights workers. He traveled around Asia, lecturing, appealing; there was about him, he would admit, the angry passion of someone whose eyes had been opened. His battle cry of “inform, provoke, and mobilise” became his rallying call. He and Shin became two voices united in common cause to promote the plight of all those trapped in North Korea or who had fled their homeland into the hostile environment of China. New Exodus became the focus of all they wanted to achieve. By 2004, over three hundred thousand had traveled its length.

Along the invisible railway “platforms”—safe houses in China’s cities, farms in its countryside, boats on its rivers—waited the intelligence agents and their informers. As usual, Jamal and the other Mossad agents worked alone. It was their way. Their brief was simple: to locate any defector who could provide the latest information about North Korea and its work on developing weapons of mass destruction. Then the spies and their informers all became united in common cause: to locate Dr. Ri Che-Woo. He was undoubtedly the most important escapee to be traveling along New Exodus.

Dr. Ri was a microbiologist and director of a project more secret than all the other secret projects in a country where secrecy itself was instilled from birth. Just as Department 12 and Project Coast had sought to create their ethnic bombs, Dr. Ri was employed at Institute 398, located at Sogram-ri in the south of Pyongyang Province to develop a similar weapon, this one designed to strike the white populations on earth. A sign of the institute’s importance was being ring fenced by three battalions of troops. The first hint about Dr. Ri’s work had come from a defector. Over the following months, details emerged from more defectors suggesting that Dr. Ri and his 250 geneticists could be further advanced than the South Africans and Russians had been. Now, many more months later, Horaj had sought a meeting with Jamal, bringing information that Mossad, like other intelligence services, had eagerly awaited. Dr. Ri was somewhere along the New Exodus route trying to make his perilous way to freedom. Norbert Vollersten had learned Dr. Ri was carrying a dossier detailing human experiments used in North Korea’s biological program. Western intelligence agents watched the moves of the CSIS and the country’s Public Security as they tried to locate Dr. Ri. But amid a population of 1.3 billion people who were used to being constantly spied upon, the microbiologist had vanished into the air faster than the spent fireworks at Chinese New Year celebrations.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s scientists consulted their own network of researchers at some of the world’s leading science institutes. One recalled how, at the height of America’s intervention in Nicaragua, the idea of creating a genetic bomb had occupied the CIA’s geneticists. They had been ordered to locate what became known in the agency as “the Nicaraguan gene.” Substantial sums of money were spent in obtaining blood samples of Nicaraguans and testing them in the CIA laboratories. No gene specific to Nicaragua was identified. The project was abandoned only to be later resurrected to select a “Cuban-only gene.” This research also came to nothing.

But Dr. Ri’s research showed that creating an ethnic bomb was no longer a fantasy. It had become what the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Joshua Lederberg had called the “monster in our backyard.” Anthropologist John Moore, an acknowledged expert in the threat from an ethnic bomb, had predicted its creation would unleash genetic variations that could produce widespread contagion of the human population with rates of mortality like the fictional Andromeda Strain, sufficient to exterminate the whole species.

By the time Jamal and Horaj had separated after their meeting in the Hindu Kush, the Mossad agent had acquired a photograph of Dr. Ri. It showed he was physically the quintessential Korean, short and stocky with a pleasantly rounded face, eyes set wide apart behind his glasses. With the photo came a curriculum vitae that indicated his importance after graduating from the country’s Hambung University of Chemical Industry, which produced scientists for North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs.

During the years that followed, Dr. Ri was transferred from one biotechnology center to another, and from time to time he would have encountered some of the thirty-eight thousand scientists and technicians from the Soviet Union who had been recruited to work in North Korea’s biological warfare program. Others had gone to China, Syria, Libya, and Iran.

In 1999, he was appointed to work at Sogram-ri’s Institute 398. NSA satellite images routinely passed to Mossad showed the compound was a half-mile square area, bordered by heavily patrolled roads. The featureless buildings included a headquarters block, a communications building, barracks, and fuel storage tanks. To one side were living quarters for officers and scientists close to a tunnel entrance. The photo analysts believed it led to the underground complex where Dr. Ri and his team worked.

The Institute was under the overall command of Dr. Yi Yong Su. Intelligence sources had established the fifty-one-year-old geneticist was widely respected and not a little feared by her fellow geneticists. She was known to have a close relationship with Kim Jong Il, who had succeeded his father in 1994 to become the country’s supreme leader.

News that Dr. Ri planned to defect had alerted not only Mossad but the CIA, MI6, and the German, French, and Australian intelligence services. Then, as so often happens in the intelligence world, came a whisper: Dr. Ri was heading for Guangzhou, the port city of Canton Province in South China. With Hong Kong a short distance away, there was an opportunity to smuggle Dr. Ri on to one of the many foreign ships in the harbor. In the early hours of one morning—the day of the week or month would remain unknown—Dr. Ri, wearing a dark blue coverall, had appeared at one of the staff entrances to the Guangdong Hotel. Apart from its many fine facilities, the hotel also houses a number of foreign consulates on the fifteenth floor. Dr. Ri used a swipe card to access the building; how he obtained it would remain unknown. At some point inside the hotel, he was confronted by Chinese Public Security officers. Shortly afterward a police van drove him away from the hotel staff entrance.