Jeffrey Fowle’s mission to N. Korea no dumber than the rest of them

In this age of click-bait listicles, The Atavist has published a rare example of real journalism, in which reporter Joshua Hunt traces the story of Jeffrey Fowle from its origins (in a dream!) to its anticlimax. Fowle, you will recall, is the Ohio municipal worker who went to North Korea, “certain that God had a plan for him,” left a Korean-language Bible next to a toilet in Chongjin, got himself arrested and detained for six months, and nearly lost both his job and his wife. Later, asked if it was all worth it, Fowle answers in the affirmative.

Fowle’s master plan was as follows: (1) smuggle one Korean-language Bible through customs at Sunan Airport, (2) lug it across North Korea, in his jacket pocket, under the watchful eyes of his minders; (3) leave it in some discreet place, to be found by some random person who is totally not a Ministry of Public Security Officer tracing his every step; (4) wait for said person to experience a miraculous conversion; (5) assume that said person will propagate the transformation of the world’s most controlled society into a clandestine house church; and (6) if caught, pretend he dropped his sole link to his spiritual life accidentally.

Through sheer luck, Fowle achieves steps 1 and 2, but things come badly unglued at step 3. To buy himself time, Fowle places the Bible under a wastebasket, rendering his whole cover story (see step 6) implausible. The reader is left with an impression of a man driven more by the best of intentions than by natural gifts of intellect or common sense.

At this point, Fowle quickly learns that North Korea has a unique gift for isolating the individual — in this case, a nearly friendless man who, thanks to a combination of flawed judgments and flawed relationships, soon finds that he has no friends at all. As we’ll soon see, Fowle’s relationship with Koryo Tours turns out especially badly for him. To anyone of at least average judgment, the ethical context foreshadows this.

Admittedly, the idea that you can change a society — especially this one — by leaving a Bible next to a toilet for the janitorial staff sounds dumb enough. It might be the perfect story for coastal elites to titter at the Bible-thumping flyover loser.

To be sure, Fowle emerges from the story as a pathetic figure, but I can’t say that his master plan sounds any dumber than more secular messianic master plans that have gained widespread elite acceptance. Behind every flawed engagement theory lurks the premise that liberal white people (or liberal Koreans) radiate magical sunbeams of love that melt icy hearts. Their assumptions about the penetration of their ideas through the elaborate defenses of the State Security Department and the Ministry of Public Security are every bit as irrational as Fowle’s, and they’ve done far more then the likes of Fowle to perpetuate the very controls they claim to be subverting, through billions of dollars in aid and profitable trade.

We see these theories expressed in shallow or self-serving arguments that tourism is changing North Korea or improving the lives of its people, or that the Associated Press can teach KCNA propagandists to be objective journalists. Who is supposed to be changing who again?

To me, the most laughable master plans are those of the messianic capitalists — many of whom come from the political left in their home countries — who think they have a lot to teach North Korean arms dealers and money launderers about profits, international banking, and the global economy.

Predictably, and immediately after Fowle finishes “using the toilet,” the MPS minders have traced his every step and found his “lost” Bible, complete with a (legitimately) forgotten picture of his family. At this point, Koryo Tours’ Simon Cockerell becomes the first one to interrogate the tourists, and is the one who extracts the confession from Fowle that he dropped the Bible.

Cockerell doesn’t admit that he immediately ratted Fowle out to the North Koreans, but any reader can infer as much. Depending on who was watching, Cockerell might have pulled Fowle aside and told him to shut his mouth, but he didn’t. Instead, he effectively became a willing interrogator — effectively, just another MPS minder. Cockerell and others in his industry often argue that their presence is changing North Korea, but the opposite seems closer to the truth.

Meanwhile, Fowle continued to dig himself into a deeper hole.

I’ll let Robert J. Samuelson close this post.

Ever since World War II, our foreign policy has rested on an oft-silent presumption that shared prosperity is a powerful and benevolent force for social stability, peace and (often) democracy. All the emphasis on free trade and globalization is ultimately not a celebration of economic growth for its own sake. It’s a means to larger ends of social cohesion and political pluralism.

In this, we have mostly projected our own domestic experience onto the world at large. Americans’ obsession with material progress — which seems excessive and even vulgar to many — is largely what has enabled us to be a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial and multireligious society. Everyone can strive to get ahead. There’s a large common denominator. [….]

The second defect is more unnerving and dangerous. It is the true Achilles’ heel of American foreign policy: Significant blocs of humanity ignore or repudiate our faith in the power of shared prosperity. They put other values and goals first. Nationalism is one obvious alternative — Putin’s Russia being a good example. The case of China is more complicated. Although it is obsessed with economic growth, it’s also indulging a nationalistic urge to reassert itself on the global stage. [Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post]