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what kind of writing should I do here?’
    Supervisor Park Chul laughed so hard that his comb-over flopped down over his eyebrows. He patted it back into place. ‘Neither you nor I have been to Seoul!’ he said. ‘Although we’re all countrymen, Northerners and Southerners, our cultures are different now. But it doesn’t make much difference, because we’re actually working with the Northern audience in mind, not the people of southern Chosun.’
    He paused to crumble some cooked egg yolk into a fish tank containing three bright red fish. After tipping the rest of the egg yolkinto his mouth, he wiped his hands and continued, ‘To succeed here, you have to give up on anything like your own name or renown as a writer. You know, when I used to work for the Writers’ Union, I was a star on the rise. You’ve probably read my poems. Take, for example, “Longing for my Townsfolk”.’
    ‘Yes,’ I replied, though the title didn’t ring any bells.
    He continued, ‘If I’d stuck to being a poet, I’d probably be a household name by now. But since I’ve spent my life as a UFD operative, no Koreans here or in the South will ever recognise my work. Still, at least we have an easy life, working here.’
    Hearing him sigh, I thought of him as a lonely, ageing man who had to keep his secret life to himself and his colleagues. Just as he’d said, working at the UFD meant not only hiding our work from our countrymen in the South, but also from those in the North. With the increasing economic discrepancy between the North and South, the ideological warfare against the South was perceived as futile by the 1990s, and the propaganda campaigns against the South had run out of steam.
    By my time, the UFD was using the experience and techniques previously employed against South Korea’s citizens to conduct psychological offensives against our own people. The experience and techniques that had been learned were replicated in psychological operations aimed at North Koreans though, in other ways, we were still fighting a cultural war on two fronts.
    The work of Office 101 was never confined to a single genre or medium. It employed speeches, video, music and other forms of cultural expression – all under the names of South Korean or foreign authors – that could be used to infiltrate and influence the values of Koreans.
    In April 1998, for example, four months before the start of my work at UFD, Office 101, Section 1 (Newspapers) produced an article that received praise from Kim Jong-il. The piece was written underan assumed outsider’s name and declared our Great Leader Kim Il-sung to be the Sun of the World. The evidence in question was the sinking of the
Titanic
. The date on which the RMS
Titanic
sank, 15 April 1912, also happens to be the date of Kim Il-sung’s birth. Using this coincidence as a form of historical proof, Section 1 explained that ‘As the Sun set in the West, it rose in the East’. Such creations of the United Front Department were then published in the Party newspaper, the
Rodong Sinmun
, or broadcast on television – which only shows state-run channels – as the works of foreign authors, journalists and intellectuals. The North Korean people could never have imagined that all these apparently foreign works were produced by Office 101 in the very heart of their capital, Pyongyang. Isolated from the outside world, it’s not surprising that they believed that the people of the world, including South Koreans, admired our country’s strong leadership and many achievements.
    After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, epic poetry became the chief vehicle of political propaganda with the publication of a poem by Kim Man-young of the Writers’ Union Central Committee. The work took the form of a prayer for the eternal life of Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-il published that lengthy poem in the
Rodong Sinmun
and proclaimed Kim Man-young the most loyal worker in North Korea. Soon afterwards, the poetry of Shin Byung-gang was