U.S, to sneak tiny radios into N. Korea

SEOUL, South Korea -- The U.S. government is preparing to smuggle tiny radios into North Korea as part of a newly financed program to break down the country's isolation.

For the next four years, Washington will spend up to $2 million annually to boost radio broadcasts toward North Korea and infiltrate mini-radios across its borders.

North Korea, probably the most isolated country in the world, has only radios that are rigged to capture broadcasts lionizing the nation's Stalinist leadership. The broadcasts also blare from outdoor loudspeakers.

The American plan to smuggle small radios into North Korea is outlined in the North Korean Human Rights Act, which President Bush signed into law Oct. 18. The sweeping act provides money to private humanitarian groups to assist defectors, extends refugee status to fleeing North Koreans and sets in motion a plan to boost broadcasts to North Korea and get receivers into the country.

North Korea's Kim Jong Il regime says the tiny radios will air "rotten imperialist reactionary culture" to undermine the country.

The human rights act, in its broad scope, also has encountered opposition from President Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea's center-left leader. Officials under Roh say the act will stiffen Pyongyang's resistance to the outside world and hinder already-stalled talks to get North Korea to abandon its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.

They scoff at the U.S. plan to smuggle in radios, saying it's a goodhearted idea but one that will worsen the plight of North Koreans. Anyone captured with a radio, they said, might face prison.

Supporters of the tactic argue that it offers a ray of hope to a populace that's hungry for news amid food shortages and an acute humanitarian crisis.

"There's an incredible desire among North Korean people to know what's going on," said Suzanne Scholte, the head of the Defense Forum Foundation, a nonprofit group in Falls Church, Va., that focuses on American policy toward North Korea.

A small number of clandestine radios are already in the country, sent in by helium-filled balloons deployed by South Korean religious groups or brought in by traders across North Korea's border with China.

"Some people listen to South Korean broadcasts under their blankets," said Lee Gui-ok, a young North Korean mother who fled to China in 1999 and later moved to Seoul.

Lee said the plan was worth carrying out -- even if it endangered some people -- because it would offer hope to North Koreans that the outside world cared about their situation.

"If they don't have radios, they can't listen to South Korean broadcasts. If they had them, they would listen," Lee said.

A House of Representatives International Relations Committee report on the human rights act says North Korea's radio broadcasts exalt ruler Kim Jong Il, feed "paranoia about the threat of attack by the United States, and misrepresent the conditions and standards of living that exist in the outside world, particularly in South Korea."

The plan takes a cue from previous U.S. efforts in other parts of the world. In 2001 and 2002, American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, passed out more than 1,000 short-wave radios so Cubans could tune in to the Florida-based anti-Castro radio station Radio Marti. The radios were taken to Havana in diplomatic pouches.

That wouldn't work in Pyongyang, because the United States and North Korea don't have diplomatic relations.

How to smuggle the radios in remains to be worked out. Legislators may keep operational details of the program classified to prevent North Korea from countering them, said a Capitol Hill staff aide who's active in shaping U.S. policy on North Korea, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I don't see radios in balloons as particularly tenable," the staff aide said. During most of the 1990s, the South Korean military deployed balloons to send propaganda leaflets, rice and radios into North Korea, but suspended the practice in late 1999 under then- President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy" of opening contacts with Pyongyang.

Since then, Seoul has sought to stop even private groups from airlifting radios with balloons. In March 2003, police blocked a Korean-American pastor from Artesia, Calif., Douglas E. Shin, as he and colleagues prepared to send 700 radios across the border slung from 22 helium-filled balloons.

"Everybody wants the radios," Shin said. "If a regular farmer or worker gets caught, they get slapped on the hand, and the guy who confiscates it keeps it because he wants to listen to it."

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