Raise Your Bayonets (#1): Bob Dole plays a Bond villain

Raise Your Bayonets (총검을 들고) is a 2002 novel by Song Sang Wŏn, part of the Imperishable Leadership series of historical novels which purports to chronicle the life & deeds of Kim Jong Il. Song is also a co-author of Eternal Life (1997), reviewed earlier in this blog.

This novel covers events in 1996, chiefly the construction of the massive Kumgangsan Dam and Anbyŏn Youth Power Plant, the KPA submarine incursion into South Korea, and the Arduous March Famine. The famine coverage includes some quite moving scenes of ordinary workers and soldiers making extraordinary sacrifices to save the country from disaster, as well as depictions of high-level debates over economic priorities and the best strategy for recovery.

"Who has one thumb and a badass role
in a North Korean novel?"
Src: Getty Images

In this post I will ignore all of that, to focus instead on a secondary and rather silly portion of the novel: its depiction of the 1996 US presidential race, and particularly Republican Candidate Bob Dole. I choose to do this because it is one of the few cases of North Korean historical fiction depicting an American political campaign in any detail, and because it's just so gosh-darn entertaining.

The Room Z Fraktsiya

The novel makes the innovative narrative choice to cast then-candidate Dole in the principal bad-guy role, instead of the actual sitting US president. Dole leads a secretive cabal of like-minded hardliners within the US intelligence and defense agencies who meet periodically in a smoke-filled back room at CIA headquarters labeled simply 'Z'. The members of this "Room Z Conspiracy" are motivated by a shared belief that Clinton's Agreed Framework deal is a humiliation for the US and that new, hawkish leadership is needed to defeat North Korea, the greatest threat to US global hegemony.

The author takes some relish in playing up the cloak-and-dagger elements of this plot. When we first encounter Dole in Chapter 3, he is sitting blindfolded in the backseat of an idling car with reflective glass windows by the back door of CIA headquarters. We then backtrack to the story of how he came to be there:

   Early that morning, Dole had been awakened from sleep by the phone ringing on the small table next to his bedside. He stretched out his arm, picked up the phone, and groggily asked: “Who is this?”
   “This is your airport guide. Your flight to New York leaves at exactly 2:00 pm.” 
   It was a woman's soft voice.  But those words were enough to wake Dole for good. He sat up in bed and pushed the covers off, lifting his legs and lowering them to the floor, fumbling for his slippers. Such was his excitement that he forgot he was still holding the phone.

   He quickly recovered and, in a voice mixed with joy and fear of misunderstanding, asked: “Is that true?”

   “Yes, your contact asked me to inform you that he will wait at the appointed place at 10:00 am.”

   Dole absently set down the phone. He found his prosthetic arm, strapped it on, and walked around the room limping. He had lost his right arm and injured his left leg in the Vietnam War.

   Dole grabbed the prosthetic arm with his good hand and raised it to the right of his head, muttering to himself, “I’ve won! Clinton, you draft dodger [전쟁기피자]! Did you think I would lose to you?”

   His wife, Elizabeth Dole, regarded her husband in amazement.

   The call that drove Dole to mad ecstasy came from CIA Director Herriman’s secretary. The only important word in that phone call was the number “2.”

Dole understands that the number "2" in this call indicates the output of a calculation by a CIA supercomputer programmed to simulate various crisis situations in North Korea. The number signifies that if their plans are implemented, the computer predicts that North Korea will collapse in two years.

"The secret ingredient is... love? Okay, who's 
been messing with this thing?!!"
Src: WarGames, MGM

Eagle-eyed readers will note that the above excerpt incorrectly states that Dole had a prosthetic arm as a result of an injury sustained fighting in Vietnam. In reality, his arm was paralyzed, not prosthetic, and the injury happened when Dole was fighting in Europe during WWII. Such mistakes have little significance, but they hint at the difficulties faced by North Korean authors when researching for a historical novel while working with a limited selection of probably poorly translated news sources.

"CIA Director Herriman" [허리먼] is a fabrication; the actual CIA director at this time would have been John Deutch. It's quite common for these novels to give aliases to DPRK officials, likely to save trouble later if those individuals fall from favor, but US officials are usually identified by their real names unless they need to step far outside of their real historical roles for the sake of the plot. I've read enough by now to know that when a fake name is assigned to a clearly identified US official, something pretty crazy is going to happen with that character.

Anyway, Dole is thrilled at this phone call and the impending crisis that, in his mind, virtually guarantees his victory in the upcoming election. After savoring the feeling of victory a bit, he hurries to meet his co-conspirators in their secret CIA lair.

   Entering the secret room marked with the letter "Z" at the CIA at 10:00 a.m., Bob Dole was in high spirits.

   In attendance, as always at these meetings, were Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Jones (representing the Department of Defense), Deputy Secretary of State Seaburn [씨번], Deputy Director of the FBI Dipper [디퍼], and Senior Fellow Hoker [호케르] of the Carnegie Endowment, which was funding their group. None of them had ever seen Dole so exuberant, except for the first few days after their fraktsiya had been formed three years ago. 

  But Bob Dole, an extraordinary actor, managed to contain his elation. However much he had longed to see those computer calculations, he did not want to show his feelings in front of these people, who would occupy important positions in his future administration. By doing so, he would have been essentially admitting that he had been in a tight spot until now.

Again, all of these officials' names seem fictional; it is easy to verify who actually held those titles in 1996 and none of their names resemble any romanized rendering of the given Korean. Notice there are a lot of "deputy" chiefs here; perhaps the author felt it more believable that a deputy would be willing to conspire against the president who appointed them. Why he chose to pick on the Carnegie Endowment is anyone's guess (note: because Carnegie was misspelled 카네디, I initially thought it referred to the Kennedy Foundation). The Russian term fraktsiya is rendered phonetically and seems a well-known foreign loan word in North Korea.

CIA Director Herriman opens the meeting with his report on the latest computer calculations. He explains how they used data collected from espionage and satellite reconnaissance to input political, economic and military crisis situations of North Korea into the program, focusing on economic crises. All the data suggest that the NK economy is near disaster and cannot possibly recover (here the text accurately reports several grim indicators - 5 years' negative growth, record low GNP & foreign trade, near-zero factory operation rate). 

He concludes: “The fundamental reason why the North Korean economy has developed like this is that the socialist economic market on which they depended has completely disappeared, and they have been unable to enter Western markets due to our economic blockade. So if we tighten the economic blockade and increase military pressure, they will suffocate in the very near future. The computer has calculated this precisely.”

Bob Dole, speaking next, agrees. He believes that the DPRK has been rocked to its core by the death of President Kim Il-sung, and if this had been included in the computer input, they might see an even lower number. “Anyway, the collapse of North Korea is a fait accompli. Therefore, we must work to accelerate it with all our might. One year is enough to destroy North Korea, not two years!” To achieve this acceleration, they plan to instigate a series of provocations along the DMZ, which they will then use as a pretext for war.

World domination. The same old dream....

Later in the novel, the Room Z conspirators gather to watch their plans come to fruition from an underground command center at Mount Weather – the closest thing America has to a hollowed-out volcano ala Dr. No. The base is described:

   In the US state of Virginia is an unknown town that cannot even be found on a map. 7.2 kilometers from the capital Washington, this town is little-known and is not included in the government budget. This mysterious place, which they named "Mount Weather," takes on the mission of underground capital [지하수도] in the event the US enters a war.  
   Built in 1958 during the Eisenhower era, it had never before been opened, as its opening signals an intention to have a final confrontation with the enemy. It was clear that the fuse had been ignited for some kind of provocation, the kind of fuse that would decide each other's life or death.

"Mr. Kim, I've been expecting you."
Src: Getty Images (from You Only Live Twice)

Via a satellite feed, the conspirators are treated to a high-res view of the obscure point along the MDL where their agents have arranged a sort of ambush that they hope will escalate into a wider crisis. As they watch, their plan backfires spectacularly, thanks to the quick thinking of a certain KPA commander and his team: 

   The [KPA] attack was ruthless; a hundredfold, a thousandfold retaliation. All kinds of sniper weapons and artillery howled. Under this extraordinary battery, the enemy's concrete barriers were blown away like sheets of paper, and their firing points, anti-tank barriers and barbed wire were reduced to bean curd powder [콩가루가 되였다]. Not only the enemy's guard posts but also their radio broadcasting stations and first-line infantry medic wards were blown away to nothing.
   The attack was so unexpected, fierce and explosive that the generals back at Mount Weather, observing the scene via military satellite, were frozen and unable to give any instructions to the local commanders. Before any instructions could have even been given, it was all over, as the enemy soldiers in the field had hurriedly raised the white flag and acknowledged their surrender by holding breathlessly silent.

The plot involves sneakily moving a certain
MDL marker a few meters north and waiting
for a KPA patrol to come along

It's hard to imagine why the US/ROK forces would not have just escalated to airstrikes at that point, and this should have pleased the Room Z group since escalation was their hope from the beginning. But they all seem shattered, and instead of gaining popular support for the hardliners this incident causes Dole's whole campaign to fall apart. To me this is the most troubling part of the whole story, because it seems to suggest that massive retaliation is a good and productive response to DMZ clashes. Up to now, the lesson had seemed to be "The US warmongers are always trying to provoke a massive retaliation as a pretext for war, don't give them what they want."

Who's Your Baddie?

It's interesting to contrast this novel with Ryŏksa ŭi Taeha, part of the same Imperishable Leadership Series and written by an equally elite author, published just four years earlier in 1998. That novel, set in 1993 during the first nuclear crisis, had President Clinton in the role of warmonger-in-chief and principal villain plotting North Korea's downfall, with nary a mention of Dole or the Republican Party.

In this later novel, Dole is the main villain, but Clinton does not completely get a pass. By the time the DMZ clash happens, he has joined forces with the Room Z conspirators, spooked by the unexpected successful completion of the Anbyon Youth Power Plant which suggests that North Korea might be stronger than he [Clinton] had believed. 

Clinton has no dialogue or personal interaction with the conspirators, however. There is no explanation of how he found out about their plot in the first place, nor any dramatic scene of him confronting all the "deputy chiefs" who had been conspiring behind his back. There is just a brief paragraph explaining that the Anbyon Plant's success produced "a massive public opinion wave that combined the rival forces of the two presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole; in other words, hardliners and moderates had joined together."  It's unclear what Clinton contributes to the plot, aside from access to Mt. Weather, and there is no subsequent mention of his involvement, even when Bob Dole is dragged before a joint session of Congress and made to answer for the whole fiasco. 

If I were the gambling type, I might place a small wager that this Clinton involvement was added at the last minute, at some party bureaucrat's insistence. It would not do for people to start thinking of a sitting US president as "the good guy."

Rise of the Machines

There is also an interesting contrast between the two novels in their portrayals of American strategists relying on computer-based models. 

Loyal readers of this blog may recall the scene in Ryŏksa ŭi Taeha that I reviewed a few years back, in which the Clinton-era Defense Department ran a computer-simulated war game based on their secret plan to attack North Korea. There, Clinton and the assembled generals watched aghast as the simulation predicted that Seoul would be occupied by the KPA within two weeks of the start of hostilities. Seeing this, a shaken Clinton despaired: "They couldn’t ignore this result from a computer developed with state-of-the-art science and technology. The machine had no emotions and did not care about anybody's feelings, even the US president. It just produced scientific, absolute calculations."

In the novel excerpted above, we see a similar type of computer simulation, but this time it is predicting something the American warmongers presumably want to hear – the collapse of North Korea. When Dole hears the computer prediction he crows ecstatically,  “I won! ... Computers are science! Let's pull tighter for the final victory! I will appeal to the people. Clinton, I will beat you!” 

In this story, we the readers are invited to laugh at the folly of these computer-trusting Americans, knowing full well that the DPRK will not collapse in two years, nor ten, nor twenty. Yet in Ryŏksa ŭi Taeha, we are meant to appreciate the wisdom of the computer that could see what the US president and his advisors could not: a North Korean victory. What are we to make of this, other than that DoD supercomputers are apparently superior to CIA supercomputers? Whose side are these computers on, anyway?