like it would do them separately? he had a very clear purpose for asking that question. because he knew if we didn't separately the coast guard team would pass and the cruise ship thing would fail. it's my job as chairman to make sure that we don't play the game that way. so i just want to come up with you totally thank you one, are talking about experiences that are not comfortable to talk about, doing so in a very forthright way, for educating this panel and believe me, just because not all the members are here, a lot of the staff is tom and it's always the staff that really counts. [laughter] we've got good stuff, you will be a good senator. if you don't, well -- so i'm not going to carry this hearing forward, because i think the points that need to be made have been made and that's because you've made them clearly and with firmness and with

certainty, and with the degree of anger. which i share. so whatever you have come from, go back safely. and i thank you. this hearing is adjourned. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] . .

this week a debate on america's greatness. veterans health care, and the center cdc, we visit the atlanta press club and take a history tour looking at the civil war. c-span primetime, monday through friday at 8:00 p.m. eastern and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. you can call us or e-mail us. join the c-span conversation. like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. >> now, a conversation with authors featured in chance's

latest book. we look back at author interviews from our book notes and q & a programs. next, blaine harden talks about his book "escape" he escaped by going through an electrified fence and climbing over a dead companion's body. this program is just under an hour. >> host: your booking "escape from camp 14" but your preface is, his first memory is an execution. >> guest: the story is about a kid at this point in the story, whose name is nyok. born in camp 14, political labor camp in north korea. his first memory at the age of 4

was going with his mom to a place near where he grew up in the camp to watch somebody get shot, and shooting -- public executions in the camp were held every few weeks. and they were a way of punishing people who violated camp rules, and a terrorizing the 20,000 to 40,000 people who lived in the camp to obey the rules. from then on. >> host: you say in your book you have been to north korea opposite. did you get to see a camp? >> guest: nobody has been to a camp, other than north korean guards and a officials and the people who go to them and almost never come out. they're now five or six of these camps, and they contain between 150 and 200,000 prisoners. and with the exception of one camp, they are no-exit places.

where one goes if you are believed or imagined by the north korean government of having don something wrong, having been a wrong-doer or wrong can thinker, and you go there without trial. usually taken away at night. and you stay there for the rest of your life, and very often you go with your kids and with your parents. i was at a conference yesterday on the concentration camps, and the latest information is that half of the people in the camps now are believed to be just the relatives of wrong-doers or wrong-thinkers. so collective guilt is very much a part of this system. the reason the camps exist and have existed for more than 40 years, is because they're an instrument of terror. of the kim family dynasty.

what they do is they put away those who might cause trouble and they terrorize the 23 million, 24 million people in the country, to not even think about causing trouble. and to that end they've been pretty darn successful. north korea has been the longest lasting to totalitarian state. >> host: we have a google map of north korea and you can see the line of china. what -- when you were there, you say in your book there are 20 million people there. what is in your mind's eye about north korea and where did you go? >> guest: well, going to north korea is not a good way to report about north korea. i went along with a group of about 600 westerners when the new york philharmonic went to

pyongyang at the invitation of the government, for a special concert. and like almost all western visitors, we were housed in a high-rise hotel on an island, in pyongyang, and taken to various places that they want to show off. statues, assembly halls, grand avenues, the subway, and then we were taken to the airplane and left about two and a half days later. so, my understanding of north korea based on that trip is that the country is bizarre, and full of white concrete and very immaculately dressed guards. but that's not the reality of north korea. the way you find out about the reality of north korea -- and it's increasingly easy for a reporter to do it -- is to go to

seoul in south korea, where there are now close 230,000 defectors from south korea, almost all of whom have arrived in the past ten years. and you can talk to them, and they are by far the best sources about what it's like to live in that country, and how difficult it is to get out. and there are now 60 former camp inmates and former guards who have been interviewed by human rights groups, who have given a very detailed, nuanced and credible picture of what goes on in the camps and those -- that picture in their words has been supplemented by increasingly detailed satellite images of all the camps. >> host: 23 million in north. how many in the south? >> guest: more than 50. more than 50 million. and there are really two different places, two different

universes. south korea is the 11th 11th largest economy in the world. it has people -- people are obsessed with education. they work really hard. they have less leisure than any other country in the developed world, and they commit suicide at a very, very high rate. in fact the highest rate in the world now. it's a high-pressure, high-achieving, education-obsessed culture, that really does not pay a lot of attention to north korea in the cultural sense or in the aspirational sense. it deals with north korea because it must, because it's a trouble-making neighbor. >> host: if my memory is collect we lost 50,000 americans in the korean war. back in the early '50s. what was that war about and what was south korea then compared to north korea? >> guest: well, they were both

poor, and they were both recovering from the ravages ravf world war ii, and that war -- the united states divided the korean peninsula in the wake of world war ii between north and south, and the south was a sort of military dictatorship aligned with the united states, and the north was a military dictatorship aligned mostly with russia. kim il-sung was the leader who emerged in north korea. and he, over a period of ten years, created a cult personality around himself. he modeled his state after stalin's state, and then he invaded south korea in 1951, and made some real progress across south korea. there was a counterattack by

u.s.-led forces, and united nation force, and then of the course of three years they fought to a stalemate, and the same line was returned, and north and south korea have been divided ever since. and north korea remained aligned with russia and with china, and but north korea had a brand of dough tall tareanship that was increasingly isolated and increasingly cruel. kim il-sung was a popular leader. he had real grassroots support from lots of north koreans. and when he died in 1994, people genuinely wept. his son, the first hereditary dictateyear in a communist state, kim jung ill, was less popular. he didn't have a popular touch,

but he was shrewd and he was cruel, and the camps, as an instrument of enforcement, became increasingly important, and their population grew, and there is -- there are indications now, with this third kim family leader, kim jong-un, who is 28, 29 years old, and interestingly is about the same age as the hero of my book. he -- it's unclear how popular he will be or even if he is in control at this point. >> host: we'll come back to your hero of this book, shen, after i show you some video from our first book interview back in 1990, when i asked you why you liked to travel. >> i went to school one. to college and read and got

interested in faraway lands. i remember as a kid in college, i didn't believe they existed. i really didn't. sometimes i think that walter cronkite and other people were putting together a big elaborate dedepression -- desings and day were photographing sets and that world one there, and i always wanted -- rick particularly in africa can to see if it was there. >> host: do you remember saying that. >> guest: yes. i do. i did think that. i sort of spent my life proving myself wrong, proving my college self wrong, by traveling and being a foreign correspondent. now. >> host: now, win we talked to you at the "washington post" and you wrote a book about africa, since then where have how lived? >> guest: in eastern europe. i was there for the collapse of communism and the yugoslav wars,

really interesting mixes one was story of joy and hope and reconciliation. the prague revolution where in czechoslovakia people came out in the hundreds of thousands and listened to his incredible speeches, and left the main square and didn't even step on the flower beds. it was a wonderful, joyous thing to do and to be part of. and then the yugoslavs crackup came, and it was a horrible mess that americans didn't understand, this incredibly dangerous -- went on for a long time. i did not see it all through. i left about two-thirds of the way through it, and came home and wrote a book about another subject and felt terrible guilt

and actual supply post traumatic stress. i spent a lot of time in sarajevo and had taken risks and the bad guys were winning when i left. so a very strange assignment, from joy to heartbreak. >> host: in 1995, you were talking bat book on the columbia river. hearst -- i think this -- let's watch this clip. we were on the bus at the time. >> i was born there, and i grew up there. >> have you been back lately? >> i spent from -- most of 1993 and part of '94 there, working on a book about the columbia river, which is a big environmental problem april. been dammed to death and the salmon have been to a large extent wiped out. and there's a huge public policy debate. what is interesting about the place is my family went there, in fact i was born in the town the year that water was diverted from the columbia river to irrigate the farms around the town, and my family and my

ability to go to college all depended on destroying the river. and that's what the story is about. >> host: moses lake, washington, is where? >> guest: it's in the columbia basin, almost in the middle of washington state. and it was a desert. and they built grand coulee dam and diverted water into the desert and turned it into a very productive familiarity that's where i was born. >> host: you left eastern europe and came back here and then where did you go? >> guest: i went to "the new york times" for four years, and covered -- i was a roving national correspondent, and also i did stories about africa and eastern europe for the magazine. and i went back to "most. p.o.w. the mother ship, as all the editors called it, and it was the place that had hired me when i was young, when i first came on your -- i'd been -- it's

been a few years -- and so i went back and then i went out to cover the american west for the "washington post," from 2003 until 2007, and then the they i said, i don't know. my wife said, yes, we should go. and so we went, with our little daughter and son. and we were there until 2010. >> host: where did you live? >> guest: in tokyo. when i went to japan, my boss, david hoffman, whose has been the boss of the foreign correspondents. >> host: at the post. >> guest: at the post he said you're a feature writer. i want you to do something that is hard. something that you probably don't want to do. he said i want you to write about north korea. i want you to bash your head against that story and tell us something new. tell us how it works. and if you fail, that's fine,

but if you don't try i'm going to be very unhappy. and so i started to work on that. >> host: this book, "escape from camp 14" has a picture or a young man. who is he. >> guest: a survivor of camp 14. he was born in the camp and escaped in 2005 and as far as we know he is the only individual on earth, born in those camps to get out and tell what it's like to grow up in the camp. >> host: where did you get the idea to do a book about him. >> guest: i interviewed him in 2008 and wrote a story that was on the front page, that really resulted in an incredible emotional reaction from readers theyn't wanted to know more about him and the camps. wanted to give him money and save his soul. so i went back to him a few weeks after the piece came out, and i said, look, let's do a book. let's dig into everything you know about that camp and how you

got out of there and what it was like to walk across north korea, and he didn't trust me, and he didn't want to do it. so i begged him for nine months, and human rights groups, who had become familiar with his story, said, you should cooperate because this is -- will further your goals, which is to make the world aware of what goes on in these camps, and also it will maybe create some sort of governmental pressure in the united states so that human rights becomes at the top of the agenda when they deal with north korea. >> host: you made an arrangement with him about the money. >> guest: we split the money even, and that was important to him, because he wanted -- he didn't have -- he doesn't have any money, and he really doesn't have any business other than being a survivor of this camp. and then we started to work on it. >> host: where did you get the

idea that he even had a story. >> guest: well, knew he had a story because a friend of mine, who has become a very close friend, lisa colacurcio, with the u.s. committee on human rights in north korea, she met my wife at a book group and told her about this guy, and then i talked to her, and then i went to seoul and had lurch with him, and that resulted in the newspaper story. >> host: how did you deal with the language. >> guest: it's really interest, the language. i don't speak korean and he does not speak anything other than korean. so, i had a series of translators. we did interviews in seoul. we did more interviews in seoul than we did interviews in southern california, then interviews in seattle, and then we also did hundreds of e-mails, and -- >> host: i want to show you this picture of you in front of the

louis vuitton store in seoul. >> guest: this is during one of our weeks of interviews in seoul in 2009. >> host: how tall are you and how tall is he. >> guest: i'm 6'1", and he is about 5'6". and he is --tq&z maybe 5'5". he is stunted from malnutrition, and hisek arms are bowed from childhood labor. most of the male population of north korea is stunted from malnutrition. when males come to south korea -- now there are about 30,000 of them -- they are on average now -- according to the associating oreckan government, more than -- the south korean government, more than five inches shorter than their south korean peers. >> host: where his he today.

>> guest: in washington because we're promoting the book but he moved six or seven months ago from the united states back to seoul, where he is doing some web broadcasting with some young human rights friends and invites other defectors on to talk about north korea. >> host: so, the translation was expensive? >> guest: no, it wasn't that expensive. a lot of people care about shen, and they care about his story and want to get it out. i had really good translators in some of whom worked for the "washington post," in seoul, but the most important translator was a young guy named david kemp, who is a friend of shin's, and whose family befriend emhim and fed shin in southern california when he was living in torrance, a suburb of los angeles.

and david kim offered to be a translator. david kim is a graduate of yale. now at northwestern law school. and he is incredibly smart, and he is really multilingual and in idio mat tick american english and speaks korean with his parent whose don't speak much english. and he is a good friend. so he did all of the translating in southern california, which is where i did the bulk of the reporting and where shin really opened up to me after a year. >> host: where is this picture from? >> guest: this is taken from the group house in torrance, california, where shin was living and working for a group called liberty in north korea, which is a human rights group called link, which helped bring shin to the united states in 2009, and where he was a unpaid volunteer. they gave him housing in this group house, and he lived

there -- depending on the time, but between 12 and 25 people lived in that house. mostly people younger than him. >> host: how old is he today? >> guest: he is 29. >> host: you have a lot of torture stories in this book. go to the one -- this is out of context just so people can understand how far it went with him -- the story about him being put over the flame. >> guest: when he was 13 years old, he was taken to an underground prison, and i'll explain the context for this a little later. but he was taken to an underground prison and asked about the escape plans of his mother and brother. and he didn't have good answers. he was very afraid, very confused. and so at one point in that underground prison he was taken interest a room that looked like a machine shop.

he was stripped, and hung upside-down from his ankles and his wrists with his clothes off in a kind of "u p.o.w. with his backhanding down, and a cart was brought in with a coal fire, and the flames -- bellows were put on the flames and the flames came up and the cart was rolled underneath his body and he was burned as they asked him questions. and he passed out. >> host: what were the extent of his injuries from hat? >> guest: well, they're still visible. he has terrible burn marks on his lower back and buttocks, of a most severe burn that you would get from being held over a fire. he has other marks on his body from other events. he has middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle. when he was 22, 23, he was working in a military uniform

factory, inside the camp. >> host: the camp. >> guest: he was fixing sewing machines and working with a you of seem stresses and he dropped a sewing machine, and they got real man because they're very valuable, maybe more valuable than the human beings who fixed them, and they grabbed him, took him to a table and hacked off part of his finger as punishment. >> host: right there. >> guest: right there. almost immediately. and he has scarring on his legs from when he was hung upside-down in that prison as part of the torture to get him to talk about the escape of his mother and brother. and when he escaped the camp, he called to -- crawled through a high voltage fence, and his legs came in contact with the lowest strand, and it burned his legs from knee to ankle, on both legs, and the scars there are really horrible. >> host: are you talking about

when he escaped the camp and went to china. >> guest: yes. >> host: what year was that? >> guest: that was in 2005. >> host: how did he get inside this camp in the first place? >> guest: he was born there. his crime was to be born, and his parents were there for reasons that are almost as flimsy. his father was in the camp because his father's brothers, after the korean war, had fled to south korea, and after the authorities heard about that, his father and his father's many brothers and parents, were all rounded up and taken to camp 14. and that is where shin was born. he doesn't know why his mother was there. she never told him and he never asked. they didn't have the kind of relationship where they would talk. his parents, his mom and dad,

conceived him because they were chosen by the guards for something called a reward marriage, and shin was bred like a farm animal in the camp, and raised by his mother, and he was physically -- his mother gave birth to him but he was raised with the values and rules of the guards and was not close to his mother at all. he had to memorize ten rules of the camp, most of which end by saying if you don't do this you will be shot immediately. the first rule, most important rule, is if you try to escape you will be shot immediately, and the corollary to the rule is if you hear about an escape and don't rate you'll be shot immediately. and these -- these were basically his ten commandments, his ethical guide posts as a little guy, growing up in that camp.

>> host: let me read the rest of those ten quickly, and they almost all have, will be shot immediately if they're caught doing this. the first one is do not try to escape. second one, no more than two prisoners can meet together. third one, do not steal. fourth, guards must be obeyed unconditionally. five, anyone who sees a fugitive or suspicious figure must promptly report him. six, prisoners must watch one another and report any suspicious behavior. seven, prisoners must more than philadelphia the work assigned them each day. eight, beyond the workplace there must be no intermingling of the sexes for personal reasons. nine, prisoners must genuinely respent of their errors, and ten, prisoners who violate the laws of the camp will be shot immediately. were they really shot immediately? >> guest: they were shot offer, and ship was one of the only

forms of entertainment in the camp, where people get together to watch something, was an execution, and so the rules were taken very seriously, particularly by the kids, who saw the results of disobedience very clearly. >> host: who was the first execution that shin saw? >> guest: it was the one that begins the book, when he was four years old. >> host: how does he remember anything from being four? >> guest: well, i said, what is your first memory? and he said, i remember going with a crowd of people with my mom and being very excited because it was the first time he had ever been around a crowd of people. the rules of the camp, you don't spend time with a lot of people. so he was -- that is what i think triggers his memory, that he had never been with a crowd of people.

never heard this hubbub of people whispering and being close together in a big crowd. ... >> it comes out of the escape

plan of his mother and brother. when he was 13, he was living in a bording school that was all kids leave their parents are 12 and go to live with other kids in a boarding school in the camp. this is only a couple blocks actually from where his mom was staying. he had been in the boarding school for a while. on a friday night, his teacher, a guard who worked there, told him you go home and stay with your mom tonight. and shin didn't want to but he did it was he was told to. his brother was also at the house and this is unusual because his brother lived away from home also. he lived in a concrete factory which was about a mile and a half. the camp is big. >> his brother was eight years older. >> and shin hardly knew his

brother. he had no relationship with him. they had supper. the supper he had eaten -- the only meal he had eaten in his life which was salt, corn and cabbage. that was breakfast, lunch and dinner. >> how do you eat salt? >> they put the salt in the cabbage soup and corn. it is a kind of gruel. and that is the primary thing. other than small animals they could catch in the camp like mice and rats. but his meal was that classic meal. he had the meal, went to sleep in his house that he lived in had a central kitchen and one bedroom. the central kitchen was for three other units besides the room where his mother slept. he went into the bedroom, fell asleep and was awakened by the conversation of his mother and brother at midnight.

he heard them talking, looked out and saw his mother was cooking rice for his brother. rice is something that hardly exist at all in the camps. but it is grown there so some farm workers are steal it. she had never made rice for him and she was jealous about that. that peiqupiqued his interest. and his brother was in some kind of trouble in the camp. he had violated a rule apparently and left the concrete factory without permission and went to his brother. and guards would soon come and take him away and punish him. probably not execute him but beat him up which was a common way of punishing people. shin listened even more.

and he heard his brother mention the world escape. and his heart started to pound. he became very, very upset and very afraid because of these rules. if you don't report an escape you would be escuted. and then he heard his mother talking about the conversation and talking about escape. shin listened for a while and it was clear about trying to escape the plant and the rice she was cooking was food for flight to take and eat after he was out of the camp. shin got up, told his mom he had to go to the bathroom and went out and found a guard and went to a classmate and said what do i do? and they said we should report them. when he reported this he was

thinking how can i turn this to my advantage and asked the guard if he could have more food as a result of his snitching and if he could be made class leader; a position that allowed him to do less work, have fewer beatings and maybe more food. the guard said no problem. he called his superiors and told shin to go to bed. shin went to bed and the next morning he was awakened and told guards were waiting for him. and they put a blindfold on him outside of the school and put him in a jeep and drove him off to an underground prison inside the camp which before that he didn't know existed. he was taken inside and interrogated. he went thinking they would see him as a good snitch. but they started asking him

questions about his involvement in the escape and he was frightened and didn't answer in a coherent way for the first two rounds of interrogation which included the torture i told you about. in the third interrogation when he was too weak to get up because he had been burned so badly and was lying on the floor in his cell he said i did a good job. i turned in my mother. you can check it out with my classmate i told. and they did check it out. and shin was allowed to recover in that underground prison. and then he was taken out after seven months and back to the same officers who had originally interrogated him and he came out and saw his father was in the camp. and his father had also been tortured and looked horrible. his leg was broken in the torture and his father could

hardly move or walk. and the place he first remembers when he was four. big crowd. shin had his blindfold taken off and he thought they are going to kill me now and he was terrified he was about to be shot. they took his father and helped his father up to the front of the row and then they dragged out his mom and his brother. what is really interesting about this is that when his mom came out she was put on a makeshift gallow in front of him and she wasn't blindfolded and a hood wasn't put over her face and she tried to catch shin's eye. he hated her for the horrors he had just gone through in this

underground prison and for her wreckless talk of escape and he refused to catch his eye. she was hung in front of him and his brother was shot three times by the guards. and shin went went back into the population as a 14-year-old. >> what happened to his father? >> his father lost his job as a lathe operator and started acting as a laborer around the camp. he had a strained relationship after the execution. his father tried to say i am sorry we were selfish and had kids in this camp and he said i hope somehow you can get out of here and shin said i don't care what you said. >> is he alive? >> shin escaped a decade later

when he was 23. >> the year he escaped was? >> 2005. >> how did he escape? >> he escaped -- the escape is very important part of the book. one thing i want to say about the appearance of the execution is that shin was raised in such a way he didn't really love his mother. he didn't have feelings of affection or trust toward his father or brother. i asked him about those things. how could you hate your mother? how could you not look your mother in the eye when she died? and he said they were competi r competitors for food for me and did nothing for me that was useful. >> what about god? >> he had never heard of god. this is a concept he heard about in south korea.

but learning how to trust other people and learning to feel guilty for what he did with his mother is something he has had to do since he got to south korea and the united states. he has seen other families and mothers and sons together and he has begun to feel guilty about the boy he was and guilty. >> i don't want to leave it with does he know what happened to his father? >> no. he assumes his father was either tortured or killed as a result of his escape. >> i know this is the book that people should read and i am sure from your perspective and i don't want you going into every detail. but escaping to china was difficult in what way for him? you say it never happened

someone born in the camp escaped the camp. >> that would give you the indication that this camp existed since 1958 and no body is known to have escaped it until shin in 2005. so it is damn hard to get out of there. he did it was he met someone who inspired him to think of the outside world. i think this is sort of shin's birth as a human being. he was in the camp, working in a sewing machine factory when he was assigned to work with an older guy in his 40's. his name was park. and park had lived and travelled and been educated in the former soviet union. he was a worldly and nice guy. and shin's job was to snitch on him because he had proved himself as a snitch over the

years doing it with his parents and many others. he started talking to park about the world and shin was interested in hearing the stories. and then shin started talking about something that -- or park started talking about something that shin was really interested and that was food. park liked to eat and talked about the joys and wonders of grilled meat in china with grilled pork, beef and chicken and you could eat until you were full and you didn't have to be rich. that is the way people live outside of the fence. and that was a revelation that shin couldn't get out of his imagination. he dreamed and fantasieied abou eating well. he told him south korea, north

korea and the united states existed. that the leaders in south korea were thieves and thugs. but none of that was interesting to shin because he had no context for understanding that. his context was that he had been hungry his whole life and he learned if he could get out of this cage he could eat. he said, you know, that was enough for him. >> camp 14 is how far from the chinese border? >> it is about 300 miles. and it is about 50 miles from the mountains of central north korea. >> what was the camp surrounded with? what kind of fence. >> it was a barb wire fence between 8-10 barbwire lines

electric electric. it was the kind of fence that will grab you and kill you. shin heard about grilled meats and got excited and said let's fry to escape park. and park was okay with that idea. he met park just two months before deciding to escape. this was all sudden. shin was very excited. they were really lucky in their escape planning because they were assigned on the first of the year to go up to the side of the camp to gather firewood that was close to the fens that wasn't near the guard towers where they looked down on prisoners with weapons and could have shot people running for the fence. they waited until late afternoon on january 2nd, 2005 till dusk.

and they ran towards the fence. in fact, when they decided to go, when shin decided to go, he said let's go to park. and park said i am not so sure. and shin grabbed his hand and grabbed and pulled it toward the fence. and park started to run. as they ran, shin slipped and fell in the snow on an icy part of the snow because it was cold in the middle of the winter. park got there first and shoved his torso between the wires and was eelectricuted and shin got through the fence and his leg slipped off and he got terrible burns from the voltage. i talked to an expert on

electricution and this scenario which struck me as pretty weird and odd and not believable -- he said it is totally believable this would happen. and he needed that insulator of a human body grounding the voltage to the ground so he could get through the fence without taking the lethal charges. >> chances he would have been electricut electricuted? >> he got through the fence and the plan was for shin to be mr. insider. once they got through the fence, mr. park, who was outside the

fence and grow up in the real world, she was supposed to be mr. outside and take them to china where he had an uncle and plan to get them the south korea. >> how long did it take him to get to china and back to south korea after getting out? >> it took him a month of walking, riding in trucks, he hopped a train. and one of the things that is really interesting about his journey across north korea, a totalitarian police state, and this kid didn't know which way was north, and it is an incredible and lucky trip he made. shin had a couple things in his advantage. he had a cunning sense of

self-survival. and he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. he didn't tell anybody he was from a camp. a few hours after getting through the fence he came to an old barn that no body was around and he found military clothes he put on. >> this was in china? >> this was in north korea. north korea is the most military society on earth with a million man army. there are military uniforms in every bar you would find. so he found a military uniform and a change of clothes so he was no longer dressed like a camp inmate. and he then walked into a town and he looked very much like a lot of young north koreans. he was skinny, he was faciliiltd

their wearing an old military uniform and didn't have much to do. there were a lot of people drifting in the famine of the 1990's where people died. so north korea is a digorganized place where the food distribution is informal and depends on smugglers and farmers selling when they are not supposed to and the north korea government has to put up with this messy informal market system because it is the only way people can eat. 80-90 percent of the calories in the stomach of north koreans come from this system. he fell into the system and didn't know it existed. within a few days, he had broken into the a house, stolen warmer clothes and stolen a big bag of rice.

i think it was a 10-pound bag of rice and he put in a backpack he also stole. he walked past a market and she said what do you have in the bag, boy and he said i have rice and she said i will give you money for. he was given money and that was his first transaction with money before park told him it existed. he brought crackers, nuts and a few snacks and went walking on the town and saw other traders who were moving north towards china to do more trading. he fell in with them and that was his route out of china. >> host: let's go back to how you put this together. how many hours did you talk to shin to get this book? >> guest: i am not sure how many hours. but it was, i think, we had seven sessions of interviews and four of the sessions were

week-long sessions where we would start in the morning and end in the late afternoon. >> host: how did you document it? >> guest: the interviews? >> host: yeah, did you record them? >> guest: i recorded them on audio only and took notes on the computer at the same time. there is a question of verifying mr. shin's story. >> you say he lied to you. >> guest: he lied about the role of betraying his mother. he said they were executed and he saw it. he didn't tell us because he thought the south korean government might arrest him and other people would think of him not as not human. those were his words. so he decided he would leave

that out. and a year into the interviews he decided to tell the truth and he said he did it was he was surrounded by people telling the truth and they cared him about and he felt an obligation to tell the truth. >> host: when you see this photo taken in, i believe, seattle, what do you see in that face from your knowledge of sitting with him? >> guest: what is interesting about his face is he looks so young given the hardships of his life. >> host: his age now? >> guest: he's aged a little. this was taken at 27-28. but i met him a few years before that and he looked like a teenager. i saw him yesterday and he as a

youthful look. >> host: how has he changed since you started talking to him? >> guest: less weary and suspicious and a little more at peace with himself because he told the betrayal of his mother. we were talking at a human rights convention yesterday and he talked about selling out his mother, why he did it and what he hopes comes of the truth. he wants people to know this is the kind of human beings they are raising in the camps. there is the human rights of starving people, shooting people and also that of raising children to be monsters. >> host: did you ever see him get mad at you? >> guest: he got mad at me because he didn't want to talk about this stuff and journalist want to keep drilling. i say in the book it was like being a dentist and not using medicine and it was painful and

miserable and sometimes he would say no and leave. >> host: why do you think the american people will be interested in the book when you say the south koreans could careless about the north koreans? >> guest: well it is a great story. it is an adventure and a psychological story because it is about how a person goes from having no human emotions to figuring out they are a good idea and then developing it. the normal trajectory of escape stories is you have someone coming from a sophisticated civilized family, they are taken to the camp, all of their other relatives are killed and they have to behave in an inhuman way

to survive and they come out telling the story of descending into hell and coming out. shin was born in hell, and thought it was home and thought the values he learned there were what it was to be a human being and has now discovered the world and what it means to be a human being are totally different. >> host: why did the south koreans not care about the north koreans? >> guest: because they have moved on as a culture and economy. their aspirations are far greater individual wealth, te technilogica technilogical achievement. north korea is a dead weight on those goals. most of the family ties have

been made stronger by time and weakened by age. most of the people with living relati relatives are in their 60's, 70's, and 80's. so the connections are falling apart. >> i ran into some germans and said how is it going in your country and they said okay. and i said how about the east and he said they are doing well. and are they worried in south korea it is going to cost them to pick up the 23 million people? >> guest: they are very worried. there are studies about the cost of it and estimates it could cost three times as much in dollars to have unification with the north because of the development problems in north korea. if you fly over the korean

peninsula at night. you see light in south korea and china but it is dark in north korea. it shows the development. very few roads, education system has largely collapsed, there is factories that don't work. the place is a basket case run by a militarized state that survives because of aid from china and the sales of missiles to places like iran. >> host: we will run out of town. you live where now? >> guest: i live in seattle now. i moved back to seattle after leaving tokyo. >> where did you meet your wife? >> on a blind date in new york city. >> seattle? no more "washington post" or new york times? >> right. i took a buy out from the post.

i have been working for the economist and front line occasionally. >> what have you done for frontline? >> i worked about a copper mind in alaska. >> you have another book in mind? >> it might be about the copper mine in alaska or about my father's generation and i am not sure. >> host: so what do you expect shin to do? will he end up in south korea permane permanently or come back to the united states? we have not mentioned the couple from ohio. >> guest: the couple from ohio has been important to shin. he calls them his parents and they are happy with that. they read my piece in "washington post" in december of 2008 and have helped get him into the united states, sg given

him counseling and love. and they are from columbus ohio. >> >> host: why did they get into it? >> guest: they are north korea human rights activist and devote christians. they got interested in him and sought him out. >> host: where do you expect him to end up? >> guest: he is 29. i hope he will use the money from this book to get more education and i would hope to learn english and pursue this dream as a human rights advocate on north korea and other issues. he has not done exactly as everyone hoped in terms of education, training, psychotherapy. he is his own individual person