those who violated camp rules. and the 40,000 people who lived in the camp. >> you say in your book, you've been to north korea once. >> nobody has been to a camp other than north korean guards, other than those who go to them and never come out. they contain between 150 and 200,000 prisoners. with the exception of one camp, there are no exit-places, where one goes if you are believed or imagined by the north koreans of having done something wrong. of having been a wrong doer or wrong thinker.

you are taken away at night. and you stay there for the rest of your life. and very often, you go with your kids and parents. i was at a conference -- half the people in the camps are believed to be a relative. collective guilt is part of this system. the reason the camps exist and have for years is because they are an instrument of terror of the kim family dynasty. they put away those who may cause trouble and terrorize the people in the country to not only think -- even think about causing trouble.

they've been very successful. north korea is the longest- lasting totalitarian state. >> we have a shot of north korea. you see the line of china. above -- what -- when you were there, you said, there are 23 million people there. what is in your mind's eye about north korea? >> this is not a good way to report about north korea. i went with a group of about 600 westerners when the new york philharmonic went to pyongyang. we were in a high-rise hotel on an island. taken to various places to show

off. statues and assembly halls. a day, two and a half later. based on that trip -- the country is full of concrete and emaculately dressed guards. the way you find out the reality, and it's easy for a reporter to do it is go to seoul, where there are close to 30,000 defectors from south korea. they almost all have arrived in the last 10 years. they are by far the best sources of what this is like and

how difficult it is to get out. there are 60 former camp inmates and former guards, who have been interviewed, and given a nuanced and credible picture of what goes on. the -- that picture in their words has been suplemented with sattelite images of the camps. >> 23 milion to the north. how many to the south? >> more than 50 million. south korea is now the 11th largest economy in the world. they have people obsessed with education. they work hard and have less

leisure than any other country in the developed world. and they commit suicide at the highest rate in the world. a high-pressure, high- achieving, educational-obsessed culture. they do not pay enough attention to north korea. they do because they must. >> we lost 50,000 americans in the korean war in the 50's. what was this war about? what was south korea compared to north korea. >> they were poor and recovering from the ravages of world war 2. that war -- the united states divided the penninsula in the wake of world war 2.

the south was a military dictatorship aligned with the united states. the north was aligned with russia. kim il-sung emerged in north korea. he, over several years, he modeled his state after stalin's state. in 1951. it made some real progress. there was a counterattack. the united nation sources. and the same line was returned. north korea remained aligned with russia.

it became increasingly isolated and cruel as time went by. kim ill-sung had a grassroots support. when he died in 1984, people wept. his son, the first hereditary dictator in a communist state, kim jong-il, was less popular. but he was shrewd and cruel. the camps became increasingly important. the population grew.

there are indications with this third kim family leader, jim jong-un, who is 28, 29 years old, and is about the same age as the hero of my book, he -- it's unclear how popular he will be or if he is in control. >> we will come back to your hero of the book. i will show you some video from our first interview in 1990, when i asked you why you like to travel. >> i read and i got interested and i remember, as a kid in college, i dind't believe they existed. i sometimes would go and think, walter kronkite put together a big, elaborate deception.

the world outside is what i knew. >> do you remember saying that. >> i did think that. i spent my life proving myself wrong. >> when we talked to you, you wrote a book about africa. since then, when have you lived? >> i was there for the collapse of communism and the yugoslav wars. the prague revolution. in czeckoslovakia, they came

out to listen tot his speeches, and left the main square and did not step on the flowerbeds. and the crack-up came and it was a horrible mess. americans did not understand. i left about halfway -- two thirds of the way through it. i felt terrible guilt. some post-traumatic stress. i didn't think i'd done a good job. a very strange assignment.

>> you talked about a book on the columbia river. we were on the bus. >> i was born there. >> do you go back lately? >> i spent 1993 and 1994 there, working on a book about the columbia river. the salmon have been wiped out. there is a huge public policy debate. my family went there. i was born in the town the year water was diverted to irrigate the farms. my education depended on destroying the river. >> where is this? >> in the columbia basin, in

washington state. it was a desert. they build the dam and turned the desert into a very productive farm area. >> so you left eastern europe, and came here. >> i was a roving nationa correspondent, who did stories about africa and eastern europe. i went back to the post, "the mothership," and this was the place that hired me when i was young. and i went out to cover "the washington post." and they said, "do you want to go to asia?"

my wife said, "yes, we should go with our daughter and son." we went there until 2010. we went to tokyo. when i went to japan, my boss, david hoffman, the boss of the foreign correspondents, said, you are a future writer. i want you to do something that's hard. something you don't want to do. i want you to write about north korea. tell us how it works and if you fail, that's fine. be if you don't try, i will unhappy. i started working on that. >> this book, "escape from camp 14," has the young man.

>> he is a survivor, who escaped in 2005. he is the only individual on earth born in those camps who got out and says what this is like. >> where did you get the idea? >> i wrote a story on the front page. it resulted in an incredible emotional reaction. they wanted to know about him, give him money and save his soul. i went back to him and said, "let's do a book and dig into everything you know about that camp and what it was like." and he didn't trust me and didn't want to do it. so i begged him for 9 months.

human rights groups said, you should cooperate. this will further your goals. it goes on in this camps. maybe some kind of governmental pressure. so human rights would be at the top of the agenda. this was important. he didn't have any money or any business aside from being a survivor. >> where did you get the idea. >> i knew he had a story. a friend of mine -- who is a very clsoe friend, who is with

the u.s. committee on human right,s she met my wife at a book group. i talked to her and had lunch with him. >> how did you deal with the language. >> it is interesting. i don't speak korean. he doesn't speak anything other than korean. i had a series of translators. we did interviews in seoul. we did interviews in seattle and hundreds of emails. >> we have this picture in front of the louis vitton store. >> this was during one of the weeks of interviews in seoul.

>> he is about 5'6". he is -- maybe 5'5". he is stunted from malnutrition. most o fthe males are stunted. there are 30,000 of them. they are on an average, more than five inches shorter than their south korean contemporaries. this is an amazing statement. >> where is he today? >> he is in washington. we are promoting the book. he has moved six or seven months ago back to seoul, where he does web broadcasting with human rights friends, to talk about north korea.

>> the translation was expensive? >> no. it wasn't that expensive. a lot of people care about him. they care about his story and want to get it out. i had really good translators, some of whom worked for the "washington post." the most important translator was named david kim, who is a friend of his and whose family befriended him in southern california. when he lived in a suburb of los angeles. david kim offered to be a translator. he is now at northwestern law school and is incredibly smart. he is very fluent in english,

and speaks korean with his parents. he's a good friend. he did all the translating in southern california. this is where he opened up to me. he was working for "liberty in north korea," a human right's group which helped bring shin to the united states in 2009. he was an unpaid volunteer. they gave him housing and he lived there. between 12 and 25 people lived in that house, most younger than him. >> how old is he today? >> he is 29.

>> you have a lot of torture stories. just so people see how far it went, the story about him being put over the flame. >> when he was 13, he was taken to an underground prison. he was taken to ask about the escape plans. he didn't have a good answer. he was very confused. he was taken to a machine shop, hung upside down by his ankles and wrists, in a "u' with his back hanging down. a cart came in with a coal fire.

the flames came up. the cart was rolled under his body and he was burned as they asked him questions. >> what were his injuries? >> they are still visible. burn marks on his back and buttocks, a most severe burn you would get being held over a fire. the middle finger of his right hand was cut off at his first knuckle. when he was 22, he was working on military uniforms. he worked with seamstresses. he dropped a sewing machine, and they got mad.

they are more valuable than the human beings. they hacked off part of his finger. almost immediately. he has scarring on his legs from being hung upside-down. his legs came in contact with the strand. it burned his legs from knee to ankle. the scars there are horrible. >> what year was that. >> that was in 2005. >> how did he get to this in the first place.

his crime was to be born. his parents were there. his parents were there for reasons as flimsy. his father's brothers had flet to south korea. after the authorities heard about that, his father and the many brothers. they were rounded up and taken to camp 14. that's where shin was born. his mother never told him, he never asked. they did not have the kind of relationship where they would talk. his mom and dad conceived him because they were chosen by the guard for the reward marriage. he was bred like a farm animal, and raised by his mother.

his mother gave birth to him, but he was raised with the values of the guards. he had to memorize 10 rules of the camp. most of them say, if you don't do this, you are shot immediately. if you try to escape, you will be shot. and if you hear about an escape and don't report it, you will be shot. >> let me say this quickly so people can understand. almost all of them -- no more than two prisoners can be together.

do not steal. guards must be obeyed. anyone who sees a fugitive must report them. prisoners must report suspicious behavior, and prisoners must fufil their work. and there must not be intermingling between the sexes. they must repent the errors, and those who break the rules of the camp will be shot. >> they were shot often. shin -- one of the only forms where people get together to watch something was an execution. so the rules were taken very seriously.

particularly by the kids. who saw the results of disagreements. >> the first execution he saw. >> it was whe nhe was four. >> how does he remember this? >> i said, "what is your first memory?" he said, "i went with a crowd of people, and my mom." it was the first time he was around a crowd of people. you don't spend time with people. he'd never been in a crowd of people, this group of people whispering and being close together. many thousands of prisoners. >> what about putting marbles in their mouths when shot?

>> i talked to three others. they do it so they don't denounce the guards or the leadership. they can't say anything. it's rocks. >> rocks. and they put a hood over them. >> sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. >> what about his parents? with the death of his parents and his brother. >> the real heart of the book, and the pyschological trauma comes out of the escape plan of his mothe rand brother. when he was 13, he was living in a boarding school. they are a few blocks from where he was staying.

a guy who wore a gun told him to stay with his mom. he didn't think he would want to. he went home that night. his brother also lived away from home. he lived in a concrete factory. >> his brother was 8 years older. >> shin hardly knew his brother. they had supper, the supper he'd eaten. the only meal he'd eaten. salt, corn, and cabbage. that was breakfast, lunch, and

dinner. >> how do you eat salt? >> they put it in soup. it is a kind of gruel. other than small animals like mice and rats. this meal was that classic meal. he had the meal, went to sleep in the house she lived in which at a central kitchen and one bedroom. the central kitchen was for three other units besides the room where his mother slept. he went into this bedroom, fell asleep and was awakened by the conversation of his mother and brother about midnight and he heard them talking and he looked out and saw that his mother was cooking rice for his brother. rice is something that hardly

exists at all in the camp but it is grown there's so some farmworkers can still head and his mom worked at a farm on the camp. she must a stolen some and was making rice. she never made price for them. he was really jealous. he was 13-years old. that piqued his interest and he heard them talking. his brother was in some kind of trouble in the camp. he had apparently violated a rule and had left the concrete factory without permission and had gone to his mother. guards would soon come for him and taken away and punish him but probably not execute him but beat him up. shin listen more and heard his brother mention the word escape. his heart started to pound. he became very upset and afraid

because of these rules. if you don't report an escape, you will be executed. then he heard his mother countenancing that conversation about escape. shin listen for a while and it was clear they were talking about trying to escape and the rice he was cooking was food for flight for him to take and he after he cut 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 reported them. first he went to class and ask what to do and the classmate said we should report them so that went together. when he reported this escape, he was wondering how he can turn this to the his advantage. he asked the guard if he could have more food as a result of him snitching and defeat also be

made class leader, a position that would allow him to do less work, take fewer beatings, and maybe have more food as well. the guard said sure, no problem and the guard called his superior and told shin to go to bed. he went to bed in the school where he lived in the next morning, he was awakened and told there were guards waiting for him. they put a blindfold on him by the school and put him in a jeep and drove him to this underground prison in the camp which he did not know existed. he was taken inside and he was 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 confused and he did not answer in any coherent way for his

first two rounds of interrogation which included that torture that i told you about. in the third interrogation when he was too weak to get up because he had been burned badly, he was lying on the floor in his cell, he said he did a good job and i turned in my mother. you can check this out with my class met and they checked it out and shin was allowed to recover in the underground prison and then he was taken out after seven months. he was taken back to the same officers who had originally interrogated him. he came out and saw his father was there and his father had also been tortured and looked horrible. it father's leg was akimbo, had been broken in the torture and he could hardly walk. there were both taken together in that jeep with blindfolds on back to the execution grounds,

the place he first remembers when he was four. remembers the big crowd and shin had his blindfold taken off and he said they are going to kill me. and he was terrified was about to be shuttered they took his father and helped his father to the front of the rope and delton to the front of a row and they dragged out his mom and brother. what is really interesting about this is that when his mom came out, she was put on a makeshift gallows right in front of them. she was not blindfolded and a hood was not put over her face. she tried to catch her sons i and he hated her for they are as he had gone through in this underground prison and for reckless talk of escape. he refused to catch her eye and she was hanged in front of him and then his brother was shot in

the head three times by the guards. shin went back into the population as a 14-year-old. >> what happened to his father? >> he lost his good job as a lathe operator. he began to work as a laborer and shin had a strange relationship with them. his father tried to say he was sorry for having children and the camp and he hopes somehow he could get out of here. shin said he did not care. >> is he alive? >>shin escaped one decade later when he was 23. >> the year he escapes? >> 2005. >> how did he escape?

>> the escape is a very important part of the book. shin was raised in such a way that he did not love his mother. he did not have feelings of affection, trust towards his father or his brother. i first asked about those things and how could you hate your mother? he said these people were competitors with me for food. they did nothing for me that was useful. >> what about god? >> he had never heard of god. this is a concept he heard about when he got to south korea but learning how to trust other people and learning to feel guilty for what he did with his mother is something that he has had to do since he got to south

korea and the united states. he has seen other families, other mothers and sons together. he has begun to feel terribly guilty about the kind of boy he was and what he did. then he was not guilty. >> does he know what happened to his father? >> no, he assumes his father was either tortured or killed as a result of his escape. >> this is a book that people should read i don't want you to go into every detail but escaping to china was difficult for him? you say it as never happened before that someone has escaped the camp. >> this camp existed since 1958.

nobody is known to have escaped until shin in 2005. it is damn hard to get out of there. he did it because he met someone who inspired him to think of the outside world. this is his birth as a human being. he was in the camp where king and a sewing machine factory when he was a assigned to work with an older guy who was in his early 40's whose name was park and he had lived in p'yongyang. he was a world league and nice guy. -- he was a worldly and nice guy and his job was to snitch on him. shin started talking to park about the world. he was interested in hearing

these stories and shpark started talking about food. park liked to eat and he talked about the joys and wonders of grilled meat in china. you could get grilled chicken or beef or pork and you could he tell you were falling you did not have to be rich or important. that is the way people live outside this camp. that was a revelation that shin could not get out of his imagination. he dreamed about it. he fantasizes that eating well. park told him many other things that were news to him, that the world is round and china existed and south korea existed that the united states existed, that the leaders in north korea were a bunch of thieves and the thugs. none of that was very

interesting to shin because he had no context for understanding that. his contact with that he had been hungry his whole life and learn that he could just get out of this cage, he could eat. he said that was enough for him. >> camp 14 is how far from the chinese border? >> it is about 300 miles. it is about 50 miles just north of p'yongyang in the mountains of central north korea. >> what was the camp surrounded with? >> it was a barbed wire fence between eight and 10 barbwire lines, electrocuted. it is the kind of fence that you touch and it will grab you end it will kill you. that is the kind of fence it is. shin heard about grilled meat

and got excited and said to park, let's try to escape. park was ok with that idea. he said they would try. he met park two months before he decided to escape. this is all very sudden and shin got excited and they were really lucky in their escape planning because they were assigned in the first of the year to go up to a said that they can to gather firewood that was close to the fence and not near the guard towers and they waited until late afternoon on january 2, 2005, at dusk, and they ran toward the fence. when decided to go, shin said

let's go and parks said i'm not so sure. shin grant his hand and pulled him toward the fans. park started to run and as they ran,shin slipped and fell in the snow because it was in the middle of the winter park shoved his torso between the first and second strands of wire and was electrocuted and fell dead on the fence and pulled the bottom strand down and shin crawled over his body without a moment's hesitation and got most of the way across that fence and his legs slipped off on both sides and he got this terrible burns from the voltage. i talked to an expert on electrocution at the university of washington who deals with people who deal with power lines around the hydro dams in the opposite of northwest and

the scenario which struck me as pretty weird and odd and not very believable, he said is completely believable that this would happen and this would be the only way. he needed that insulator of a human body grounding the voltage to the ground said that he could get through that fence without taking a legal charge. >> he could have been electrocuted himself of the went through them and he was lucky to get through the fence >> but it is not like winning the lottery. it is inconceivable to do according to experts and he got through the fence. the plan was for shin to be the mr. inside. he helped them get to the fence in a way they would not get shot. once they got to the fence, mr. parker, who had been outside the fence and drop out there in the real world, he was supposed to be mr. outside and take them to china. he had an uncle there and arrange for their shipment to

south korea. but part was dead. >> after he got out of the present, how long did it take an to get to china and back to south korea? >> it took him one month to get across south korea. it was a month of walking, riding in trucks, he hopped a train and one thing that is really interesting about his journey across north korea, a totalitarian police state, and this is a kid who did not know which way is north, it really is an incredibly lucky trip he made. shin had a couple things to his advantage. he was very smart. he had a common sense of self survival which is why he had managed to survive in the camp. he also was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. he did not tell anybody was from a camp. if you hours after he got for

that offense, he came to an old barn that nobody was around and he found some military clothes which you put on. >> this was in china? >> this was in north korea outside the camp and north korea is the most militarized society on earth with a million man army. it is 1.3 million people serve our military uniforms in every bar and you would find. he found a military uniform and found a change of clothes so he was no longer dressed like a camp inmate indistinctive close. clothes. he walked into a town and he looked very much like a lot of young north koreans. he was skinny, he was wearing an old military uniform, and he did not have much to do. there are a lot of unemployed people who drifted around in the wake of thea in

great famine. north korea is a very disorganized place where the food distribution system is very informal. it depends on smugglers from china. it depends on farmers selling food for -- from cooperative farms and they're not supposed to and the north korean government has no choice but to put up with this messy, informal market system because it is the only way that people can eat. there are estimates that 90% of the calories in the stomach of any north korean come from this system. shin fell into the system. he did not know it existed but he was lucky. in a few days, he broke into a house, still more close, warm clothes and stole a big bag of rice. i think it was a 10-pound bag of rice which he put in a backpack that he also stole and he walked past a market that the market

lady passed what he had in the bag. he said i have some rice and she said i will give you money for it. it was his first transaction with money. parkin only told in a few weeks before the money existed. he got the money and bought some crackers and not in a few other things and walked out of the town and saw some other traders who were moving north toward china to do more trading. he fell in with them and that was his route out of china. >> let's go back to how you put all this together. how many hours did you talk shin to get this book written. >> i'm not sure how many hours but i think we had seven sessions of interviews. four of those sessions were week-long sessions where we would start in the morning into the late afternoon. >> how did you document? >> the interviews?

>> did you record them? >> i recorded them audio only. i also took notes on the computer simultaneously. there is a question of verifying his story and it is important to deal with. >> you say he lied to you. >> he lied to me about his role in the trading his mother. when i got to south korea, he did not say he betrayed his mother. he said there were executed. he thought if they told that story, the south korean government might arrest him and other people would think of him as not human. that was his words. he decided he would expurgated story a little bit. about a year into our interviews, he decided he would

tell the truth. he said the reason he did is he was surrounded by people telling the truth and to care about him and he felt an obligation to tell the truth, when you see this photograph of him that was taken in seattle, what do you see in that face? >> what is interesting about his face is that he looks so young given the hardships of his life. he has aged a little bett. >> what is his age now? >> this was taken when he was 2827. when i met him a couple of years before that, i swear he looked like he was a teenager. i saw him yesterday and he has a youthful look. >> how has he changed since you started talking to them? >> he has become a lesswary, less suspicious and a little

more at peace with himself because he has told the truth about the betrayal of his mother. yesterday, we were talking of a human rights convention and he talked about selling out his mother and why he did it and what he hopes will, the truth but he told. he wants people to know that this is the kind of human beings they are trying to raise in these camps. the human rights abuse of shooting and starving people and there is also raising children to be little monsters. >> have you seen him get mad at you? >> he got mad at me because he did not want to talk about all this stuff journalists just want to keep drilling. in the book, i say it was like being a dentist and not using anesthetics and it was painful and miserable for him and sometimes he would just say no and believe. >> why do you think the american people will be interested in this book when you say in the book that the south koreans

could care less about this? >> the reason people will be interested in this book is because it is a great story. it is an adventure story. it is also a psychological story because it is about how a person goes from having no human emotions to figuring out that there are good ideas and developing it. is -- the normal trajectory of escape stories or concentration camp stories is you have someone who comes from a sophisticated, civilized family. they are taken to the camp and all their other relatives are killed and they have to be a in in human way to survive and then they come out and tell their story about a descent into hell is survivalshin's story completely different because he

was born in hell and daughter was home. -- and thought it was home. he thought his values were what was to be a human being and has now discovered that it is completely different. >> why do the south koreans not care about the north koreans? >> they have moved on as a culture and as an economy. their aspirations are far greater -- are for greater individual wealth and for technological achievement. north korea which exists in some ways in the middle ages is a dead weight on those goals. most of the family ties between north and south korea have been attenuated by time and weakened by age. most of the people who have living relatives are in their 60's, 70's, and 80's so the

connections are falling apart. >> i ran into a german an acetal is going in his country and e saidh. he said eastern germany is doing very well. you realize how much it cost the west germans. are they worry and south korea that it will cost them to pick up the 23 million people of north korea? >> they have been very wary. there have been studies by economic consulting groups about the cost of it. our estimates that it could cost three times as much incomparable dollars to have unification with the north because of the development problems and north korea. if you fly over the korean peninsula at night, north korea is light and you see japan off to the light but it is dark north korea and that darkness is a good symbol of the stage of

development. there are very few roads. education system has largely collapsed. factories don't work. the place is a basket case run by been militarized state that survives because of aid from china and because of the sales of missiles to places like iran. >> where do you live? >> i live in seattle and moved back there after leaving tokyo. >> how old are your kids? >> 7 and 9. >> where did you make your wife? >> i met her on a blind date in new york city. >> "more washing"and post or new york times? >> i took a bite out from the post and since this book, i work for the economist occasionally and occasionally for front line on pbs. >> what kind of things have you

done for front line? >> i worked on program about a copper mine in alaska. >> do have another book in mind? >> i do. >> what is it about? >> it might be about the copper mines in alaska or it might be about my father's generation. i'm not sure. >> what do you expectshin to do? will he end up in south korea permanently or will he come back to the united states? we have not mentioned a couple from ohio. >> they are important to him. he calls them his parents and that are very happy with that. the red by peace and the washington post in december, 2008 and helped bring into the united states and have given in counseling, advise, love and security. he has not had that from older people. >> lowell and linda dye, why

did they get into it? >> bay are north korea human rights advocates. they are devout christians. they just got interested in this guy and sought him out. >> where do you expect him to end up? >> he is 29 now. i hope he will use the money from this book to get a bit more education. i would hope he would learn english and pursue his dream as a human rights advocate on north korea and other issues. he has not done exactly as evelyn has hoped in terms of education, language, training, a psychotherapist. he is his own individual. he is now doing this webcast thing in south korea and he is very excited about it. he is in a much better place than when i first met him in

2008. he is thrilled that this book is selling in the united states and people are learning about the camps and that was the goal. that was the reason he went for the misery of talking. >> r- bl beenaine harden. -- our guest has bla beenine harden, thank you very much. - blaine harden. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] for a dvd copy of this program -- for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit a us atq7a.org and they are also available as cspan podcast.

>> next sunday , >> i don't regard this as just a biography of lyndon johnson. i want each book to examine a political power in america. this is the kind of political power, seeing what a president can do and a moment of great crisis, how he gathers information and gets legislation going. i want to do this in fall. >> robert caro on the passage of power, the years of lyndon johnson, his multi-year volume next sunday on"q &a." >> next your calls and comments

on washington journal enlightenment eastern, john brennan, the president's assistance for home one security and counterterrorism talks about the strategy. live at 2:00 p.m., a discussion on the future of nato. >> the aclu has believe that the police departments around the country are tracking people's cell phones i regular basis without getting a warrant based on probable cause. >> should tracking a cell phone require a warrant? tonight, the use of surveillance for protection. that is at 8:00 >> this morning, author robert draper talks about his behind- the-scenes book, "do not ask what good we do." what good we do."