The meeting ended with the request that Dagan should send a small team of agents to South Korea to discover what was happening across the border with its northern neighbor. One of its members was Jamal. Under cover of being an Iranian businessman trading in artefacts, he had established a network of informers across South Asia. One had been Horaj, who had provided the first details of what became known in Mossad as New Exodus, the secret route refugees used to escape from the harsh regime of North Korea. For them it had become the equivalent to the biblical Exodus.
The route had a long and colorful history. Originally created by the CIA at the end of the Korean War, it had been used to smuggle its own agents and high-value informers out of North Korea and China. The informers were moved from one safe house to another and escorted by guides through China’s towns and villages to the borders of Cambodia, Laos, and Hong Kong, and who received little or no payment for this dangerous work. One guide probably spoke for many when he told his CIA controller, “I do this for democracy.”
A journey could take weeks, even months. A CIA officer involved in running the operation recalled (to the author): “It was like traveling on a railway where you never knew when the signal would turn from green to red. Then everything shut down until there was another green light.”
The route out of China was a torturous one, often doubling back, and involved traveling by road, river, and train. Several of those who set out never reached safety; the risk of betrayal was a constant threat. China’s Public Security spies and its formidable secret intelligence service were a fearsome duo. No one knows how many CIA agents or informers were captured and never heard of again. Eventually the Exodus route ceased to operate. Then during the 1990s, once more shocking accounts of the depravity of the North Korean regime began to emerge. Defectors all told the same story of a nation living increasingly in near starvation, of torture, and forced labor. Most horrifying of all were the reports of inhuman experiments on prisoners from relatives who managed to cross the 880-mile-long border into China. But those who had fled found little relief there. It had an estimated 5 million of its own prisoners in camps as grim as the gulags of North Korea. When caught, asylum seekers were swiftly transported back across the border to an inevitable fate of interrogation, torture, and death.
To save them, two remarkable human rights activists reopened the old CIA route. Their Mossad profiles paint ennobling pictures.
Douglas Shin and Norbert Vollersten were both in their late forties and came from very different cultural backgrounds. Shin was a Korean-American church pastor who had been ordained after a career as a businessman and filmmaker, and he lived in a Los Angeles suburb as pastor of his church. He had the Asian’s mannerisms of being polite and diffident; only when he spoke of the gross abuses of North Korea or its people was he aroused to quiet passion. Then his words filled with religious metaphors; the pain and anger in his eyes was there for all to see. There was about him then a sense that if you were not part of the answer he wanted, you were part of his many problems in rescuing people from the terror of Kim Jong Il’s regime. He was one of the two “station masters” for New Exodus. The other was Vollersten.
A tallish, stocky man, broad across the shoulders, Vollersten looked and, at times, sounded like one of the hippy protestors who had taken to the streets against Vietnam and, later, the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Some people called him “a little crazy”; others said the world needed more men like him. Vollersten accepted their plaudits the way he dealt with his detractors: with that same slow smile, the flick of a hairstyle rooted in a bygone generation. “It made him disarming even when he would continue to argue his point until there was no point left to argue,” his Mossad file noted.
