Vollersten’s student life in Düsseldorf had encompassed politics and journalism until he became a medical doctor, married, and fathered four sons. But on the eve of a new millennium all that was soon to change. He argued with the German health authorities how community care should be run. Ignored, he organized his patients to publicly demonstrate—the first time a doctor had done this in Germany. He was again ignored. He organized more patient marches. His Medical Association in the conservative city of Goettingen disowned him. Finally his wife divorced him, claiming he was “crazy.” With his long blond hair and full moustache, he looked like an aging rock star. Finally he joined an organization called “German Emergency Doctors”; it sent physicians anywhere there was a need for humanitarian aid. Vollersten was offered either the baking Sahara of South Sudan or North Korea. He read several travel guidebooks about Sudan. But there was not one available for North Korea. He decided that was where he should go.
Shin had come from South Korea to California as a twenty year-old. But the knowledge of what was happening in North Korea had followed him, and by the time he became a pastor, all he had read and heard made a decisive impact on him. He began to lay down the tracks for what became New Exodus and plugged into other human rights organizations around the world.
Meantime, in North Korea, Vollersten had repeatedly encountered the terrified silence of patients asked about their lives. Leaving North Korea at the end of his contract, he mounted a ferocious campaign against the regime. He sought out North Korean refugees and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: journalists, politicians, other human rights workers. He traveled around Asia, lecturing, appealing; there was about him, he would admit, the angry passion of someone whose eyes had been opened. His battle cry of “inform, provoke, and mobilise” became his rallying call. He and Shin became two voices united in common cause to promote the plight of all those trapped in North Korea or who had fled their homeland into the hostile environment of China. New Exodus became the focus of all they wanted to achieve. By 2004, over three hundred thousand had traveled its length.
Along the invisible railway “platforms”—safe houses in China’s cities, farms in its countryside, boats on its rivers—waited the intelligence agents and their informers. As usual, Jamal and the other Mossad agents worked alone. It was their way. Their brief was simple: to locate any defector who could provide the latest information about North Korea and its work on developing weapons of mass destruction. Then the spies and their informers all became united in common cause: to locate Dr. Ri Che-Woo. He was undoubtedly the most important escapee to be traveling along New Exodus.
Dr. Ri was a microbiologist and director of a project more secret than all the other secret projects in a country where secrecy itself was instilled from birth. Just as Department 12 and Project Coast had sought to create their ethnic bombs, Dr. Ri was employed at Institute 398, located at Sogram-ri in the south of Pyongyang Province to develop a similar weapon, this one designed to strike the white populations on earth. A sign of the institute’s importance was being ring fenced by three battalions of troops. The first hint about Dr. Ri’s work had come from a defector. Over the following months, details emerged from more defectors suggesting that Dr. Ri and his 250 geneticists could be further advanced than the South Africans and Russians had been. Now, many more months later, Horaj had sought a meeting with Jamal, bringing information that Mossad, like other intelligence services, had eagerly awaited. Dr. Ri was somewhere along the New Exodus route trying to make his perilous way to freedom. Norbert Vollersten had learned Dr. Ri was carrying a dossier detailing human experiments used in North Korea’s biological program. Western intelligence agents watched the moves of the CSIS and the country’s Public Security as they tried to locate Dr. Ri. But amid a population of 1.3 billion people who were used to being constantly spied upon, the microbiologist had vanished into the air faster than the spent fireworks at Chinese New Year celebrations.
In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s scientists consulted their own network of researchers at some of the world’s leading science institutes. One recalled how, at the height of America’s intervention in Nicaragua, the idea of creating a genetic bomb had occupied the CIA’s geneticists. They had been ordered to locate what became known in the agency as “the Nicaraguan gene.” Substantial sums of money were spent in obtaining blood samples of Nicaraguans and testing them in the CIA laboratories. No gene specific to Nicaragua was identified. The project was abandoned only to be later resurrected to select a “Cuban-only gene.” This research also came to nothing.
