ICC NOTE: Kenneth Bae, the former American prisoner of North Korea, sat down with Unification Media Group for an interview to discuss his ordeal and time as a prisoner of North Korea. Kenneth Bae is a Korean-American missionary who spent 735 days in a North Korean prison before his release in 2014. The charges placed upon Kenneth were typical of foreign citizens inside North Korea as the regime accuses them of attempting to overthrow the government. He was originally sentenced to 15 years hard labor for evangelizing in North Korea. Since his release, Kenneth has written a book detailing his incarceration and has been providing interviews to the media while continuing to spread the gospel through his testimony. 

6/17/2016 North Korea (Daily NK) – Unification Media Group: Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary and US citizen, spent 735 days in a North Korean prison before being released in 2014. He originally received a sentence of 15 years hard labor on charges of attempting to overthrow the government. Mr. Bae recently sat down with Daily NK and Unification Media Group in Seoul to shed light on his experiences in the North. Below is a transcript of the interview, which has been edited for clarity.

Thank you for visiting Unification Media Group. Please start off by introducing yourself to our listeners in North Korea.

Kenneth Bae:Hello, everyone. My name is Kenneth Bae. About 30 years ago, I emigrated from South Korea to the US, and had been working as a missionary in China and North Korea prior to my detainment there for roughly two years.

I heard you had spent six years doing missionary work for North Korea before being detained. How did you become interested in this?

I think I was influenced by my father, whose hometown is Yongbyon in North Pyongan Province. When I was young and the family would get together, people would use dialect from that area, and I think that piqued my interest about North Korea. Also, when I was studying at a seminary in the US, I heard about the ‘Arduous March’ (famine of the mid 1990s) and the difficult times people in the North had to go through and that really broke my heart. I had thought ‘I would like to be of help to those people’ if I have the opportunity, and in 2005, I had the chance to meet North Koreans who were visiting their relatives in China on private travel permits. Despite the difficult times, they were still steadfast (in their beliefs) and explained they had first become religious during the mass famine. So I asked them what it meant to them, and they said, “We had no hope in life before, but now we do.” After hearing that, I thought, ‘What can I do to help?’ and that’s how I started my missionary work.

Before November 2012, you had been to North Korea 17 times but were never detained. What happened during your 18th trip?

I was running a tour company (to hide the fact that I was a missionary). Through this company, I would bring people in from other countries and introduce them to locations that exemplified North Korea’s natural beauty and local culture. But on my 18th trip, I mistakenly took an external hard drive with me that contained videos exposing the reality in the North. That hard drive was picked up in a security check, and I was detained as a result.

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