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“…it seems like everyone who deals with the North Koreans eventually gets burned.”
--Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author of The Orphan Master’s Son
A gleaming new airport. The Ebola travel ban a distant memory. Train tours to “undiscovered cities.” South Korean firms trying to get back into the act. Even Paul Tjia flogging investment in the tourism sector.
Meet Mr. Walter Keats.
Since 1978, Walter has been running a Chicago-based tour company, Asia Pacific Travel. According to his own estimate, in a long interview with Oliver Hotham published in NK News a couple months back, over the course of five years he led 30-35 group tours to North Korea.
Until the North Korean authorities banned him.
Anyone who knows Walter as I do can attest that he is not exactly a neo-con. So the story of how this ultra-engager managed to run afoul of the authorities should serve as a kind of cautionary tale.
To be clear, the North Korean government has never told him why he was banned. But as far as he can tell, the issue is that among the tourists on a 2007 trip was a Stanford University literature professor named Adam Johnson. Not exactly famous in 2007, Johnson went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son, a book set in North Korea which by all accounts is harsh on Kim Jong-il. (Full disclosure: I’ve never read the book. The other night I had to admit to my mother that I had never read To Kill a Mocking Bird, either. You don’t want to play “Humiliation” with me.) Walter surmises that when the book came out, someone had to take the fall for it, and it was Asia Pacific Travel for having brought Johnson into the country.
From a policy standpoint, perhaps the most disheartening part of the interview is Walter’s discussion of how the financial transactions with North Korea were handled: by transferring funds into the bank accounts of individual North Korean bureaucrats via Chinese banks. At some point he visited Treasury and offered the American bureaucrats at the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) a lesson on how these transactions were handled. “They weren’t interested.”
The one bright spot is that Walter never had a tour member detained, an achievement Jean Lee reminds us that Koryo Tours, Uri Tours, and Juche Travel cannot claim. Something you might want to ponder before hopping on the train to one of North Korea’s undiscovered cities.
Especially if you are one of the 20-40 year old males "looking for adventure" who dominate the market of Western tourists.
