"Do you know what day it is?” asked the man as we sat in the black Mercedes-Benz that had whisked me from the foreign student dormitory at Kim Il-sung university, where I had been living in the North Korean capital Pyongyang. I knew full well, but he answered his own question: “It’s the day the US imperialists invaded and started the war.”
It was Tuesday 25 June, and the start of my
nine long days of interrogation at the hands of the North Korean ministry of state security – or at least that’s who I believed it was, as they never revealed who they actually were.