Jumunjin, South Korea — RUSTY squid trawlers chafe at their tethers in this bustling harbor along South Korea's east coast, just as they did on the August morning in 1975 when fisherman Choe Uk-il boarded the Cheonwang with a crew of 31 others and set out on an expedition that was supposed to last a week.
It would be close to 32 years before he came home. Choe, 67 now, finally returned in January, a gaunt shadow of the man who went to sea as a hired hand looking to help support his wife and four children. He and his shipmates had vanished four days into the trip. Their families were told they had been lost at sea.
More than two decades passed before Choe got word to his family that the Cheonwang's crew had instead been captured by a North Korean naval vessel and sent to live inside the gulag state. He had since wed a North Korean widow with two children and was scratching out a living as a farmer in a village.
It would be 10 more years before he was able to escape the North Korean dictatorship and return home a free man. But only the happy conclusion to his story makes Choe's disappearance stand out.
By count of the government of South Korea, 3,790 of the country's citizens have been kidnapped by North Korea since the 1953 truce in their civil war, of whom 485 are believed still alive, held against their will and unable to keep in touch with their families. Yet successive South Korean governments have been reluctant to press the cause of these hostages.
If Choe owes his freedom to anyone, it is to his South Korean wife, who never gave up on the possibility of his returning home, and to a soft-spoken but determined rescuer named Choi Sung-yong.
Choi has become the embodi-
ment of hope for families whose loved ones have been abducted by North Korea. His own father was kidnapped from a fishing boat in 1967. Pushed by a mother who "ordered" him to bring his father back, Choi, 55, has spent 15 years developing a network to penetrate the mists of North Korea.
Over the years, his "messengers," as he calls them, have managed to locate some of the abducted South Koreans and have freed five, at a price as high as $30,000 each.
The story of Choe's rescue underscores the perils of Choi's enterprise. More than three decades after being abducted, Choe was still closely watched by North Korean security agents and afraid to risk escape.
