The note read, “Seeking asylum from CIA abuse.”
By charter and treaty, the United Nations was international territory and no part of it resided in the United States or New York City, where it physically existed. In short, the UN was out of the jurisdiction of US officials at the federal, state, and local levels.
The first guard handed the note to the other, saying, “This woman is from North Korea. Can you believe it? How did she come all the way to New York from overseas?”
Reading a second note, the other guard said, “She’s an army colonel kidnapped by the CIA. Wow… that’s why she’s here. She must have escaped.”
“Kidnapped?” the first guard said, flipping through the pages of her passport to see if it had been stamped by customs agents entering the United States. But the guards didn’t find any US stamp. In fact, the last stamps were months old, with one belonging to Syria and then a few weeks later from when she entered Iran. But neither country showed an exit stamp. The first guard asked Dong-Sun for a US visa. She looked blankly at the guard, shrugged, and shook her head pretending not to understand, then said in thick Korean accent, “Ghost plane.”
Jenny pointed to the first note that requested asylum from the US for fear she would be attacked again, kidnapped, and tortured in the CIA’s rendition program. She then handed Merk’s flash drive to the other guard with a note wrapped around it, with a label reading: “Toxic Illegal Dumping by the West in the Gulf of Aden.”
The guard gripped the flash drive and motioned the other guard to take her inside.
Stunned, the guard led Jenny through the gate. He spoke on a radio requesting the chief of security and a Korean translator to meet the North Korean visitor.
At the metal detector, Jenny as Dong-Sun emptied her pockets and took off her military hat. She removed the hat and handed it to the guard. He put it in a container and ran it through the X-ray machine. She placed a wallet, a pen, some Syrian and Iranian coins, and North Korean money in another basket. As the female X-ray examiner studied the contents in the baskets, Jenny watched the guard out of the corner of her eyes.
Stone-faced, emotionless, with her eyes not making contact with any one guard, Kim Dong-Sun stepped through the metal detector, wearing a short wooden chopstick that pinned her hair in a ball on the back of her head. The chopstick didn’t trigger the alarm.
Another UN security guard swept a metal-detecting wand over her limbs, then up and down her torso. She neither blinked nor moved, standing like a statue, giving a sniper’s stare straight ahead. The guard waved her to step through.
After a short wait, a security detachment led Kim Dong-Sun upstairs to the second floor library and asked her to take a seat until a translator arrived.
The guards spoke to one another, mentioning she was like the other asylum seeker that came to the UN the day before from Somalia. Pretending not to listen, the UN security detail confirmed for Jenny that Korfa was on the premises. She sat still and waited, staring at a glass of water that was offered to her, with her face devoid of emotion.
When the Korean translator arrived, she took Dong-Sun into an empty office with a view of First Avenue. There, she was offered to sit down and tell her story.
In Korean, Jenny said, “The CIA agents kidnapped me twice. First in Syria, then inside the Iranian border. They flew me to America and did this to me.” She pulled up her army jacket and undershirt, showing the fresh bruise on her ribs. “They beat my foot. Why? What did I do? I don’t know. Doesn’t America respect women? Doesn’t America respect North Korean Army officers? Doesn’t America respect civil engineers? I am an engineer.”
“Tell me, what questions did the CIA ask you?” the translator inquired.
“Look—” Dong-Sun pointed out the window to a government van parked across the street with the digital engineer and two other CIA agents waiting inside, who were all part of Jenny’s team. “Arrest them,” she shouted. When the translator only nodded, writing down notes, Jenny stood up and shouted a screed about torture, about waterboarding and punishment, about food and sleep deprivation, and other forms of abuse and torture to break her will. “But it didn’t break my will. I was strong. That’s how I escaped. That’s why I’m here. Now I want to go home. But they want to kill me. They want to hunt me down.” She pointed to the van again.
In glancing at the van, the translator replied in Korean, “You’re going to have to stay here tonight until we can get representatives from Pyongyang on the phone tomorrow to speak to the US State Department, which is closed right now.” The translator tapped her watch.
Kim Dong-Sun gave a stiff nod and was led to the lounge area behind the library until arrangements could be made on-site for her to sleep somewhere in the newly renovated UN headquarters. The translator led Jenny into the lounge, where the Somali warlord Korfa was playing chess with another man, the diminutive Bahdoon. She asked to go to the bathroom.
Inside, Jenny locked the door. She opened the cuffed sleeves on the army jacket, removed the false buttons, ripped open a sewn seam, and pulled out tubes of one dart from each sleeve. In each button was a mini-packet of liquid tranquilizer she poured into the two tubes.
She removed the chopstick, twisted it open breaking a glue seal, removed two needles, and attached each one to the darts. She checked the inky fluids inside the plastic darts, then stored one dart in each jacket pocket along with the broken chopstick. She bit her lip, saying to the mirror, “I can’t believe they are both here. Wow, two birds in the hand, Jenny.” She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. Shaking her hands dry, the now-armed Kim Dong-Sun stepped out of the bathroom. The translator handed her a laptop and offered her a seat near Korfa’s chair. The Korean missile engineer whispered to the translator, “Who is he?”
“He’s an exile from Somalia. He couldn’t go to the Somali consulate in New York, since the US government calls him a terrorist,” the translator explained.
Jenny dropped the laptop on a sofa next to Korfa. He looked up at her in a cold stare. She eyed him back and shouted in Korean, “Swine. You are rude. I can’t stay in the same room with a pirate. I’m an army colonel. I’m a missile engineer. Not a killer beast like this animal.”
Confused by the language, but not by the tone of her voice, Korfa stood up and towered over her, drilling a colder stare. But the 105-pound engineer stood firm. He started jabbering in his Somali tongue, shouting in her face. When she had enough, she kicked the chessboard over, chasing Bahdoon away as a fight was about to break out.
The translator stepped between them. Jenny tossed her aside and struck Korfa in the temple with a lightning blow. Stunned, he threw a punch. But in his telegraphing it, she ducked under his fist and, pulling out a dart, stabbed it in Korfa’s side. Feeling the pinch of the needle, the hot fluid injected into him, Korfa wrestled her down, knocking over the coffee table and chairs. On the floor, Jenny plunged the second dart into his thigh — enough tranquilizers to immobilize 1,000 pounds of dolphins — driving the needle deep, before quickly pulling it out.
As the translator and Bahdoon jumped in to separate them, Korfa lost strength and then consciousness. The translator pulled Jenny off, while she slid the darts into her jacket pockets.
UN security rushed in and examined Korfa. They kept Kim Dong-Sun away from the motionless warlord. One security officer put his finger on Korfa’s pulse, shouting, “Call 9-1-1. Get an ambulance, fast. He’s fading.”
What the security officer and the UN staff didn’t know was the sedative artificially lowered Korfa’s heart rate to what appeared to be a life-threatening level. Jenny showed her hands, covered with purple dye, complaining, “Is the dog dying? What color blood do Somalis bleed?” Jenny knew she could only snatch Korfa; grabbing both terrorists would be too risky.