Ahn Hak-sop leaned on a cane and a dining table as he lowered himself at glacial speed to sit on the floor of his home. The husk of a man who once loved judo, he has been worn down by life in South Korea, an enemy nation that locked him up for more than four decades.
His speech was slow and slurred because of his dentures, but Mr. Ahn was eager to explain why he so hated the United States. From the words he used — “comrades,” “struggle,” “imperialism,” “colony” and “independence”— there was no mistaking the former North Korean soldier’s devotion to communism.
“I am still trying to figure out this thing called capitalism,” said Mr. Ahn, 95. Along the walls around him were papier-mâché figures mocking Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty as money-loving, machine gun-toting, bloodthirsty warmongers. “People in South Korea don’t realize that they are slaves in a colony and their leaders can’t do anything without American approval.”
The Korean War ground to a cease-fire 72 years ago, after millions were killed. But it never ended for Mr. Ahn, who as a young man fought on the North Korean side. He was captured by the South during the conflict and then survived 42 years and four months in prison on espionage charges, mostly in solitary confinement. Released in the mid ’90s, he stayed on in the South to continue to campaign for his life’s mission: the removal of U.S. military from the Korean Peninsula.
These days, Mr. Ahn is waging the last battle of his life: He wants to return to North Korea to die in his political and ideological home.
This pursuit may be quixotic because the North has become so antagonistic to the South that it doesn’t even want to communicate any more. But Mr. Ahn has a small coterie of supporters who hold demonstrations on his behalf in Seoul, calling on both Koreas to agree to his repatriation as a gesture of reconciliation. When his health allows, he joins them, marching slowly with assistance and delivering speeches from a wheelchair.
“I don’t want to be buried in the American colony that South Korea is,” Mr. Ahn said. “I want to spend what little is left of my life in the North, the only free and independent Korea there is, and want to be buried there beside my old comrades.”
On a recent summer day, Mr. Ahn sat for an interview in his squat concrete home near the Demilitarized Zone, which separates the two Koreas. Pumpkin vines crawled up the fences outside under a clear blue sky. Inside his living room was a riot of anti-American slogans and art works made by his daughter, Jeong Mi-sook, whom he adopted after he was released from prison.
His doormat is the likeness of an American flag bearing the words, “Yankees, move out!” Ms. Jeong, a papier-mâché artist, has recreated a scene of U.S. troops massacring Korean women and children during the war — a favorite theme in North Korean propaganda. Framed on the wall are quotes from Jimmy Carter (who once called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (who said the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”).
Mr. Ahn is hard of hearing now and often loses his train of thought. But he betrayed no regrets as he told the story of his service, his long imprisonment and his current life in what he considers a rich but oppressed nation.
“South Korean people may claim they live well, but how do you define ‘living well’?” he said, as he spoke about his preference of the North Korean political system and his own eventful life.
Mr. Ahn was born in Ganghwa, an island west of Seoul, in 1930 when imperial Japan ruled Korea. He was a teenager when the Japanese occupation ended thanks to the Allied victory in World War II. The Korean Peninsula was divided into a communist North and a pro-West South.
But to many nationalists like Mr. Ahn, colonial rule never ended; it just changed hands from the Japanese to the Americans.
Torturing Communists
Korea soon plunged into an internecine war. While Chinese troops streamed across the border to help North Korea, the U.S. military maintained its air superiority with a horrific bombing campaign. Mr. Ahn was about 20 at the time.
“I saw people hit by American napalm bombs,” he said. “When they pulled off their burning clothes, their skins came off too. What I remember to this day is young women covering their private parts with their burning hands even when they were dying.”
In October 1952, Mr. Ahn led a squad to the South to connect with communist partisans on South Korea’s rugged eastern mountain ranges and help them rebuild guerrilla operations. Fully armed and in North Korean army uniforms, the group fought running battles as it was repeatedly ambushed on the way to its destination.
By April 1953, three months before the armistice was signed, Mr. Ahn was the only one alive. Starved, he was cooking two potatoes on a hill when South Korean rangers swarmed over him. A military court sentenced him to life in prison on espionage charges.
Leftist prisoners like him were held in solitary cells, barely larger than a bed, with a hole in one corner that served as a toilet. Maggots crawled out when the inmates were given food.
The inmates were tortured until they signed with their thumbprints a statement saying they had renounced their communist ideology. At night, Mr. Ahn’s ward rang with the howls of fellow communist prisoners being persecuted.
Mr. Ahn lost all his teeth in prison. He was flogged with knotted ropes and waterboarded with water laced with pepper powder until he choked and fainted. In winter, his tormentors tied him naked to a chair in a room where the floor was covered in ice. They dripped freezing water on the same spot on the top of his head.
“After a while, each drop felt like a huge rock,” Mr. Ahn said, both hands folded on his cane. He paused with his eyes half-closed as if he were reliving those memories, the momentary silence taken over by the buzzing of cicadas outside.
“Passing out was the only way out,” he said. “When I came to, I would check my thumbs for ink. When there was none, I knew I had survived another day.”
Hanging On to His Dignity
Prisoners who affixed their thumbprints were further humiliated when they were forced to read the oath they had signed in front of their unconverted comrades.
“I endured the torture not because my political or ideological beliefs were particularly strong but because I hung onto my dignity,” Mr. Ahn said.
After the war ended, the South was ruled by dictators who for decades enforced the conversion program. It started petering out after the South began embracing democracy in the 1980s, though the public heard little about them. Mr. Ahn was paroled in 1995, along with another man, Kim Sun-myung, who had also served more than four decades in detention.
In 2004, a government panel reported 77 inmate deaths connected to the conversion-through-torture program. Later, another panel recognized Mr. Ahn as a victim of torture.
By the time Mr. Ahn was released, at age 65, South Korea had transformed into a vibrant democracy and economic powerhouse. But to his dismay, tens of thousands of U.S. troops were still stationed there. The North was in the throes of a catastrophic famine.
Mr. Ahn got married five years later to a woman who insisted on tying the knot despite differences in their political background and age. (She was 30 years his junior.) In 2000, the South repatriated 63 unconverted former inmates to the North, where they were welcomed as heroes. Mr. Ahn chose not to join them.
“There was much debate with my comrades about what we should do,” he said. “I decided to fight on in the South, shouting for the withdrawal of American troops even if there was only one soul who would listen to me.”
He found work in a herbal medicine shop and his wife, Lee Chae-won, gave piano lessons.
‘Nowhere to Go’
Mr. Ahn’s misgivings about the capitalist South intensified when he saw jobless men bumming cigarettes and standing in line for work during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, and when he and his wife were swindled out of their life savings a decade ago. (Ms. Lee is ill and wasn’t available for an interview.)
Homeless, Mr. Ahn and Ms. Lee were invited to live with Lee Jeok, a pastor who has helped them with expenses and housing in a village so close to the border with North Korea that approval from the South’s military is required to visit.
“He was persecuted in the South. If the North abandons him too, he will have nowhere to go,” said the Rev. Lee.
During the interview, Mr. Ahn dug out an old photo of fellow unconverted prisoners who also spent decades in prison. He did not see most of them again after they returned to the North in 2000.
Later that day, Mr. Lee drove Mr. Ahn to a tall military barbed wire fence, the farthest north that civilians are allowed to travel. Mr. Ahn gazed at North Korea across the river border and at migrant birds flying north.
Mr. Ahn’s public activities have consisted largely of attending small weekly rallies near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and shouting for the withdrawal of American troops.
When he showed up for similar rallies near government buildings this summer, supporters hugged him, rubbed his arthritic hands and gave him cool water and an umbrella for respite from the heat. Last month, they organized a symbolic march to the border to press their demand for his repatriation. Mr. Ahn joined them with a North Korean flag. But the police stopped them before they could reach the off-limits zone.
Mr. Ahn blames the Korean divide squarely on the Americans.
“The U.S. troops will never leave until you force them out,” he said. “A feudal lord will set slaves free only when they rise up to make him fear for his life.”
His slogans sound hopelessly out of place in today’s South Korea, where most citizens want the U.S. troops to stay on their soil to help guard against North Korea and China. Korean reunification, the ideal Mr. Ahn has cherished for so long, looks more distant than ever, as even North Korea says it no longer considers South Korea a partner for reconciliation.
In July, Mr. Ahn was hospitalized with shortness of breath. South Korean officials visited him to confirm his desire to return to the North. They say they have no channel of dialogue with the North to discuss his fate and are waiting for Pyongyang to react to news about his final wish.
Fearing death, Mr. Ahn recorded a message on video.
“I am sorry I could not finish the work I came here for,” he said from the hospital bed, in the video taken by Mr. Lee. Mr. Ahn sought forgiveness if he hurt people with his uncompromising views. “Please understand that I am a man from North Korea,” he said.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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