It was 11:55 p.m. — 2355 hours on the clock at the Japanese Intelligence headquarters in Tokyo — and Henry Wray of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sat quietly enjoying a cigarette, something he couldn’t do in Langley, Virginia, because of the strict no-smoking laws. His two Japanese hosts lit up as well. At 11:57 he watched his Japanese counterpart turn up the volume of the Sanyo shortwave receiver. At 11:58 two officers of the JDF, Japanese Defense Force, entered the cork-lined room, bowed to the civilians — four in all — from Japanese intelligence, and took their seats, the red light of the tape machine signaling it had already begun. At precisely twelve midnight the transmission from somewhere in North Korea began — four-digit numbers until 0020, when the code abruptly finished.
“All we need now,” Wray said, “is their onetime pad.”
“If that’s what they are using,” his Japanese host replied.
“Hmm… it’s what I’d use,” Wray told them. “You people are so far ahead in computers, I wouldn’t run a network on computer digitization. I’d be afraid you’d descramble it in a couple of weeks.”
“We’ve been trying for months, Mr. Wray.”
“Call me Henry.” He turned to the two officers from the JDF. “How about infiltration of the Chongryun?” It was a large expatriate pro-North Korean organization in Japan that raised millions of yen for Pyongyang. Nearly ten percent of all North Korea’s urgently needed foreign exchange was from Korean workers’ remittances abroad.
“It and others,” the Japanese said. “Problem is, we have no idea how many North Koreans they are broadcasting to.”
Whatever the number of agents listening, the CIA and Japanese Intelligence knew that by now there must be a large organization of illegals, as well as those who had immigrant or visitor worker status, in the pay of Pyongyang. Should hostilities ever break out, either domestically in Japan or between Japan and North Korea, the Chongryun’s association of North Koreans and deep cover agents would come out en masse like ants from a nest to sow confusion aimed particularly at Japanese transport and communication networks.