Chris Stewart gave a simple explanation for introducing a congressional resolution on missing American David Sneddon: “As a parent, it seemed the right thing to do.” The Utah congressman’s own son was the one who told him that his friend had mysteriously vanished—the first U.S. citizen to disappear from China without a trace since President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip.
Sneddon, then 24 and a student at Brigham Young University, disappeared in August 2004 on a trip that included hiking through southern China’s Tiger Leaping Gorge. Chinese officials said he most likely died from drowning in a river during the hike. Family members and State Department officials encountered eyewitnesses who reported subsequently seeing David, however, including in a Korean restaurant that may have been frequented by North Korean agents. Thus some suspect he was abducted by North Korea.
Representative Stewart, who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, explained that the resolution has two primary objectives: to meet “a moral obligation” to the Sneddons, who have been left wondering for over a decade what happened to their son and brother, and “to hold North Korea accountable” if it has mistreated a U.S. citizen. Stewart, speaking in his Capitol Hill office, remarked that while the Sneddons are not his constituents, “Utah is a small place, like one large family.”
The resolution, which “directs the Department of State and the intelligence community to jointly continue investigations” into the disappearance, unanimously passed on a voice vote before the House adjourned for the upcoming election. As a press release from Stewart’s office notes, “The resolution specifically asks them to investigate the possibility that the North Korean government may have abducted Sneddon.” Utah senator Mike Lee has introduced an identical resolution in his chamber that the family hopes will pass after the election.
That agents of a foreign government would knowingly abduct a U.S. citizen may sound implausible. But not for North Korea, which has a long track record of kidnapping foreign nationals in order to train its spy network. The resolution specifically cited North Korea’s program “to kidnap citizens of foreign nations for espionage purposes.”
This nefarious abduction activity was confirmed by none other than late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il himself in a now-famous September 2002 summit in Pyongyang with Japan’s then-prime-minister Junichiro Koizumi. Kim acknowledged that “overzealous” members of his security forces, who were subsequently “punished,” had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens—Tokyo believes the number is significantly higher—in the 1970s and 1980s to obtain teachers of Japanese language and culture and to make use of their identities by North Korean agents. One abductee, Yaeko Taguchi, was forced to train the female North Korean agent involved in the terrorist bombing of Korean Air Flight 858, which killed all 115 passengers and crew, prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
ln one of the greatest diplomatic miscalculations in history, Kim and his underlings thought that fessing up to the Japanese abductions would lead swiftly to a normalization of diplomatic relations and the release of hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance, similar to the $800 million South Korea received as “economic cooperation” from Japan when relations were normalized in 1965. Instead, the subsequent public outcry in Japan over the blatant abuse of its citizens put Japanese-North Korean relations in the deep freeze.
Some observers insist that North Korea, while a serial abductor in its day, has learned its lesson and left the kidnapping business, but more recent examples suggest otherwise. U.S. permanent resident Kim Dong-shik was spirited across the Chinese border in January 2000 while providing assistance to North Korean refugees. Despite the repeated efforts of his U.S. citizen spouse and fellow Korean-American congregants from a Chicago-area church to determine what happened, the case remains unresolved. Those efforts included a 2005 letter from the Illinois congressional delegation, organized by the late congressman Henry Hyde and signed by then-senator Barack Obama, that demanded answers from the North Korean U.N. Mission in New York. The letter compared Reverend Kim to abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whose pre-Civil War Underground Railroad was a precursor for the one aiding North Korean refugees on the run in China. Later reports out of North Korea indicate that Kim succumbed to starvation and torture and that his remains are being held at a North Korean military base.
Then there was the March 2009 abduction of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were in the border area along the Tumen River, seeking to interview refugees. Pyongyang insisted the pair illegally entered North Korean territory. “When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China,” they wrote in the Los Angeles Times, intimating that their guide purposely led them onto North Korean soil. “Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. . . . We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran. We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us.”
Stewart’s resolution notes, “The Government of the People’s Republic of China allows North Korean agents to operate throughout the region to repatriate refugees.” American citizens are widely known to have been involved in the Underground Railroad on China’s southern border. The most famous is Mike Kim, whose book Escaping North Korea details the four years he spent helping North Korean refugees inside China, beginning in 2003, just before Sneddon vanished. These activities included guiding them on mountain trails from China into Laos. Chinese security officials and North Korean agents in the area could certainly have come to the assumption that another young, Korean-speaking American, David Sneddon, was also involved in assisting refugees and needed to be stopped.
It might be hard to imagine Chinese officials being caught up in a web of deceit with their North Korean allies in order to abduct an American citizen, but there is an old Chinese expression: “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” Local officials in China are known to be susceptible to bribes. A case that drew congressional attention around the same time as Sneddon’s disappearance was the death of American citizen Darren Russell in Guangzhou on April 14, 2005. He died mysteriously after a contractual dispute with the administrators of an English language “sweatshop” known for exploiting foreign teachers. His parents were initially told that he died in a late-night traffic accident, but an autopsy conducted after the return of his remains to the United States found that the cause of death was “homicide” by “blunt force trauma to the head and brain.” Local Chinese officials appeared to have collaborated closely on the case with the language school.
Roy and Kathleen Sneddon, both retired academics, went to Guangzhou and took an unusual course of action after their son David disappeared. For two years, they served as volunteers, teaching English technical writing to Ph.D. candidates at South China University of Technology. They hoped that if China had detained David by mistake, their service would soften hearts within the government and open doors to enable David’s return. Teaching these graduate students was, according to Roy, “one of our highlights as a retired couple.”
Rep. Stewart believes China knows how seriously the United States takes David’s disappearance. During a congressional visit to the U.S. embassy in Beijing last spring, he said, senior embassy officials indicated that they have discussed the Sneddon case with Chinese authorities.
Stewart’s resolution passed after recent reports of a sighting of David in Pyongyang from a North Korean defectors’ organization in Seoul. North Korea expert Chuck Downs found the source to be “highly credible.” The most sensational accounts suggested Sneddon could even be the English tutor of leader Kim Jong-un himself. Unbelievable? Perhaps, but remember that what Kim wants, Kim gets. Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, a notorious movie buff, thought nothing of having a famous South Korean director and his actress wife kidnapped from Hong Kong and brought to Pyongyang to make movies at his personal whim in 1978. The couple escaped while attending a film festival in Vienna eight years later—so there remains hope for David Sneddon yet.
Dennis P. Halpin is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant for the Poblete Analysis Group.
