Most of the breathless accounts of Clinton’s mercy dash to North Korea – aboard a luxury Boeing 737 jet belonging to Liz Hurley’s billionaire ex, Steve Bing – have taken up the story from the moment Laura and Euna were imprisoned back in March.Read the whole thing.
But who are these two fresh-faced women? What were they doing in North Korea, undoubtedly one of the most dangerous and repressed places in the world, and how on earth did they get themselves into what a friend jauntily described on one website as ‘a bit of a disastrous pickle’?
A Mail on Sunday investigation has unearthed some rather surprising facts about the pair – facts that show they were hopelessly ill-prepared for their ‘mission’ to the Chinese-Korean border, that they were working for a minor television organisation run by a former ambulance-chasing lawyer and, while they no doubt did not intend to be captured, the hapless twosome ended up as valuable pawns in an international game of bluff and double bluff.
Indeed, from the whole tawdry affair only one clear winner has emerged – an exuberant Bill Clinton – even if, according to an insider, ‘the joke in the White House was that the girls were safer in North Korea than on the plane going home with Bill’.
I had a lot of suspicions about this whole story, especially the way the storybook ending was choreographed for the media. In fact, I referred to them as P.R. pawns the day after they came home when it became obvious that they had never been transferred to the hard labor camp to which they'd been sentenced. They were simply too valuable to the North Korean government to risk being harmed.
Although their capture may not have been a stunt, what followed clearly was.
And by the way, Henry Kissinger called Bill Clinton's stunt dumb. I believe he's probably correct.
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