To the North

There was no frontier too risky for Chung to want to cross, with or without the backing of his government. By the time Hyundai was thoroughly ensconced in the Middle East, helping to convert Iraq into a modern state and changing the appearance of strategic portions of the shoreline of both the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, Chung was looking above the demilitarized zone toward the area of his native village in what had become North Korea — and, beyond that, across the Siberian wasteland to Moscow. Although Chung’s relations with President Roh Tae Woo were hardly as familiar as they were with Roll’s predecessors, he still was close enough to the center to be the first businessman to obtain his governments’s permission to go to North Korea. He was an emissary of Seoul’s new policy of “Nordpolitik” — opening economic relations with communist countries to the north.