In 2016, a 21-year-old American student was arrested in North Korea after allegedly stealing a political poster.
Weeks later, he appeared in a strange public confession and was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.
Seventeen months on, he returned home in a coma, raising disturbing questions about what really happened behind closed doors.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we’ll be talking about Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old American student who went on a trip to North Korea and returned unrecognisable.
[00:00:46] In part two, we’ll talk about the daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:54] And in the final part, part three, we’ll talk about Kim Jong-il’s obsession with cinema, and how this led him to kidnap one of South Korea’s most famous directors.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] I can imagine you can all think of something that you regret doing when you were young.
[00:01:19] From that tattoo you now try to cover up to betting your friend you could climb up a large tree, only to fall down and break your elbow, making mistakes and learning from them is all a part of growing up.
[00:01:34] And a holiday, far away from home, is the kind of place where mistakes are perhaps more likely to happen.
[00:01:43] Normally, of course, mistakes aren’t permanent. A sore head in the morning, perhaps a slap on the wrist from a police officer for doing something more serious, but nothing that will forever change the trajectory of your life.
[00:02:01] That is, unless the mistake takes place in North Korea.
[00:02:06] So, let me paint you a picture.
[00:02:09] It is the 2nd of January, 2016.
[00:02:14] A young man is standing in Pyongyang International Airport, waiting to board a flight back to Beijing.
[00:02:23] His name is Otto Warmbier. He is twenty-one years old, a star student at the University of Virginia, a dutiful son, and the eldest of three children.
[00:02:36] He has just spent five days in North Korea as part of a tour group, a $1,200 five-day, four-night “New Year's Party Tour”.
[00:02:49] Tourists are allowed in North Korea, or at least, back then they were, but only as part of a group, and under very tight supervision.
[00:03:00] He has seen what all tourists see: the vast bronze statues of the Kim family, the immaculate streets, the carefully choreographed displays of loyalty and order. He has bowed where he was told to bow, photographed what he was allowed to photograph, and said nothing that might cause offence.
[00:03:24] It’s been fun. Eye-opening. A world away from his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, obviously.
[00:03:31] But now he is ready to leave.
[00:03:35] He is one of the last to go through security, and as he hands over his passport, the officers spend more time looking at his documents than seems necessary. They flick through the pages, whispering to each other. Some more officials approach from behind, tap him on the shoulder, and ask him to follow them to a private room.
[00:04:01] The man he has been sharing a room with for the past few days, an Englishman named Danny Gratton, attempts a joke, telling Otto, “'Well, that's the last we'll see of you.”
[00:04:14] Unfortunately, it would prove to be true.
[00:04:18] This will be the last time anyone outside North Korea will see Otto Warmbier, at least, as the Otto Warmbier they knew.
[00:04:28] Now, to understand what happened next, and perhaps why, we need to remind ourselves of a little bit of North Korean history.
[00:04:41] North Korea, or to give it its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is, by almost any measure, the most closed and controlled state in the world.
[00:04:55] It has been ruled by the same family since 1948: first Kim Il-sung, then his son Kim Jong-il, and now his grandson Kim Jong-un.
[00:05:08] The regime maintains control through an almost total monopoly on information.
[00:05:14] There is no free press, no independent internet access for ordinary citizens, and no meaningful political opposition. Leaving the country without permission is illegal and, for most people, essentially impossible.
[00:05:31] For those who break the rules, or who are simply accused of doing so, the consequences can be devastating. Sentences are extremely harsh, and typically involve back-breaking forced labour in the country’s network of political prison camps.
[00:05:52] And crucially for our story, North Korea is extraordinarily sensitive about its image.
[00:06:01] Any perceived insult to the leadership of the Kim family, to the state, to the symbols of the regime, these are treated not as a minor offence, but as a serious political crime.
[00:06:18] And this brings us back to Otto Warmbier, and what the North Korean authorities said he had done.
[00:06:27] For the first six weeks after his arrest, the only statement they released about him was that he had committed "a hostile act against the state".
[00:06:40] To Otto’s family, and to those who had been on the tour with him, this seemed…implausible, very unlikely.
[00:06:49] He was a young man, an otherwise well-behaved, upstanding member of society. He had been very cautious on the tour, and he knew all too well the consequences of getting on the wrong side of the regime.
[00:07:05] Sure, it was New Year’s Eve, and everyone had had a few drinks, but there was no indication that he was particularly drunk or disorderly, nobody remembered him causing any problems.
[00:07:19] There must surely have been a mixup, a misunderstanding, and he would be released soon.
[00:07:27] But…he wasn’t.
[00:07:30] On the 29th of February, 2016 — two months after his arrest — he was brought before the cameras for a press conference.
[00:07:41] He appeared thin and clearly distressed. In a halting, tearful voice, he delivered a prepared statement confessing to his alleged crimes and begging the North Korean government for forgiveness.
[00:07:59] "I have made the worst mistake of my life," the young man said, almost weeping.
[00:08:05] You can see the entire thing on YouTube, and it is pretty painful to watch.
[00:08:11] His family and the US government made clear that they considered the confession to have been made under duress — in other words, that he had been forced to say it. They simply didn’t accept it.
[00:08:28] Even disregarding the content of the confession, and with our “English learner’s” hat on, the language was as if it had been written by a non-native speaker.
[00:08:42] He said things like, “I came to commit this crime task”, and “but since my family suffered from very severe financial difficulties”.
[00:08:53] This might be grammatically correct English, but these are not the words of a native English speaker. Anyone listening to the speech could clearly understand that these weren’t his words; someone with good but imperfect English had drafted the statement.
[00:09:16] The North Koreans’ claim was this: in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, Otto Warmbier had entered a staff-only area of his hotel and attempted to steal a political banner from a wall.
[00:09:34] Now, you might think, “ok, he had a few drinks and wanted to take a fun memento of his trip. He’s a young man, that’s not such a terrible crime”.
[00:09:45] Well, three things.
[00:09:47] Firstly, removing any kind of political banner in North Korea is a serious crime, no matter the intention. You might think this law is extreme, but it is the law, and a North Korean citizen would certainly have been treated the same way, if not more harshly.
[00:10:09] Secondly, the supposed “evidence” for Otto taking the sign was flimsy at best. There was some grainy CCTV footage that showed a tall-ish man touching the sign at around 1am, but, his companions on the trip said that they didn’t get back until more like 3am, and what’s more, this corridor was well-lit even in the middle of the night, which is very unusual in North Korea. In other words, this CCTV footage was not exactly reliable.
[00:10:48] And lastly, and perhaps most bizarrely, the North Koreans claimed that Otto Warmbier’s actions were not those of a tipsy young American looking for something fun to hang in his dormroom; this was a hostile act, carried out at the instigation of a Methodist church group and the US government, as part of a deliberate attempt to destabilise the country.
[00:11:18] Or at least, that was the official policy line, and what Otto confessed to in his prepared statement.
[00:11:26] Now, that version of events was, to put it gently, implausible.
[00:11:33] Firstly, Otto Warmbier was Jewish, so he was unlikely to be part of a Methodist church.
[00:11:41] And secondly, he was a twenty-one-year-old student on a five-day group tour; the idea that he was a covert agent working with the CIA to bring down the North Korean government is not one that many Western observers found convincing.
[00:12:00] But…it didn’t matter.
[00:12:02] North Korea was not interested in convincing anyone, anyone outside its borders, that was.
[00:12:09] It had Otto Warmbier, and there was nothing anyone else could do.
[00:12:15] A month later, at a trial that lasted barely an hour, he was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.
[00:12:27] And then, from the perspective of the outside world, he disappeared.
[00:12:33] For the next seventeen months, his family received practically no information about his condition. The North Korean government said he was being treated well and receiving medical care.
[00:12:50] Now, there’s another aspect to this story.
[00:12:53] The United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, and the two countries are still technically at war. So actually having these conversations was…complicated. All communication went through Sweden, which does have an embassy, and staff in Pyongyang, the capital.
[00:13:18] Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, spoke publicly, pleading for their son's release, and trying everything they could think of to bring him home.
[00:13:31] And then, in June 2017, a year and a half after the incident, the North Korean government made a surprise announcement.
[00:13:42] Otto Warmbier would be released on humanitarian grounds.
[00:13:48] He was, they said, in a coma, and had been since shortly after his trial in March 2016. More than a year earlier.
[00:13:59] The reason they gave for the coma was something called botulism, which is a rare form of food poisoning, and they said that this, combined with a sleeping pill he had been given, had sent him into a coma.
[00:14:15] Now, we’ll come to whether this was actually true later on, but, spoiler alert, most foreign doctors don’t buy this official explanation.
[00:14:26] On the 13th of June, Otto Warmbier arrived back in the United States. His parents rushed to meet him, but as they approached the aeroplane, they heard this raw, almost animalistic groaning, like a primordial cry for help.
[00:14:47] It was coming from Otto.
[00:14:50] He was a shadow of his former self. His hair had been shaved off, he was hooked up with tubes, he was blind and deaf. He could not speak or respond to commands. He showed no signs of awareness of the world around him.
[00:15:08] He was rushed to hospital, where the doctors said he was in what’s called a state of unresponsive wakefulness, which is a condition where a person's eyes may open and they may breathe without assistance, but where there is no meaningful conscious activity.
[00:15:29] In other words, he had lost virtually all of his brain function.
[00:15:35] And tragically, the doctors told his parents, it would never come back. There was no hope.
[00:15:43] His parents made the agonising decision to remove his feeding tube, thus sealing his fate.
[00:15:51] Six days after his return home, on the 19th of June, 2017, Otto Warmbier died. He was twenty-two years old.
[00:16:02] His parents, who had spent seventeen months fighting to bring their son home, had him back for less than a week.
[00:16:11] The question that followed, and which has still never been fully answered, was what happened to Otto Warmbier?
[00:16:22] The North Korean government maintained that he had been treated well, that they bore no responsibility for his condition, and that his death was the result of the botulism, the food poisoning, that he had suffered before his coma.
[00:16:39] American doctors were deeply sceptical. If it was caused by botulism, it was unlike anything they had ever seen.
[00:16:50] As for his parents, they were, as any parent would be, desperate to find some kind of justice, to hold someone or something accountable for the death of their son.
[00:17:06] By this point, there had been a change in the White House. Barack Obama was out, and Donald Trump had taken his place at the start of 2017.
[00:17:18] The Warmbiers knew that Donald Trump was a keen watcher of Fox News, and thought that if they could go on the show and tell their story, it might appeal to the one viewer who could do something about it: the then relatively recently inaugurated President Trump.
[00:17:38] In these interviews, the Warmbiers stated that they believed their son had been tortured. Otto’s father stated that his son’s teeth looked like they had been rearranged with pliers, and that he had a scar on his foot.
[00:17:56] The Fox interview worked. It had its intended purpose. Donald Trump tweeted out “great interview”, adding that “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea”, despite there being no evidence that he actually was.
[00:18:15] Now, the backdrop of all of this was the escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, after North Korea’s repeated nuclear weapons tests.
[00:18:28] Some commentators would later claim that the Otto Warmbier case was used by Trump to drum up anti-North Korean sentiment in preparation for a potential military strike.
[00:18:43] Now, this strike never came, thankfully, but encouraging the idea that North Korea had tortured Otto Warmbier to death certainly helped reinforce this image of the regime as brutal and dangerous.
[00:18:59] But, as you may remember, in 2018, there was an about turn. After a series of meetings, Donald Trump declared that he and Kim had “fallen in love”, and the so-called “North Korea crisis” was over.
[00:19:18] There was now no wider geopolitical incentive to push the kingdom over its treatment of Otto Warmbier, and in 2019, Trump publicly stated that he thought Kim Jong-un didn’t know what had happened.
[00:19:37] In other words, he, and the North Koreans, were off the hook.
[00:19:42] Nobody would see justice, at least publicly, for whatever happened to Otto Warmbier.
[00:19:50] So…what did happen, or at least what are some theories about what happened?
[00:19:57] In terms of whether he even removed the propaganda poster, the evidence is inconclusive.
[00:20:05] Maybe he did, after a few too many beers. Or it wasn’t him at all; the North Korean authorities thought it would be politically useful to have an American captive, and he was simply unlucky.
[00:20:20] And how did he end up in a coma?
[00:20:24] The official North Korean verdict, according to American doctors, is unlikely.
[00:20:30] But so is his parents’ claim that he was badly beaten. His body didn’t show signs of torture, American prisoners in North Korea are generally not tortured, and it was far more politically useful for North Korea to have him alive and healthy than in a vegetative state.
[00:20:51] In other words, why would he have been tortured? Nobody stood to gain from it.
[00:20:58] The American doctors stated that his brain damage, and subsequent coma, were most likely caused by oxygen deprivation, when your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. This can be caused by physical violence, but it can also be caused by many other things: cardiac arrest, suffocation, drowning and so on.
[00:21:24] To be fair, the American doctors said that Otto had otherwise been kept in good condition, and well looked after. But whatever had happened, he left North Korea a shell of the person who had arrived seventeen months earlier.
[00:21:43] There are a few theories about what might have happened.
[00:21:48] One is that it was some kind of tragic accident, either a genuine accident or some miscalculation by one of the guards. The North Koreans invented the botulism and sleeping pill excuse, thinking it might be more plausible than whatever did happen, but it had the opposite effect.
[00:22:11] Another theory was put forward in a GQ article, and this was that Otto Warmbier might have tried to kill himself shortly after hearing his sentence. 15 years in a labour camp. He was distraught, and might have tried to end his life before being found by his guards, but not before suffering such high levels of oxygen deprivation that he was sent into a coma.
[00:22:40] The truth will almost certainly never see the light of day.
[00:22:46] Otto Warmbier was not a spy. He was not a dissident. He was a young man on holiday who, by any reasonable measure, did nothing that warranted the response it received. And he died for it.
[00:23:03] Fortunately for any young Americans who might be thinking about making a similar trip, promising their mothers that things are different now, and the same thing would never happen again, they can’t.
[00:23:16] The US State Department imposed a travel ban on US citizens visiting North Korea shortly after Otto Warmbier’s death, and North Korea currently also has a ban on American citizens entering the country as tourists.
[00:23:32] Unfortunately, the story of Otto Warmbier does not have a tidy conclusion, in the sense that justice has not been served and accountability has not followed. Kim Jong-un remains in power. The regime continues. The camps continue.
[00:23:50] But what Otto's case did was to make something vivid and undeniable that had previously been easy, for many people, to file away as abstract: North Korea is not merely strange or amusing or ideologically peculiar. A funny hermit kingdom ruled by a despot with an unconventional haircut.
[00:24:14] It can be genuinely, systematically, brutal.
[00:24:18] And if your name is Otto Warmbier, fatal.
[00:24:23] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Otto Warmbier.
[00:24:27] As a reminder, this is part one of a three part mini-series.
[00:24:31] Next up we’ll be talking about the brazen daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother, and in part three it’ll be Kim Jong-il’s peculiar love for cinema, and how that led him to kidnapping a famous South Korean director.
[00:24:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we’ll be talking about Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old American student who went on a trip to North Korea and returned unrecognisable.
[00:00:46] In part two, we’ll talk about the daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:54] And in the final part, part three, we’ll talk about Kim Jong-il’s obsession with cinema, and how this led him to kidnap one of South Korea’s most famous directors.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] I can imagine you can all think of something that you regret doing when you were young.
[00:01:19] From that tattoo you now try to cover up to betting your friend you could climb up a large tree, only to fall down and break your elbow, making mistakes and learning from them is all a part of growing up.
[00:01:34] And a holiday, far away from home, is the kind of place where mistakes are perhaps more likely to happen.
[00:01:43] Normally, of course, mistakes aren’t permanent. A sore head in the morning, perhaps a slap on the wrist from a police officer for doing something more serious, but nothing that will forever change the trajectory of your life.
[00:02:01] That is, unless the mistake takes place in North Korea.
[00:02:06] So, let me paint you a picture.
[00:02:09] It is the 2nd of January, 2016.
[00:02:14] A young man is standing in Pyongyang International Airport, waiting to board a flight back to Beijing.
[00:02:23] His name is Otto Warmbier. He is twenty-one years old, a star student at the University of Virginia, a dutiful son, and the eldest of three children.
[00:02:36] He has just spent five days in North Korea as part of a tour group, a $1,200 five-day, four-night “New Year's Party Tour”.
[00:02:49] Tourists are allowed in North Korea, or at least, back then they were, but only as part of a group, and under very tight supervision.
[00:03:00] He has seen what all tourists see: the vast bronze statues of the Kim family, the immaculate streets, the carefully choreographed displays of loyalty and order. He has bowed where he was told to bow, photographed what he was allowed to photograph, and said nothing that might cause offence.
[00:03:24] It’s been fun. Eye-opening. A world away from his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, obviously.
[00:03:31] But now he is ready to leave.
[00:03:35] He is one of the last to go through security, and as he hands over his passport, the officers spend more time looking at his documents than seems necessary. They flick through the pages, whispering to each other. Some more officials approach from behind, tap him on the shoulder, and ask him to follow them to a private room.
[00:04:01] The man he has been sharing a room with for the past few days, an Englishman named Danny Gratton, attempts a joke, telling Otto, “'Well, that's the last we'll see of you.”
[00:04:14] Unfortunately, it would prove to be true.
[00:04:18] This will be the last time anyone outside North Korea will see Otto Warmbier, at least, as the Otto Warmbier they knew.
[00:04:28] Now, to understand what happened next, and perhaps why, we need to remind ourselves of a little bit of North Korean history.
[00:04:41] North Korea, or to give it its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is, by almost any measure, the most closed and controlled state in the world.
[00:04:55] It has been ruled by the same family since 1948: first Kim Il-sung, then his son Kim Jong-il, and now his grandson Kim Jong-un.
[00:05:08] The regime maintains control through an almost total monopoly on information.
[00:05:14] There is no free press, no independent internet access for ordinary citizens, and no meaningful political opposition. Leaving the country without permission is illegal and, for most people, essentially impossible.
[00:05:31] For those who break the rules, or who are simply accused of doing so, the consequences can be devastating. Sentences are extremely harsh, and typically involve back-breaking forced labour in the country’s network of political prison camps.
[00:05:52] And crucially for our story, North Korea is extraordinarily sensitive about its image.
[00:06:01] Any perceived insult to the leadership of the Kim family, to the state, to the symbols of the regime, these are treated not as a minor offence, but as a serious political crime.
[00:06:18] And this brings us back to Otto Warmbier, and what the North Korean authorities said he had done.
[00:06:27] For the first six weeks after his arrest, the only statement they released about him was that he had committed "a hostile act against the state".
[00:06:40] To Otto’s family, and to those who had been on the tour with him, this seemed…implausible, very unlikely.
[00:06:49] He was a young man, an otherwise well-behaved, upstanding member of society. He had been very cautious on the tour, and he knew all too well the consequences of getting on the wrong side of the regime.
[00:07:05] Sure, it was New Year’s Eve, and everyone had had a few drinks, but there was no indication that he was particularly drunk or disorderly, nobody remembered him causing any problems.
[00:07:19] There must surely have been a mixup, a misunderstanding, and he would be released soon.
[00:07:27] But…he wasn’t.
[00:07:30] On the 29th of February, 2016 — two months after his arrest — he was brought before the cameras for a press conference.
[00:07:41] He appeared thin and clearly distressed. In a halting, tearful voice, he delivered a prepared statement confessing to his alleged crimes and begging the North Korean government for forgiveness.
[00:07:59] "I have made the worst mistake of my life," the young man said, almost weeping.
[00:08:05] You can see the entire thing on YouTube, and it is pretty painful to watch.
[00:08:11] His family and the US government made clear that they considered the confession to have been made under duress — in other words, that he had been forced to say it. They simply didn’t accept it.
[00:08:28] Even disregarding the content of the confession, and with our “English learner’s” hat on, the language was as if it had been written by a non-native speaker.
[00:08:42] He said things like, “I came to commit this crime task”, and “but since my family suffered from very severe financial difficulties”.
[00:08:53] This might be grammatically correct English, but these are not the words of a native English speaker. Anyone listening to the speech could clearly understand that these weren’t his words; someone with good but imperfect English had drafted the statement.
[00:09:16] The North Koreans’ claim was this: in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, Otto Warmbier had entered a staff-only area of his hotel and attempted to steal a political banner from a wall.
[00:09:34] Now, you might think, “ok, he had a few drinks and wanted to take a fun memento of his trip. He’s a young man, that’s not such a terrible crime”.
[00:09:45] Well, three things.
[00:09:47] Firstly, removing any kind of political banner in North Korea is a serious crime, no matter the intention. You might think this law is extreme, but it is the law, and a North Korean citizen would certainly have been treated the same way, if not more harshly.
[00:10:09] Secondly, the supposed “evidence” for Otto taking the sign was flimsy at best. There was some grainy CCTV footage that showed a tall-ish man touching the sign at around 1am, but, his companions on the trip said that they didn’t get back until more like 3am, and what’s more, this corridor was well-lit even in the middle of the night, which is very unusual in North Korea. In other words, this CCTV footage was not exactly reliable.
[00:10:48] And lastly, and perhaps most bizarrely, the North Koreans claimed that Otto Warmbier’s actions were not those of a tipsy young American looking for something fun to hang in his dormroom; this was a hostile act, carried out at the instigation of a Methodist church group and the US government, as part of a deliberate attempt to destabilise the country.
[00:11:18] Or at least, that was the official policy line, and what Otto confessed to in his prepared statement.
[00:11:26] Now, that version of events was, to put it gently, implausible.
[00:11:33] Firstly, Otto Warmbier was Jewish, so he was unlikely to be part of a Methodist church.
[00:11:41] And secondly, he was a twenty-one-year-old student on a five-day group tour; the idea that he was a covert agent working with the CIA to bring down the North Korean government is not one that many Western observers found convincing.
[00:12:00] But…it didn’t matter.
[00:12:02] North Korea was not interested in convincing anyone, anyone outside its borders, that was.
[00:12:09] It had Otto Warmbier, and there was nothing anyone else could do.
[00:12:15] A month later, at a trial that lasted barely an hour, he was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.
[00:12:27] And then, from the perspective of the outside world, he disappeared.
[00:12:33] For the next seventeen months, his family received practically no information about his condition. The North Korean government said he was being treated well and receiving medical care.
[00:12:50] Now, there’s another aspect to this story.
[00:12:53] The United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, and the two countries are still technically at war. So actually having these conversations was…complicated. All communication went through Sweden, which does have an embassy, and staff in Pyongyang, the capital.
[00:13:18] Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, spoke publicly, pleading for their son's release, and trying everything they could think of to bring him home.
[00:13:31] And then, in June 2017, a year and a half after the incident, the North Korean government made a surprise announcement.
[00:13:42] Otto Warmbier would be released on humanitarian grounds.
[00:13:48] He was, they said, in a coma, and had been since shortly after his trial in March 2016. More than a year earlier.
[00:13:59] The reason they gave for the coma was something called botulism, which is a rare form of food poisoning, and they said that this, combined with a sleeping pill he had been given, had sent him into a coma.
[00:14:15] Now, we’ll come to whether this was actually true later on, but, spoiler alert, most foreign doctors don’t buy this official explanation.
[00:14:26] On the 13th of June, Otto Warmbier arrived back in the United States. His parents rushed to meet him, but as they approached the aeroplane, they heard this raw, almost animalistic groaning, like a primordial cry for help.
[00:14:47] It was coming from Otto.
[00:14:50] He was a shadow of his former self. His hair had been shaved off, he was hooked up with tubes, he was blind and deaf. He could not speak or respond to commands. He showed no signs of awareness of the world around him.
[00:15:08] He was rushed to hospital, where the doctors said he was in what’s called a state of unresponsive wakefulness, which is a condition where a person's eyes may open and they may breathe without assistance, but where there is no meaningful conscious activity.
[00:15:29] In other words, he had lost virtually all of his brain function.
[00:15:35] And tragically, the doctors told his parents, it would never come back. There was no hope.
[00:15:43] His parents made the agonising decision to remove his feeding tube, thus sealing his fate.
[00:15:51] Six days after his return home, on the 19th of June, 2017, Otto Warmbier died. He was twenty-two years old.
[00:16:02] His parents, who had spent seventeen months fighting to bring their son home, had him back for less than a week.
[00:16:11] The question that followed, and which has still never been fully answered, was what happened to Otto Warmbier?
[00:16:22] The North Korean government maintained that he had been treated well, that they bore no responsibility for his condition, and that his death was the result of the botulism, the food poisoning, that he had suffered before his coma.
[00:16:39] American doctors were deeply sceptical. If it was caused by botulism, it was unlike anything they had ever seen.
[00:16:50] As for his parents, they were, as any parent would be, desperate to find some kind of justice, to hold someone or something accountable for the death of their son.
[00:17:06] By this point, there had been a change in the White House. Barack Obama was out, and Donald Trump had taken his place at the start of 2017.
[00:17:18] The Warmbiers knew that Donald Trump was a keen watcher of Fox News, and thought that if they could go on the show and tell their story, it might appeal to the one viewer who could do something about it: the then relatively recently inaugurated President Trump.
[00:17:38] In these interviews, the Warmbiers stated that they believed their son had been tortured. Otto’s father stated that his son’s teeth looked like they had been rearranged with pliers, and that he had a scar on his foot.
[00:17:56] The Fox interview worked. It had its intended purpose. Donald Trump tweeted out “great interview”, adding that “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea”, despite there being no evidence that he actually was.
[00:18:15] Now, the backdrop of all of this was the escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, after North Korea’s repeated nuclear weapons tests.
[00:18:28] Some commentators would later claim that the Otto Warmbier case was used by Trump to drum up anti-North Korean sentiment in preparation for a potential military strike.
[00:18:43] Now, this strike never came, thankfully, but encouraging the idea that North Korea had tortured Otto Warmbier to death certainly helped reinforce this image of the regime as brutal and dangerous.
[00:18:59] But, as you may remember, in 2018, there was an about turn. After a series of meetings, Donald Trump declared that he and Kim had “fallen in love”, and the so-called “North Korea crisis” was over.
[00:19:18] There was now no wider geopolitical incentive to push the kingdom over its treatment of Otto Warmbier, and in 2019, Trump publicly stated that he thought Kim Jong-un didn’t know what had happened.
[00:19:37] In other words, he, and the North Koreans, were off the hook.
[00:19:42] Nobody would see justice, at least publicly, for whatever happened to Otto Warmbier.
[00:19:50] So…what did happen, or at least what are some theories about what happened?
[00:19:57] In terms of whether he even removed the propaganda poster, the evidence is inconclusive.
[00:20:05] Maybe he did, after a few too many beers. Or it wasn’t him at all; the North Korean authorities thought it would be politically useful to have an American captive, and he was simply unlucky.
[00:20:20] And how did he end up in a coma?
[00:20:24] The official North Korean verdict, according to American doctors, is unlikely.
[00:20:30] But so is his parents’ claim that he was badly beaten. His body didn’t show signs of torture, American prisoners in North Korea are generally not tortured, and it was far more politically useful for North Korea to have him alive and healthy than in a vegetative state.
[00:20:51] In other words, why would he have been tortured? Nobody stood to gain from it.
[00:20:58] The American doctors stated that his brain damage, and subsequent coma, were most likely caused by oxygen deprivation, when your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. This can be caused by physical violence, but it can also be caused by many other things: cardiac arrest, suffocation, drowning and so on.
[00:21:24] To be fair, the American doctors said that Otto had otherwise been kept in good condition, and well looked after. But whatever had happened, he left North Korea a shell of the person who had arrived seventeen months earlier.
[00:21:43] There are a few theories about what might have happened.
[00:21:48] One is that it was some kind of tragic accident, either a genuine accident or some miscalculation by one of the guards. The North Koreans invented the botulism and sleeping pill excuse, thinking it might be more plausible than whatever did happen, but it had the opposite effect.
[00:22:11] Another theory was put forward in a GQ article, and this was that Otto Warmbier might have tried to kill himself shortly after hearing his sentence. 15 years in a labour camp. He was distraught, and might have tried to end his life before being found by his guards, but not before suffering such high levels of oxygen deprivation that he was sent into a coma.
[00:22:40] The truth will almost certainly never see the light of day.
[00:22:46] Otto Warmbier was not a spy. He was not a dissident. He was a young man on holiday who, by any reasonable measure, did nothing that warranted the response it received. And he died for it.
[00:23:03] Fortunately for any young Americans who might be thinking about making a similar trip, promising their mothers that things are different now, and the same thing would never happen again, they can’t.
[00:23:16] The US State Department imposed a travel ban on US citizens visiting North Korea shortly after Otto Warmbier’s death, and North Korea currently also has a ban on American citizens entering the country as tourists.
[00:23:32] Unfortunately, the story of Otto Warmbier does not have a tidy conclusion, in the sense that justice has not been served and accountability has not followed. Kim Jong-un remains in power. The regime continues. The camps continue.
[00:23:50] But what Otto's case did was to make something vivid and undeniable that had previously been easy, for many people, to file away as abstract: North Korea is not merely strange or amusing or ideologically peculiar. A funny hermit kingdom ruled by a despot with an unconventional haircut.
[00:24:14] It can be genuinely, systematically, brutal.
[00:24:18] And if your name is Otto Warmbier, fatal.
[00:24:23] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Otto Warmbier.
[00:24:27] As a reminder, this is part one of a three part mini-series.
[00:24:31] Next up we’ll be talking about the brazen daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother, and in part three it’ll be Kim Jong-il’s peculiar love for cinema, and how that led him to kidnapping a famous South Korean director.
[00:24:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we’ll be talking about Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old American student who went on a trip to North Korea and returned unrecognisable.
[00:00:46] In part two, we’ll talk about the daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:54] And in the final part, part three, we’ll talk about Kim Jong-il’s obsession with cinema, and how this led him to kidnap one of South Korea’s most famous directors.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] I can imagine you can all think of something that you regret doing when you were young.
[00:01:19] From that tattoo you now try to cover up to betting your friend you could climb up a large tree, only to fall down and break your elbow, making mistakes and learning from them is all a part of growing up.
[00:01:34] And a holiday, far away from home, is the kind of place where mistakes are perhaps more likely to happen.
[00:01:43] Normally, of course, mistakes aren’t permanent. A sore head in the morning, perhaps a slap on the wrist from a police officer for doing something more serious, but nothing that will forever change the trajectory of your life.
[00:02:01] That is, unless the mistake takes place in North Korea.
[00:02:06] So, let me paint you a picture.
[00:02:09] It is the 2nd of January, 2016.
[00:02:14] A young man is standing in Pyongyang International Airport, waiting to board a flight back to Beijing.
[00:02:23] His name is Otto Warmbier. He is twenty-one years old, a star student at the University of Virginia, a dutiful son, and the eldest of three children.
[00:02:36] He has just spent five days in North Korea as part of a tour group, a $1,200 five-day, four-night “New Year's Party Tour”.
[00:02:49] Tourists are allowed in North Korea, or at least, back then they were, but only as part of a group, and under very tight supervision.
[00:03:00] He has seen what all tourists see: the vast bronze statues of the Kim family, the immaculate streets, the carefully choreographed displays of loyalty and order. He has bowed where he was told to bow, photographed what he was allowed to photograph, and said nothing that might cause offence.
[00:03:24] It’s been fun. Eye-opening. A world away from his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, obviously.
[00:03:31] But now he is ready to leave.
[00:03:35] He is one of the last to go through security, and as he hands over his passport, the officers spend more time looking at his documents than seems necessary. They flick through the pages, whispering to each other. Some more officials approach from behind, tap him on the shoulder, and ask him to follow them to a private room.
[00:04:01] The man he has been sharing a room with for the past few days, an Englishman named Danny Gratton, attempts a joke, telling Otto, “'Well, that's the last we'll see of you.”
[00:04:14] Unfortunately, it would prove to be true.
[00:04:18] This will be the last time anyone outside North Korea will see Otto Warmbier, at least, as the Otto Warmbier they knew.
[00:04:28] Now, to understand what happened next, and perhaps why, we need to remind ourselves of a little bit of North Korean history.
[00:04:41] North Korea, or to give it its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is, by almost any measure, the most closed and controlled state in the world.
[00:04:55] It has been ruled by the same family since 1948: first Kim Il-sung, then his son Kim Jong-il, and now his grandson Kim Jong-un.
[00:05:08] The regime maintains control through an almost total monopoly on information.
[00:05:14] There is no free press, no independent internet access for ordinary citizens, and no meaningful political opposition. Leaving the country without permission is illegal and, for most people, essentially impossible.
[00:05:31] For those who break the rules, or who are simply accused of doing so, the consequences can be devastating. Sentences are extremely harsh, and typically involve back-breaking forced labour in the country’s network of political prison camps.
[00:05:52] And crucially for our story, North Korea is extraordinarily sensitive about its image.
[00:06:01] Any perceived insult to the leadership of the Kim family, to the state, to the symbols of the regime, these are treated not as a minor offence, but as a serious political crime.
[00:06:18] And this brings us back to Otto Warmbier, and what the North Korean authorities said he had done.
[00:06:27] For the first six weeks after his arrest, the only statement they released about him was that he had committed "a hostile act against the state".
[00:06:40] To Otto’s family, and to those who had been on the tour with him, this seemed…implausible, very unlikely.
[00:06:49] He was a young man, an otherwise well-behaved, upstanding member of society. He had been very cautious on the tour, and he knew all too well the consequences of getting on the wrong side of the regime.
[00:07:05] Sure, it was New Year’s Eve, and everyone had had a few drinks, but there was no indication that he was particularly drunk or disorderly, nobody remembered him causing any problems.
[00:07:19] There must surely have been a mixup, a misunderstanding, and he would be released soon.
[00:07:27] But…he wasn’t.
[00:07:30] On the 29th of February, 2016 — two months after his arrest — he was brought before the cameras for a press conference.
[00:07:41] He appeared thin and clearly distressed. In a halting, tearful voice, he delivered a prepared statement confessing to his alleged crimes and begging the North Korean government for forgiveness.
[00:07:59] "I have made the worst mistake of my life," the young man said, almost weeping.
[00:08:05] You can see the entire thing on YouTube, and it is pretty painful to watch.
[00:08:11] His family and the US government made clear that they considered the confession to have been made under duress — in other words, that he had been forced to say it. They simply didn’t accept it.
[00:08:28] Even disregarding the content of the confession, and with our “English learner’s” hat on, the language was as if it had been written by a non-native speaker.
[00:08:42] He said things like, “I came to commit this crime task”, and “but since my family suffered from very severe financial difficulties”.
[00:08:53] This might be grammatically correct English, but these are not the words of a native English speaker. Anyone listening to the speech could clearly understand that these weren’t his words; someone with good but imperfect English had drafted the statement.
[00:09:16] The North Koreans’ claim was this: in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, Otto Warmbier had entered a staff-only area of his hotel and attempted to steal a political banner from a wall.
[00:09:34] Now, you might think, “ok, he had a few drinks and wanted to take a fun memento of his trip. He’s a young man, that’s not such a terrible crime”.
[00:09:45] Well, three things.
[00:09:47] Firstly, removing any kind of political banner in North Korea is a serious crime, no matter the intention. You might think this law is extreme, but it is the law, and a North Korean citizen would certainly have been treated the same way, if not more harshly.
[00:10:09] Secondly, the supposed “evidence” for Otto taking the sign was flimsy at best. There was some grainy CCTV footage that showed a tall-ish man touching the sign at around 1am, but, his companions on the trip said that they didn’t get back until more like 3am, and what’s more, this corridor was well-lit even in the middle of the night, which is very unusual in North Korea. In other words, this CCTV footage was not exactly reliable.
[00:10:48] And lastly, and perhaps most bizarrely, the North Koreans claimed that Otto Warmbier’s actions were not those of a tipsy young American looking for something fun to hang in his dormroom; this was a hostile act, carried out at the instigation of a Methodist church group and the US government, as part of a deliberate attempt to destabilise the country.
[00:11:18] Or at least, that was the official policy line, and what Otto confessed to in his prepared statement.
[00:11:26] Now, that version of events was, to put it gently, implausible.
[00:11:33] Firstly, Otto Warmbier was Jewish, so he was unlikely to be part of a Methodist church.
[00:11:41] And secondly, he was a twenty-one-year-old student on a five-day group tour; the idea that he was a covert agent working with the CIA to bring down the North Korean government is not one that many Western observers found convincing.
[00:12:00] But…it didn’t matter.
[00:12:02] North Korea was not interested in convincing anyone, anyone outside its borders, that was.
[00:12:09] It had Otto Warmbier, and there was nothing anyone else could do.
[00:12:15] A month later, at a trial that lasted barely an hour, he was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.
[00:12:27] And then, from the perspective of the outside world, he disappeared.
[00:12:33] For the next seventeen months, his family received practically no information about his condition. The North Korean government said he was being treated well and receiving medical care.
[00:12:50] Now, there’s another aspect to this story.
[00:12:53] The United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, and the two countries are still technically at war. So actually having these conversations was…complicated. All communication went through Sweden, which does have an embassy, and staff in Pyongyang, the capital.
[00:13:18] Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, spoke publicly, pleading for their son's release, and trying everything they could think of to bring him home.
[00:13:31] And then, in June 2017, a year and a half after the incident, the North Korean government made a surprise announcement.
[00:13:42] Otto Warmbier would be released on humanitarian grounds.
[00:13:48] He was, they said, in a coma, and had been since shortly after his trial in March 2016. More than a year earlier.
[00:13:59] The reason they gave for the coma was something called botulism, which is a rare form of food poisoning, and they said that this, combined with a sleeping pill he had been given, had sent him into a coma.
[00:14:15] Now, we’ll come to whether this was actually true later on, but, spoiler alert, most foreign doctors don’t buy this official explanation.
[00:14:26] On the 13th of June, Otto Warmbier arrived back in the United States. His parents rushed to meet him, but as they approached the aeroplane, they heard this raw, almost animalistic groaning, like a primordial cry for help.
[00:14:47] It was coming from Otto.
[00:14:50] He was a shadow of his former self. His hair had been shaved off, he was hooked up with tubes, he was blind and deaf. He could not speak or respond to commands. He showed no signs of awareness of the world around him.
[00:15:08] He was rushed to hospital, where the doctors said he was in what’s called a state of unresponsive wakefulness, which is a condition where a person's eyes may open and they may breathe without assistance, but where there is no meaningful conscious activity.
[00:15:29] In other words, he had lost virtually all of his brain function.
[00:15:35] And tragically, the doctors told his parents, it would never come back. There was no hope.
[00:15:43] His parents made the agonising decision to remove his feeding tube, thus sealing his fate.
[00:15:51] Six days after his return home, on the 19th of June, 2017, Otto Warmbier died. He was twenty-two years old.
[00:16:02] His parents, who had spent seventeen months fighting to bring their son home, had him back for less than a week.
[00:16:11] The question that followed, and which has still never been fully answered, was what happened to Otto Warmbier?
[00:16:22] The North Korean government maintained that he had been treated well, that they bore no responsibility for his condition, and that his death was the result of the botulism, the food poisoning, that he had suffered before his coma.
[00:16:39] American doctors were deeply sceptical. If it was caused by botulism, it was unlike anything they had ever seen.
[00:16:50] As for his parents, they were, as any parent would be, desperate to find some kind of justice, to hold someone or something accountable for the death of their son.
[00:17:06] By this point, there had been a change in the White House. Barack Obama was out, and Donald Trump had taken his place at the start of 2017.
[00:17:18] The Warmbiers knew that Donald Trump was a keen watcher of Fox News, and thought that if they could go on the show and tell their story, it might appeal to the one viewer who could do something about it: the then relatively recently inaugurated President Trump.
[00:17:38] In these interviews, the Warmbiers stated that they believed their son had been tortured. Otto’s father stated that his son’s teeth looked like they had been rearranged with pliers, and that he had a scar on his foot.
[00:17:56] The Fox interview worked. It had its intended purpose. Donald Trump tweeted out “great interview”, adding that “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea”, despite there being no evidence that he actually was.
[00:18:15] Now, the backdrop of all of this was the escalating war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, after North Korea’s repeated nuclear weapons tests.
[00:18:28] Some commentators would later claim that the Otto Warmbier case was used by Trump to drum up anti-North Korean sentiment in preparation for a potential military strike.
[00:18:43] Now, this strike never came, thankfully, but encouraging the idea that North Korea had tortured Otto Warmbier to death certainly helped reinforce this image of the regime as brutal and dangerous.
[00:18:59] But, as you may remember, in 2018, there was an about turn. After a series of meetings, Donald Trump declared that he and Kim had “fallen in love”, and the so-called “North Korea crisis” was over.
[00:19:18] There was now no wider geopolitical incentive to push the kingdom over its treatment of Otto Warmbier, and in 2019, Trump publicly stated that he thought Kim Jong-un didn’t know what had happened.
[00:19:37] In other words, he, and the North Koreans, were off the hook.
[00:19:42] Nobody would see justice, at least publicly, for whatever happened to Otto Warmbier.
[00:19:50] So…what did happen, or at least what are some theories about what happened?
[00:19:57] In terms of whether he even removed the propaganda poster, the evidence is inconclusive.
[00:20:05] Maybe he did, after a few too many beers. Or it wasn’t him at all; the North Korean authorities thought it would be politically useful to have an American captive, and he was simply unlucky.
[00:20:20] And how did he end up in a coma?
[00:20:24] The official North Korean verdict, according to American doctors, is unlikely.
[00:20:30] But so is his parents’ claim that he was badly beaten. His body didn’t show signs of torture, American prisoners in North Korea are generally not tortured, and it was far more politically useful for North Korea to have him alive and healthy than in a vegetative state.
[00:20:51] In other words, why would he have been tortured? Nobody stood to gain from it.
[00:20:58] The American doctors stated that his brain damage, and subsequent coma, were most likely caused by oxygen deprivation, when your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. This can be caused by physical violence, but it can also be caused by many other things: cardiac arrest, suffocation, drowning and so on.
[00:21:24] To be fair, the American doctors said that Otto had otherwise been kept in good condition, and well looked after. But whatever had happened, he left North Korea a shell of the person who had arrived seventeen months earlier.
[00:21:43] There are a few theories about what might have happened.
[00:21:48] One is that it was some kind of tragic accident, either a genuine accident or some miscalculation by one of the guards. The North Koreans invented the botulism and sleeping pill excuse, thinking it might be more plausible than whatever did happen, but it had the opposite effect.
[00:22:11] Another theory was put forward in a GQ article, and this was that Otto Warmbier might have tried to kill himself shortly after hearing his sentence. 15 years in a labour camp. He was distraught, and might have tried to end his life before being found by his guards, but not before suffering such high levels of oxygen deprivation that he was sent into a coma.
[00:22:40] The truth will almost certainly never see the light of day.
[00:22:46] Otto Warmbier was not a spy. He was not a dissident. He was a young man on holiday who, by any reasonable measure, did nothing that warranted the response it received. And he died for it.
[00:23:03] Fortunately for any young Americans who might be thinking about making a similar trip, promising their mothers that things are different now, and the same thing would never happen again, they can’t.
[00:23:16] The US State Department imposed a travel ban on US citizens visiting North Korea shortly after Otto Warmbier’s death, and North Korea currently also has a ban on American citizens entering the country as tourists.
[00:23:32] Unfortunately, the story of Otto Warmbier does not have a tidy conclusion, in the sense that justice has not been served and accountability has not followed. Kim Jong-un remains in power. The regime continues. The camps continue.
[00:23:50] But what Otto's case did was to make something vivid and undeniable that had previously been easy, for many people, to file away as abstract: North Korea is not merely strange or amusing or ideologically peculiar. A funny hermit kingdom ruled by a despot with an unconventional haircut.
[00:24:14] It can be genuinely, systematically, brutal.
[00:24:18] And if your name is Otto Warmbier, fatal.
[00:24:23] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Otto Warmbier.
[00:24:27] As a reminder, this is part one of a three part mini-series.
[00:24:31] Next up we’ll be talking about the brazen daylight murder of Kim Jong-un’s brother, and in part three it’ll be Kim Jong-il’s peculiar love for cinema, and how that led him to kidnapping a famous South Korean director.
[00:24:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
