On a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati in the United States, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony.
They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea.
One of their last glimpses of him had been in a televised news conference from Pyongyang, during which their boy – a sweet, intelligent 21-year-old scholarship student at the University of Virginia – confessed to undermining the regime at the behest of the unlikely triumvirate of an Ohio church, a university secret society and the American government by stealing a propaganda poster.
He sobbed to his captors, “I have made the single worst decision of my life. But I am only human […] I beg that you find it in your hearts to give me forgiveness and allow me to return home to my family.”
Despite his pleas, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour and vanished into the dictatorship’s prison system.
Fred and Cindy had so despaired during their long vigil that at one point they allegedly told friends that Otto had probably been killed. On her son’s 22nd birthday, Cindy lit Chinese-style lanterns and let the winter winds lift the flame-buoyed balloons toward North Korea, dreaming they might bear her message to her son. “I love you, Otto,” she said, then sang Happy Birthday.
But on that June morning, the Warmbiers were anticipating news of a secret US State Department mission to free their son. Upon learning that Otto was apparently unconscious, President Donald Trump had directed an American team to fly to North Korea, and now progress of the mission was being monitored at the highest level of the government.
