It was Wednesday morning last week when the families and friends of Current TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee gathered outside the Burbank airport to welcome them home after 142 days of captivity in North Korea.
The plane landed and a tearful Lee climbed down the stairs, immediately running to her four-year-old daughter and husband. Behind her was Ling, a UCLA alumna, who raised her arms high in the air with triumphant excitement before she tearfully embraced her husband, mother, father and sister.
Then appeared former president Bill Clinton, who had traveled to North Korea on the journalists’ behalf to secure their release.
In the UCLA community, former professors of Ling expressed their happiness and relief that the two journalists had finally returned safely to U.S. soil.
“I was so overjoyed and delighted that they were back in the United States with their families,” said Marde Gregory, a senior lecturer of communication studies, who was initially shocked upon hearing of Ling’s and Lee’s detainment.
Gregory became acquainted with Ling while she studied communication studies at UCLA.
“She is an absolutely wonderful young woman; so bright, so tireless, and a tremendous talent,” she said.
Ling had declared the communication studies major at UCLA during her second year. After graduating in 1998, she began working as a reporter for Channel One News, after which she joined Current TV, a California-based news network co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, Gregory said.
It was while she was working for Current TV that she met fellow reporter Euna Lee. The two journalists were discovered near the China-North Korea border by North Korean border guards on March 17, where they were working on a documentary for Current TV.
In early June, they were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegal entry into North Korea.
While the North Korean government claims the journalists had crossed the border into North Korea without permission, Lisa Ling, Laura Ling’s sister, explained via a phone interview with CNN that the journalists had never intended to cross into North Korea.
“(Laura) said it was maybe thirty seconds (that they were in North Korea) and then, everything just sort of got chaotic,” she said in the interview.
Throughout the over-four-month period when Ling and Lee were held in North Korea, former vice president Al Gore, the state department and the families of the journalists worked tirelessly to secure their release, Gregory said.
“I was not surprised (that Bill Clinton had traveled to North Korea) because I knew how hard former vice president Gore was working on this issue. He worked day and night since the middle of March to get these two young women released,” she said.
Also expressing no surprise that Clinton had traveled to North Korea on the journalists’ behalf was Michael Suman, a communication studies professor who knew Ling in the late 1990s through her work as a student monitor in the UCLA Center for Communication Policy’s study on television violence, which he had directed.
Both professors said they hope that the ordeal the two journalists faced and the efforts made by the state department to secure their release, would initiate an open dialogue between the United States and North Korea.
“It shows the value of rapprochement,” Suman said, “You need to talk to everyone, even the bad guys.” And Clinton’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il conveys just that.
Nonetheless, Gregory said that the journalists’ family and friends at home did not know with any certainty what to expect from the North Korean government.
“North Korea is the one country in the world where we cannot mandate that they take proper care of prisoners over there,” she said. “We just didn’t know what to expect.”
“Even though the North Korean government fed them, held them in a house, allowed them to call home and see the Swiss ambassador, I am not at all sure that they would continue,” Gregory said.
She also said hopes that Ling and Lee’s heart-wrenching ordeal serves as a big caution to all journalists to be weary and sensitive to what is going on in North Korea. In the meantime, however, she joins the millions of Americans who have expressed their enthusiasm at the safe return home of Ling and Lee.
Ling spoke on behalf of both journalists in her speech to the American community upon her arrival home, despite her exhaustion and fatigue.
“Thirty hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea. We feared that any moment, we would be sent to a hard labor camp,” she said between tears, according to news reports. “And then we were told we were going to a meeting … (and) we saw standing before us president Bill Clinton.
“We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end, and now we stand here, home and free,” she said in the reports.