Escape from North Korea

The early defectors almost always left North Korea for political reasons. In some instances, travel abroad had revealed new worlds, opening the defector’s eyes to the realities of the North Korean regime and offering possibilities that were unimaginable at home. Others were self-declared patriots who believed their defections would prevent war and hasten the coming of a unified Korea under South Korea’s freer political system. Still others were fleeing for their lives after committing some supposed transgression against the state that, had they stayed, would have condemned them to the gulag.

Few ordinary citizens escaped North Korea during the pre-famine period. The borders were sealed, and news of the outside world was scarce. Unless he had relatives in China with whom to stay, a North Korean had nowhere to go. Moreover, China was poor; it did not yet offer the comparative advantages that economic prosperity afforded it by the 1990s. In any event, North Korea’s societal controls were such that a man who failed to show up at his state-assigned job for more than a few days was presumed to have deserted his duties, thereby putting his family at risk for punishment. The underground railroad did not take off until the late 1990s, when the number of refugees in China swelled near the half-million mark and Christian activists started helping them escape.

In the pre-famine days, the rare North Korean who found his way to China was on his own. Evans Revere, a former American diplomat in Beijing, recalled his astonishment at encountering two North Koreans who turned up at the door of the United States Embassy in 1982, asking for help to reach South Korea. “I may have been the first American diplomat in China to have had to deal with North Korean refugees,” he said.²

Revere was the duty officer one evening when the Marine guard at the embassy entrance phoned to say there were two guys sitting in front of his post. They were dirty and disheveled and had plopped themselves down on the floor of the vestibule. “I can’t understand their Chinese,” the Marine told Revere. “Can you come down and talk to them?”

Revere went to the front entrance. After his questions in Mandarin also failed to elicit a response, something about the two men prompted him to try Korean, which he also spoke. The men responded with big smiles and a torrent of words. “I had a hard time at first placing their accent,” Revere said. “But then it dawned on me. I couldn’t quite believe it, but they were from North Korea.”

“They said they had swum across the Yalu,” Revere remembered. “Then they hitchhiked to Beijing, stole into the U.S. Embassy grounds, climbed over the back wall, and presented themselves at the front door. They said they had worked at odd jobs and stolen food along the way.” It was a miracle that they had made it as far as Beijing without being arrested.

“I asked them, ‘If you had some more money, can you get to Guangzhou?’ ”(a major city in the south of China near Hong Kong). “They said yes. So we fed them, gave them some money, and took them to the train station.” The North Koreans hid on the floor in the back seat of a van so the Chinese sentries wouldn’t spot them as they left the embassy compound. If the North Koreans had been soldiers or officials with important information to impart, Revere said, the United States might have been able to figure out a way to extract them from China. But they were just farmers and not worth diplomatic intervention, and they didn’t know enough to ask for political asylum. The Republic of Korea had no embassy in China at the time, so the Americans did not have the option of handing them over to the South Koreans. The last Revere saw of the two North Koreans was when they hopped out of the van at the train station and waved good-bye before vanishing into the crowd.

Most of the early defectors ended up in South Korea, but a handful of North Koreans managed to disappear in the West, where they quietly established new lives. Defectors were not always good guys. The fact that they had permission to travel abroad indicated some significant degree of complicity in North Korea’s brutal regime. Only trusted loyalists were allowed out of the country. At the same time, the defectors were also the only North Koreans who had any exposure to what life was like in freer societies.

Colonel Kim Jong-ryul—aka Kim Il Sung’s personal shopper—is a case in point. The colonel defected during an official trip to Vienna in 1994. Kim Il Sung had just died, and Kim Jong-ryul was convinced that it wouldn’t be long before a revolution broke out, North Korea erupted in chaos, and he would be purged. He faked his death, arranging for it to look like a hit by the Slovak mafia. His aim was to deceive the North Korean authorities and, he hoped, protect his family from retaliation. He then went into hiding in Austria for sixteen years. His story was not made public until 2010 when two Austrian journalists published a book in German about his defection. The title was Im Dienst des Diktators, or, in English, In the Dictator’s Service.

As a kind of high-tech personal shopper for Kim Il Sung, Colonel Kim had traveled regularly around Europe for nearly twenty years, armed with a diplomatic passport and suitcases filled with cash. He bought armaments, fancy cars, carpets, furniture, and other luxury items. The luxury goods were for the North Korean leader’s personal use or for him to dole out as gifts to his supporters. Colonel Kim purchased two encrypted telephones so Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il could talk to each other without anyone listening in.

Colonel Kim bought from Austrian, Swiss, German, French, and Czechoslovakian firms, which were only too willing to break international trade embargoes on North Korea in return for a 30 percent additional fee. He told the Austrian journalists that he did business with European customs agents and other officials, who would turn a blind eye to the illicit trade. The colonel even purchased a fleet of tanks, which he smuggled to North Korea disguised as hunting equipment. At a press conference in Vienna launching the publication of In the Dictator’s Service, he explained why he had defected: “I wanted freedom. I needed freedom.”³ Perhaps. Or maybe he wanted to save his skin.

The highest-ranking defector to the United States was North Korea’s ambassador to Egypt, Chang Sung-gil. Chang Sung-gil walked into the American Embassy in Cairo on a sweltering August Friday in 1997 and asked for protection. The ambassador’s defection was the first by a senior North Korean diplomat. In 1991 and 1996, two mid-level diplomats in Congo and Zambia had defected to South Korea.

Cairo was a significant diplomatic outpost for Pyongyang, and Chang Sung-gil was a good catch. News reports of the day identified him as a fountain of information about North Korea’s sales of Scud missiles to Iran, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, although the State Department did not confirm these sales. To the extent that Chang Sung-gil had facilitated the arms trafficking when he was North Korea’s man in Cairo, he had blood on his hands; at the same time, his information was valuable. There was an added bonus to Chang Sung-gil’s defection: his wife. The South Korean press identified her as a well-known actress who was acquainted with Kim Jong Il, an avid movie buff; in her debriefings, she presumably added to the intelligence community’s store of knowledge about the personal habits of the secretive dictator.

Chang Sung-gil’s defection was actually a three-fer. In Paris, at almost exactly the same hour on that August Friday in 1997, the ambassador’s brother, Chang Sung-ho, also defected to the United States. The brother was North Korea’s economic and trade representative in the French capital, a position that would have given him detailed knowledge of North Korea’s trade—legal and illegal—in Europe. He brought his wife and two children with him.⁴

North Korean students also defected. The most notorious student defections were those, in 1962, of four young men who were studying in the then Communist country of Bulgaria. The four students received asylum from the Bulgarian government in a diplomatic brouhaha that resulted in the expulsion of the North Korean ambassador from Sofia and the suspension of ties between the two countries. The diplomatic breach lasted seven years.

The North Korean students happened to be in the right place at the right time. They were among thirty-eight North Koreans studying in Bulgaria at a moment of deteriorating relations between Pyongyang and Moscow. As ties between North Korea and the Soviet Union worsened due to, among other things, Nikita Khrushchev’s rejection of Stalinism, Pyongyang recalled its students from every Communist country in Europe except Stalinist Albania.

On August 9, 1962, four students in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia decided to seize the moment and exploit the rift between their country and Bulgaria. Declaring themselves as loyal Leninists, they requested asylum. In a handwritten petition delivered to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, they stated that no “threats or hardships” could “turn us aside from the right Leninist path.” The letter ended, “We cherish our lives, but we cherish more our just cause.”

Two and a half weeks later, North Korean agents kidnapped the four students in the center of Sofia and took them by force to the North Korean Embassy. This was an outlaw action, and the Bulgarian government declared it a “rude intervention in the affairs of the country.” The incident soon devolved into farce. Two of the students managed to escape from the North Korean Embassy by tying sheets together and climbing out an upper-story window. The other two were rescued by Bulgarian police at the Sofia airport as North Korean officials tried to manhandle them onto a flight to Pyongyang.⁵

In 2010, during a visit to Seoul, two of the former students, now both in their seventies, told reporters that their protestations of support for Leninism had been false. They were not true Leninists, they said; they were only trying to win the assistance of Bulgaria’s Communist government, which at the time was closely aligned with Moscow. The real reason the North Korean government had kidnapped them in an effort to force their return, they said, was that they had issued a statement calling the Korean War a “North Korean war of aggression” in contravention of the official North Korean line that the United States started the war. Their statement also included the conviction that “it is better to read the Bible than the Collected Works of Kim Il Sung.”⁶ Half a century after the fact, it is impossible to know whether the defectors were telling the truth or rewriting history for the benefit of their hosts in Seoul.

Once the famine arrived in the mid-1990s and escape routes opened across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers and then across China, a high percentage of the fugitives came from the northeast region of North Korea, near the Chinese border. But word of the exodus reached some people in the privileged enclave of Pyongyang. Members of the powerful elite class made the decision to flee, too.

One such man was Kim Cheol-woong, first pianist of the Pyongyang Philharmonic Orchestra until 2001, when he escaped to China. Kim Cheol-woong reached South Korea in 2003 after two years on the run in China and two repatriations to the North. “My motivation to escape was not hunger,” he said later, “but to be able to play freely the music of my choice.”⁷

Kim Cheol-woong was born in Pyongyang in 1974 to a politically connected family. His father worked for the Workers’ Party, and his mother was a professor. At the age of eight, he was selected for a special program for young artists at the Pyongyang Music and Dance University, where he underwent fourteen years of intensive training. “For music students,” Kim Cheol-woong explained, “the core requirements are of course subjects related to music, but the main stress is always laid on the theory and philosophy of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.”

Among the required subjects Kim Cheol-woong studied were the Revolutionary History of Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the Revolutionary History of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. In music, as in every art form, the purpose is to serve the state and extol the country’s dictators—or so Kim Cheol-woong and his fellow students learned. The performing arts are a means to political ends.

Kim Cheol-woong recalled an episode that influenced him profoundly during his student years and taught him a lesson about the role of the artist in North Korea. The incident concerned a celebrated young pianist who had just won a minor international competition. Kim Jong Il ordered the pianist to enter the International Tchaikovsky Competition, held every four years in Moscow. It is the world’s most competitive piano competition, and Kim Cheol-woong said the young pianist knew he needed more years of practice before he would be ready for it. So he decided not to enter. It was a “rationally considered choice as a pianist,” Kim Cheol-woong said, but as a political matter, it had disastrous consequences for the unlucky young man. For his disobedience, the pianist was sent to the gulag on the orders of Kim Jong Il.

Many North Korean musicians studied in Russia at the time, and in 1995, Kim Cheol-woong, then twenty-one years old, was dispatched to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music in Moscow. In Russia, his life was tightly restricted. He lived at the North Korean Embassy, and he was under surveillance by North Korean security guards. Even so, a new world opened before him. For the first time, he could study twentieth-century music, and he fell in love with the free harmonics of jazz. There was only one problem: Jazz was banned in North Korea.

In North Korea, jazz is “seen as ‘vicious’ music that confuses people’s minds,” Kim Cheol-woong explained. American jazz pianist Dave Brubeck made a similar observation in 1958 on a visit to Warsaw. “No dictatorship can tolerate jazz,” he said at the time of that Cold War visit. “It is the first sign of a return to freedom.”⁸

The North Korean regime also bans individual composers whose biographies it deems dangerous. Among them is Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote some of the twentieth century’s greatest piano music. Rachmaninoff is verboten because he fled his native Russia after the 1917 Revolution and settled in the United States. In the eyes of the North Korean regime, a musician who betrayed his country—especially one who betrayed it in favor of the United States—is not a model anyone should emulate.

In Russia, Kim Cheol-woong discovered the lush, romantic music of the French composer and pianist Richard Clayderman. He remembers the first time he heard a recording by Clayderman. He was sitting in a café in Moscow across the street from the conservatory when the song “Autumn Leaves” came over the stereo system. He was entranced: “I had never heard music like that before, and it gave me goose bumps all over my body.”

Kim Cheol-woong bought Clayderman’s recordings in Moscow and continued to listen to them in secret when he returned home to Pyongyang in 1999. Then, one day in mid-2001, he was practicing Clayderman’s “Autumn Leaves,” which he wanted to play as a surprise for his girlfriend. A colleague heard him playing the illegal music and reported him to the Ministry of State Security, which oversees the country’s secret police and reports directly to the supreme leader, then Kim Jong Il. Kim Cheol-woong was forced to apologize and write ten pages of self-criticism. The experience was a personal epiphany: “The fact that a pianist, just because of playing his music, was forced to apologize, caused a great sense of aversion in me, and I decided to seek the freedom of being able to play freely.”

Kim Cheol-woong had heard rumors about North Koreans who had managed to get to South Korea by crossing the river to China, where they sought the help of Christian missionaries running an underground railroad. He decided to flee. In October 2001, he took a train to a town in the northeast part of the country, where he found a guide who, for $2,000, led him across the Tumen River in the middle of the night.

The guide directed him to a small village where other North Koreans were hiding. Kim Cheol-woong knocked on a random door. He told the farmer who answered that he was a classical pianist who had trained in Moscow at one of the world’s preeminent conservatories. He might as well have announced that he was an astronaut who had flown to the moon. The farmer’s response? “He said, ‘What’s a piano? I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ ” Kim said. The farmer gave him a job helping with the harvest in exchange for room and board.

For seven months, Kim Cheol-woong never touched a piano. After three weeks helping the farmer bring in his harvest, he found a job as a logger. It was backbreaking work that left him exhausted at night. Even so, he never gave up looking for a piano. “Every day I would tell whomever I met that I played the piano,” he said. Eventually another refugee directed him to a church that had a broken-down instrument. Thirty of the eighty keys did not function, but that did not matter to Kim Cheol-woong. “I could hear the missing notes in my head,” he said. After seven months of not playing, “I finally felt like I was alive.”

After about a year in China, he bought a fake South Korean passport on the black market and tried to use it to fly to Seoul. He was caught by the Chinese immigration authorities at the airport in Beijing. After three months in detention in China, he was put on a train to North Korea. Desperate to escape, he managed to jump from the moving train shortly after it reached North Korean soil. He immediately crossed the river again to China.

Two months later, Kim Cheol-woong was arrested a second time. This time he was nabbed as he was trying to cross the border into Mongolia posing as a Chinese tourist. He spent six months in jail in China before being deported. He was taken to the border and handed over to North Korean officials. He was about to be sent to a prison camp when he caught the eye of one of the officials, who happened to have worked with Kim’s father in Pyongyang. That man helped him escape and get back to China.

His third attempt to leave China worked. On December 7, 2002, using a fake South Korean passport he had purchased on the black market, Kim Cheol-woong flew from Beijing to Seoul. At the airport, he walked to the immigration desk and announced to the officer on duty, “I’m from Pyongyang.”

In recent years, Kim Cheol-woong has traveled the world with his music and his story. On a warm spring evening in 2008, he gave a private recital in Manhattan. The venue was the venerable Metropolitan Club, a white-marble palazzo designed by the renowned architect Stanford White and opened in 1894. The club overlooks Central Park from its prime location on Fifth Avenue at East Sixtieth Street. On the evening that Kim Cheol-woong took his seat at the grand piano in the ground-floor salon, the red-velvet curtains were closed to the evening light and the room was softly lit by triple-armed sconces lining the gold-and-white walls.

After the recital, which included a ballad by Richard Clayderman, Kim Cheol-woong took questions from the audience. Someone inquired about his life in South Korea. Freedom isn’t easy, he replied. “One of the hardest things I have experienced since leaving North Korea is having to choose what to play.”

The highest-ranking North Korean official to defect was Hwang Jang-yop, who made world headlines in 1997 when he requested political asylum at the South Korean Embassy in Beijing. Hwang’s defection is one of the few times that Beijing has stood up publicly to its North Korean ally. It is the only time that the Chinese have publicly defied Pyongyang in support of a defector who wanted to flee to South Korea, although China has allowed other defectors to leave China quietly. It is unclear why Chinese authorities decided to disregard Kim Jong Il’s wish that they return the defector. Hwang Jang-yop had friends in high places in Beijing, and perhaps they interceded on his behalf. Or perhaps China viewed Hwang’s release to South Korea as a way of solidifying its newly established diplomatic ties with that country. It’s also possible that international public opinion played a role.

At the time of his defection, Hwang Jang-yop was one of the most powerful men in Pyongyang. He was a man “with no intellectual rival,” according to two scholars who have studied his background and influence.⁹ He was the consummate insider, an intimate of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, and a mentor to his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, whom he had known for nearly forty years.

Hwang Jang-yop held three high-level government appointments. He was secretary of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, and president of Kim Il Sung University, which is the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale of North Korea. His most notable accomplishment, though, was authorship of the regime’s guiding juche philosophy of self-reliance. In 1972, juche replaced Marxism-Leninism as the official state ideology. Juche thought infuses every aspect of North Korean life. Even dates are given in juche years. Juche Year 1 is 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

Hwang Jang-yop’s official responsibilities took him abroad frequently and gave him access to South Koreans perceived as friendly to the North—including the businessman who played a key role in his defection. Hwang Jang-yop plotted his defection for months. On January 30, 1997, he departed Pyongyang for an international seminar in Tokyo on juche ideology. After Tokyo, his itinerary called for him to visit the Japanese cities of Kyoto and Nagano before going on to Beijing. His plan was to defect in Japan or China, or if that proved impossible, in India or Thailand in April, when he was to attend a meeting of nonaligned nations in New Delhi. Accompanying him was a close aide, Kim Duk-hong, who planned to defect with him.

In Japan, Hwang Jang-yop found it impossible to break away from his minders. Japanese-Koreans who sympathized with Pyongyang “protected” him round the clock. Later, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto observed that during Hwang Jang-yop’s stay in Japan, “North Korean guards were tightly huddled all around Hwang as if they knew he intended to defect.”¹⁰

So Hwang Jang-yop kept to his itinerary and went on to China as scheduled. He arrived in Beijing on February 11; he was to spend the night there before boarding a train for Pyongyang the following afternoon. The next morning, he and Kim Duk-hong left the North Korean Embassy compound, ostensibly to do some shopping at the Great Wall Hotel. Upon arriving at the hotel, the two men sent their embassy handlers on made-up errands and met up by prearrangement in one of the hotel shops with their South Korean–business-man contact. The businessman phoned the South Korean Embassy and asked for a car to pick them up at the hotel.

The embassy refused, arguing that if Hwang Jang-yop and his aide arrived at the facility in an embassy car, it would look as if they’d been kidnapped. Instead, embassy officials told the trio to take a taxi. So Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Duk-hong, and the South Korean businessman hailed a cab and drove to the embassy’s consular section. It all happened quickly. Hwang Jang-yop and Kim Duk-hong left for their shopping expedition at 10 a.m. By 11:30 a.m., the South Korean ambassador had informed the Chinese Foreign Minister of their defection.

Immediately upon his arrival at the South Korea consular section, Hwang Jang-yop sat down at a desk and handwrote a statement that the embassy distributed later. Introspective and personal, the statement was the only human touch in what was quickly turning into high political drama.

His statement began: “Starting with my family, all the people [in North Korea] will judge that I have gone mad when they learn that I have decided to go to the South, abandoning everything. I actually feel—on not a few occasions—that I have gone mad myself.”

As he wrote, Hwang Jang-yop was perhaps thinking about the relatives he had left behind in Pyongyang. They included his wife, a son, and three daughters. He went on to say that he did not expect to live much longer. He was a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday. His statement concluded: “I hope that my family will consider me dead as of today. If possible, I only wish to help promote reconciliation between the South and the North until the last possible moment.” In this and later public comments, Hwang Jang-yop emphasized that he defected for patriotic reasons. He said that his duty to his country transcended political considerations and his responsibility to his family.

In the weeks, months, and years that followed his defection, Hwang Jang-yop adhered to a constant message: Don’t underestimate Kim Jong Il. As he put it in a press conference in Seoul at the time of his arrival in South Korea: “I have come to the Republic of Korea in order to warn about the danger of an armed invasion of the South by the North and to contribute to the peaceful unification of our country.” He spoke repeatedly of the “warlike intention” of North Korea’s ruler and said, “I could not help but agonize in pain at the thought of the tragedy that might befall all Koreans if war were started again.” He presented himself as a patriot loyal to the Korean people on both sides of the DMZ. At first he even denied that he was defecting. The word, with its connotation of betrayal, seemed to repel him. Rather, he said he wanted to move from one part of Korea to another.

Factors other than patriotism might have played a role in Hwang Jang-yop’s decision to defect. He was angry at what he saw as the regime’s misappropriation of juche ideology to create personality cults around Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. It’s also possible he feared that his personal political future was in jeopardy. A few months before his defection, he had been forced to write a self-criticism about three ideological mistakes he supposedly had made: He had publicly renounced war with the South whereas Pyongyang’s policy was to prepare for war; he had stated that juche ideology was an offshoot of Marxism-Leninism, not the sole, glorious creation of the late Kim Il Sung; and he had praised Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in China, which Kim Jong Il had rejected for North Korea. Given this experience, he may have seen what he believed to be the handwriting on the wall: He was about to be purged.

Hwang Jang-yop’s defection posed a diplomatic challenge for Beijing, which by 1997 was jockeying to maintain good ties with both Koreas. Despite Pyongyang’s urgings, China decided not to apply the two countries’ 1986 extradition agreement. Hwang Jang-yop had entered China legally on a diplomatic passport, and Beijing found it convenient to argue that the extradition agreement applied only to North Koreans who had entered the country illegally. Beijing took care not to set a precedent that other North Koreans could cite if they wanted to transit China to South Korea.

This was a high-profile case, and Beijing knew it would face international condemnation if it sent Hwang Jang-yop back to North Korea against his will, as Kim Jong Il initially demanded. It was no secret what would happen to Hwang Jang-yop if he were repatriated. But just in case anyone had lingering doubts, North Korea provided a well-timed reminder: Three days after Hwang Jang-yop requested political asylum in Beijing, an earlier defector was murdered in Seoul by unknown assailants believed to be North Korean agents. South Korea’s prime minister described the murder as retaliation for Hwang Jang-yop’s defection.

Pyongyang had initially responded to the defection by accusing South Korean spies of kidnapping Hwang Jang-yop. When the regime realized that China would not buckle to its wishes and repatriate Hwang, Pyongyang dropped these accusations and instead declared, “A coward may leave.” This opened the door for China to work with South Korea in devising a plan for the defectors’ transfer to Seoul. The two countries crafted a plan intended to lessen North Korea’s public humiliation. Rather than sending Hwang Jang-yop directly to Seoul, they would first transfer him and his aide to a third country. So arrangements were made for Hwang and Kim Duk-hong to visit the Philippines for a month, after which they would travel on to Seoul.¹¹

More significant, and an early hint of how it would treat the coming wave of North Korean refugees in China, Beijing decided not to recognize Hwang Jang-yop as a “refugee” as defined in the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, which Beijing had signed but not yet ratified. It was careful to avoid setting a precedent that could pave the way for other North Koreans seeking refugee status. It chose to “expel” Hwang Jang-yop rather than classify him as a refugee or grant him political asylum. On March 18, 1997, five weeks after they defected, Hwang Jang-yop and Kim Duk-hong boarded a Chinese military plane and flew to the Philippines, where they stayed one month. On April 20, they arrived in South Korea.

Contrary to the dire prediction he made in his defection note, Hwang Jang-yop did not die soon after his arrival in South Korea. Rather, his fate was to be a Korean Cassandra, delivering his warnings about Kim Jong Il to successive South Korean governments that mostly chose to ignore him. In December 1997, eight months after Hwang Jang-yop reached Seoul, Kim Dae-jung was elected president of the country on a platform of outreach to North Korea, and Hwang Jang-yop was effectively silenced. The defector’s warnings about the Kim regime in the North were an embarrassment to adherents of Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy.

In Seoul, Hwang Jang-yop survived numerous assassination attempts, including one by North Korean agents several weeks before his death. The defector died of a heart attack in his bathtub at home in Seoul in October 2010 at the age of eighty-seven. He was given a hero’s burial in a national cemetery in a ceremony attended by many dignitaries, including the Unification Minister, a former president, and members of Parliament. One attendee called him a “great teacher.” His coffin was covered with the flag of the Republic of Korea. The government of President Lee Myung-bak presented him posthumously with a medal.

Hwang Jang-yop’s death reignited the debate over his motives for calling attention to North Korea’s human rights abuses. Some believed him to be sincere. They cited the many attempts made on his life as a measure of his bravery. And as proof that he was dedicated to regime change and democracy, they pointed to his fiery radio broadcasts to North Korea on the refugee-run Free North Korea Radio. Others countered that he was merely seeking publicity.

Still others suggested that the old defector was driven by guilt over what happened after he left Pyongyang. Information does not readily make its way out of North Korea, but when it’s useful to regime purposes, the authorities make sure that certain news is delivered. And so, not long after Hwang Jong-yop’s arrival in Seoul in 1997, word filtered back about the fate of the family and colleagues he had left behind. More than three thousand of his family members, friends, and associates were arrested, including distant relatives who had no idea they were even related to the defector.¹² Hwang’s wife was said to have committed suicide. So, too, the reports said, did one of his daughters. She was said to have jumped off a bridge to her death while being transported to a prison camp. Two other daughters, his son, and his grandchildren were lost in the gulag.