It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the nation’s founding in 1948 that we might as well, in the manner of medieval cartographers, inscribe maps of the Korean Peninsula between the Yalu River and the Demilitarized Zone with illustrations of dragons and lions as an admission that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains terra incognita for outsiders. Happily, for those unable to read Korean, Columbia University Press has published an English translation of a memoir by a prominent defector who fills in some of the map.
Thae Yong-ho, the book’s author, defected in 2016 from his post as the deputy ambassador at the DPRK embassy in London to the rival Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), an event widely covered in the media at the time Following his intelligence debriefing, he worked for a time at the Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), an organ tied to the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS). Unhappy there, Thae resigned from the INSS shortly before the 2018 publication of his memoir in South Korea earned him abundant royalties, high speaking fees, and election in 2020 to the National Assembly from Seoul’s affluent Gangnam District as a member of the ROK’s ruling People Power Party.
Thae claims that Pyongyang’s negotiations with Washington over the years were simply a “scam” to buy time for the regime’s overriding objective of developing nuclear weapons.
Thae reviews major DPRK diplomatic and security issues from his vantage point as a career diplomat who joined the service in the latter half of the 1980s after graduating from the prestigious Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies (PUFS) and undertaking further studies at the Peking University (PKU) School of Foreign Languages.
He devotes the first part of his book to chapters on the DPRK drive for nuclear weapons; the shift in diplomatic direction following the collapse of the Soviet Union; developments in relations with Seoul at the time of President Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy; Pyongyang’s strategy of developing ties to London to counter Washington; and Kim Jong-un’s assumption of power in Pyongyang following his father’s death in 2011.
Readers of these chapters will have much to consider. The author writes with bold assertions. Among his claims is that Pyongyang’s negotiations with Washington over the years were simply a “scam” to buy time for the regime’s overriding objective of developing nuclear weapons. Also of interest is Thae’s portrait of former leader Kim Jong Il as an astute statesman adept at international affairs.
Thae’s details on DPRK diplomacy toward the United Kingdom and his experiences in London are the book’s best feature.
Thae’s details on DPRK diplomacy toward the United Kingdom and his experiences in London are the book’s best feature. Having studied English at PUFS and in China, Thae devoted much of his career to British affairs both in Pyongyang and in two London tours of duty. He worked to build relations with the UK, participating in the December 2000 ceremony in London that first established bilateral diplomatic relations and managing the subsequent opening of the DPRK embassy there. He also handled the visit of leader Kim Jong-un’s older brother to Britain to see his musical idol Eric Clapton in concert. Thae, present at the establishment of DPRK-UK relations and working at the embassy in two tours, offers what seem reliable, first-hand accounts of Pyongyang’s diplomacy toward London.
In the second part of the book, Thae describes at length the background of his family, as well as that of his wife. He also recalls an early period of study in China, his years at PUFS, and his subsequent studies at PKU. The author ends this part of the book by suggesting how to bring down Pyongyang and unite the peninsula under Seoul’s rule.
What will likely strike readers starved for information on North Korea is the abundance of details on members of the DPRK elite, those diplomats, military officers, and party officials he knew on account of his family, his studies, and his career. For example, Thae depicts Ri Yong-ho, a former ambassador to the UK under whom he worked in London, as a bookish gentleman whose “skill and personality made him the envy of all North Korea’s diplomats.”
Also impressive is the self-portrait of the author that emerges as an ambitious and strong-willed man who bent the system—from security regulations on foreign travel to the rule dictating that diplomats leave their children in Pyongyang while working abroad—to his advantage for years until political headwinds moved him to jump ship.
The purge of his father-in-law, O Gi-su, a senior military officer, early in Thae’s career threatened for a time the young diplomat’s future. Kim Jong-un’s execution in December 2013 of his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek, shortly after Thae had arrived in London, apparently led to the author’s defection. Jang had earlier brought Thae’s father-in-law back to Pyongyang from an exile in disgrace. Thae, likely foreseeing danger on account of his connection to Jang in returning to Pyongyang at the end of his tour in London, arranged for his elder son to join his wife and younger son there before defecting with them to Seoul in the summer of 2016. Thae refrains from writing of his defection in any detail.
The book suffers from the lack of an index and more rigorous editing could have caught some of the errors that made it into print. Names are an issue. Kim Chol, a member of the International Department in the Workers Party of Korea, as well as Kim Jong-il’s interpreter, appears in one paragraph as both “Kim Chul”, an error of transliteration, and as Kim Cheol, written according to Seoul’s present transliteration system. The name of another official, Choe U-jin on one page, appears as Choe “Woo-jin” on another one. Other errors include “Baekhwawon Welcome House” for Paekhawon Guest House, “Beijing University’s Foreign Language College” for the PKU School of Foreign Languages, and “paternal” for hyongje (fraternal) in the socialist term “fraternal countries”.
Such issues aside, Columbia University Press has done a great service to professional Pyongyang watchers, students of international relations, and general readers by publishing in English translation one of the more interesting books written by a DPRK defector.