Monthly Archives: October 2020

North Korea’s elite defectors

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Grant Montgomery

Jo Song Gil, North Korea’s former acting ambassador to Italy who disappeared in late 2018, is confirmed to be living in South Korea. He is quite possibly the top-ranked defector living in the county.

Local news media reported that Jo’s wife had asked the National Intelligence Service (NIS) for permission to return to the North, out of concern for the safety of her teenage daughter and her family. The NIS approved the request, but also made clear that “Jo and his wife voluntarily defected to the South.”

Free Joseon, a group opposed to the Kim Jong Un regime that claims to represent an alternative provisional government for North Korea, helped Jo and his wife find their way to South Korea. (The U.S.-based group, also called “Cheollima Civil Defense,” previously helped Kim Han Sol keep safe from his potential North Korean adversaries after his father, Kim Jong Nam, was assassinated in 2017. In a very murky incident, Free Joseon was also responsible for raiding the North Korean embassy in Madrid in 2019.)

Jo hails from an elite family of orthodox diplomats. His father and father-in-law both served as ambassadors, according to South Korean news reports – the former as ambassador to Congo and Togo, and the latter as ambassador to Thailand and consul general to Hong Kong.

Thae Yong Ho who was deputy ambassador to London defected in 2016, and after arriving in the South became an outspoken critic of the North. In April, he was elected as a lawmaker with the conservative opposition. Previously, Thae had close relationships to the ultra-elite, having appeared in the public with Kim Jong Chul, Kim Jong Un’s brother, when the latter visited London, where he attended an Eric Clapton concert and visited guitar shops.

According to the South Korean Unification Ministry, six senior diplomats have defected to the South since the early 1990s. “As a member of the North Korean elite – by birth, education, and profession – Jo is privy to information that could be damaging to a totalitarian system. If more become outspoken like Thae Yong-ho, they could encourage further defections and undermine the Kim regime,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

So why do diplomats – part of a tiny minority of privileged North Koreans who are trusted to travel and even live overseas – defect from a country where they live at the top of the songbun system?

“The North Korean elite is not optimistic about the future of the North,” said Jo Dong-joon, a professor of political science and international relations at Seoul University. “Since the late 1980s, the North Korean elite had already lost confidence.”

“Some do it for their family (especially children), some fear repression from the regime for one reason or another, and some probably very genuinely learn to detest the North Korean system and prefer to take their chances in a place more free,” said Mason Richey, an associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, in an email interview.

[The Dipolmat]

North Korea unveils ICBM

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Grant Montgomery

Two ballistic missiles made their debut in Saturday’s North Korean military parade: a sub-launched weapon and what appeared to be an enormous new intercontinental ballistic missile borne on a long, 11-axle mobile launcher.

Analysts have long scrutinized Pyongyang’s parades for what they reveal about the military capabilities of one of the world’s most secretive regimes — but the October 10 event also offered the latest and clearest signal yet that the Trump administration’s efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions have failed. One expert called the new ICBM a destabilizing capability that would exacerbate tensions between North Korea and the rest of the world, particularly the United States.

The new ICBM isn’t exactly a surprise, said Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog. Lewis believes that the missile is intended to carry multiple warheads, another new capability. That means North Korea is improving the likelihood of slipping a nuclear weapon past the ground-based midcourse defense interceptors that the United States would deploy against an incoming ICBM. “It’s so much cheaper to add warheads than interceptors,” said Lewis.

He acknowledged that the missile hasn’t been flight-tested yet, so there’s no way to tell if it actually works. But it need not be 100-percent reliable to post a large threat that could change U.S. calculations. “We are standing by while they deploy very destabilizing capabilities,” he said.

[Defense One]

North Korean diplomat who went missing in Italy two years ago is in South Korea

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Grant Montgomery

A top North Korean diplomat who went missing in Italy two years ago is now living in South Korea, making him one of the regime’s most high profile officials to defect in decades.

Jo Song Gil and his wife disappeared in November 2018 after leaving the North Korean embassy in Rome where Jo was employed as acting-ambassador.

For almost two years, his whereabouts have been unknown — but this week, South Korean lawmaker Ha Tae-keung confirmed reports that Jo had defected to South Korea in 2019. “It is confirmed that former ambassador Jo Song Gil entered South Korea in July last year and is under government’s protection,” Ha wrote on his Facebook page Tuesday.

Jo is the highest-profile government official to defect from the totalitarian regime since Thae Yong-Ho, former deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, fled to South Korea in 2016. North Korea has yet to comment publicly on the news of Jo’s defection.

Jo disappeared in November 2018, shortly before his term as North Korea’s top diplomat in Italy was set to expire. In a statement after the diplomat fled, the Italian Foreign Ministry said it had received a notice from the North Korean Embassy that Jo and his wife had left the embassy on November 10, 2018. Four days later, Jo’s daughter returned to North Korea accompanied by female staff from the North Korean embassy after requesting to be reunited with her grandparents, the Italian Foreign Ministry said.

A spokesperson for South Korea’s National Assembly Intelligence Committee chair Jeon Hae-cheol told CNN that the South Korean government didn’t make Jo’s defection public for more than a year out of concern for his family’s safety. Jo had voluntarily expressed his desire to come to South Korea, the spokesperson said.

Thae, the former UK-based diplomat, criticized the press for exposing news about Jo without his consent. “For diplomats who have family members living in North Korea, to reveal their news (of defection) is a sensitive matter,” he said in a statement. “That is why other former North Korean diplomats are living in South Korea without revealing their identity and the South Korean government does not reveal it either.”

[CNN]