46 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
FOLLOW THE LEADER
In the underground movement for a new North Korea, only one man knows the extent of its power.
BYSUKI KIM
O
n the afternoon of February 22,
2019, a tall Asian man rang the
doorbell of the North Korean
Embassy in Madrid. His business card
identified him as Matthew Chao, an in-
vestor from Baron Stone Capital, with
offices in Toronto and Dubai. Once he
was allowed in, nine men in their twen-
ties and thirties, carrying pellet guns,
knives, and metal bars, entered. They
covered their faces with black balaclavas,
tied up four staffers with zip ties and
handcuffs, and herded them into a meet-
ing room, before taking a senior Em-
bassy official to the basement. His wife
and his eight-year-old son were put in
a room on the first floor.
About thirty minutes later, an em-
ployee of a nearby gym was driving past
the Embassy and came across a woman,
her face covered in blood, who had jumped
from a second-floor balcony. The gym
employee called for an ambulance, and,
when it arrived, the woman told the med-
ics that there were intruders in the Em-
bassy killing people. Soon, the police
rang the doorbell of the Embassy. The
tall Asian man, now wearing a badge
featuring the face of Kim Jong Un, North
Korea’s Great Leader, came out and told
the police that there had been a misun-
derstanding. At 9:40 p.m., most of the
men drove off in Embassy cars. An Uber,
ordered under the name Oswaldo Trump,
pulled up nearby, and the final two mem-
bers of the group left in it. Afterward,
the North Koreans walked out of the
Embassy looking beaten and dishevelled.
An Italian I.D. bearing the name Mat-
thew Chao was found by the police.
It was a delicate time for relations
between North Korea and the United
States. In 2017, the two countries had
seemed to be on the brink of war. Don-
ald Trump warned North Korea that it
would be met with “fire and fury” if it
continued to antagonize the U.S. A
month later, North Korea conducted its
sixth nuclear test. At Trump’s first ad-
dress to the United Nations, he threat-
ened to “totally destroy North Korea,”
and called Kim Jong Un “rocket man.”
But then Trump seemed to have a change
of heart, and in June, 2018, he met Kim
in Singapore; it was the first time that
leaders of the two countries had met in
a bilateral summit. Trump pledged to
work with Kim toward the “denuclear-
ization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The incident at the Embassy occurred
five days before Trump and Kim met
again, in Hanoi, to discuss North Korea’s
nuclear-weapons program. The Span-
ish government opened an investigation.
On March 13th, El País connected the
raid to the C.I.A., and suggested that
the attackers had been searching for
information on Kim Hyok Chol, the
former Ambassador to Spain, who now
led the negotiations with the U.S.
The Hanoi summit was not a suc-
cess. The White House claimed that
North Korea had demanded an end to
nearly all sanctions, for almost nothing
in return, prompting Trump to aban-
don the talks.
On March 14th, El Mundo reported
that the South Korean government may
also have been involved in the incident
at the Embassy. Not long afterward, the
Washington Post reported that, in fact,
a “shadowy group” called Cheollima Civil
Defense had raided the Embassy. Soon,
a Spanish court identified the partici-
pants as citizens of the U.S., South Korea,
and Mexico, and issued arrest warrants.
In late March, North Korea’s foreign
ministry called the break-in “a grave ter-
rorist attack” and demanded that the
Spanish authorities “bring the terrorists
and their wire pullers to justice.”
I was at home in New York, watch-
ing the news, when I saw the headline
“Mexican national accused of breaking
into North Korea’s Spanish Embassy.”
The accompanying story identified the
leader of C.C.D. as Adrian Hong. I sat
upright. I had met Adrian in 2003, at
the Korean American Students Con-
ference at Cornell, where I had been in-
vited to talk about my newly published
novel. Adrian was representing Yale,
where he was an undergraduate. We
spoke briefly, but I didn’t hear from him
again until 2014, when he contacted me
through Twitter and e-mail. I had re-
cently published a book, “Without You,
There Is No Us: Undercover Among
the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,” based
on my reporting while living undercover
in Pyongyang for six months, in a locked
compound with two hundred and sev-
enty North Korean young men who
make up the country’s future leadership.
Adrian’s messages were insistent yet
vague. He wanted to meet to discuss
North Korea, but refused to elaborate,
and we never got together.
Now I sent him an e-mail, though I
didn’t expect to hear back. He was being
hunted by the governments of Spain
and North Korea, and it was unclear if
the U.S. would attempt to find and ex-
tradite him. He hadn’t spoken to the
media. But, within seconds, my phone
buzzed. It was Adrian.
The next day, a tall Asian man wear-
ing a baseball cap and a black wind-
breaker walked into the Times Square
location of Dallas BBQ. It was 9:30 p.m.,
and the place was packed. We sat in a
corner booth, Adrian with his back to
the wall. He asked for my cell phone,
which he put in a black pouch with his
own. “This cuts unwelcome guests lis-
tening in,” he said. His long hair was
gathered in what he called a man bun,
and he had a goatee. He looked like a
student just returning from backpack-
ing abroad, tired yet alert.
For the next three and a half hours,
over a plate of barbecue ribs with mac
and cheese, Adrian told me the story of
what had happened in Madrid, and about
a secret network of what he called “free-
dom fighters,” including some within
North Korea, who are trying to bring
