48 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
Spanish court had the names of men
involved in the raid. In the end, Adrian
said, “the U.S. government sided with
North Korea.”
We left the restaurant at 1 a.m. When
Adrian turned his phone on, it was filled
with urgent messages from members of
his group who feared for his safety. He
put me in a taxi, and walked off through
Times Square.A
drian began texting me nearly every
night. He was in hiding, but I did
not ask him where, since I assumed that
our messages were being surveilled. De-
spite the circumstances, he never ap-
peared panicked. He wrote in lofty, vague
paragraphs, but when he described Free
Joseon’s goals for freeing North Kore-
ans from persecution he was precise and
single-minded. “I don’t have a particu-
lar passion for North Korea, beyond that
it’s culturally accessible to me and I am
culturally equipped to advocate for it,”
he told me. “It’s just the worst place on
earth, and a symbol of what man’s in-
genuity and tenacity can achieve when
organized for evil.”
Adrian was born in 1984 in Tijuana,
where his parents had immigrated from
South Korea. His father was a Tae Kwon
Do master who converted to Christianity
and became a missionary. The family
moved to San Diego when Adrian was
six, but his father founded an orphan-
age in Mexico to which Adrian often
returned, delivering donated supplies
and helping to give aid to the homeless.
Later, he conducted relief missions in
Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Ac-
cording to those who knew Adrian at
the time, his motivations seemed less
religious than humanitarian. Adrian,
like his father, taught Tae Kwon Do and
is a practicing Christian, but, when I
asked him about his faith, he said, “I
make it a rule not to discuss personal
beliefs. I am more concerned about free-
dom of belief.”
At Yale, Adrian became interested
in the plight of North Koreans. In 2003,
while visiting Los Angeles, Adrian, then
a junior, was sitting with Paul (PK)
Kim, a standup comic eight years older,
at a café called Blink, on Wilshire Bou-
levard. They had met when Adrian in-
vited PK to a campus event, and they
often discussed starting an organiza-
tion to help North Koreans. One ofdown Kim Jong Un’s government. Ex-
plaining why he had named the group
Cheollima Civil Defense, Adrian likened
it to the “righteous armies” throughout
Korea’s thousands of years of history, “ci-
vilian militias who have mobilized spon-
taneously when government failed them.”
March 1, 2019, a week after the raid,
was the centennial of the launch of Ko-
rea’s movement for independence from
Japan, which occupied the country for
thirty-five years. To mark the date, the
C.C.D. renamed itself Free Joseon—
for a Korean dynasty that lasted five
hundred years, as well as what North
Koreans call their country—and posted
a video on its Web site announcing a
government-in-exile for North Korea.
The group was now attempting to tran-
sition from a civilian militia to a pro-
visional government. The video was
largely ignored by the media, but it was
the first time that there had ever been
an organized opposition to North Ko-
rea’s dictatorship.
Adrian told me that he, as “Matthew
Chao,” and his companions had been let
in by someone inside the Embassy. “It’s
no longer trespassing if you are invited,”
he said. Contrary to the speculations of
the Spanish press, Free Joseon was not
part of any government or intelligence
service. “I have never worked for or been
paid by or trained with or partnered with
anyone at the C.I.A. or F.B.I.,” Adrian
said. I found no evidence that Adrian
was employed by either agency, but he
certainly had some sort of relationship
with them. Jay Lefkowitz, who served
as the special envoy for human rights in
North Korea under George W. Bush,
told me that it is not uncommon for ad-
vocates and government officials to form
informal relationships. “Adrian was on
the front line,” Lefkowitz said.
Free Joseon relied on resources that
included “pro-bono labor, credit cards,
and attempting things no government
would risk,” Adrian told me. However,
to set up a provisional government, the
group also needed recognition. Accord-
ing to Adrian, “The plan was to have
ambassadors and a cabinet in place.” He
said that Free Joseon had initially re-
ceived tacit support from members of
the F.B.I. But then, he insisted, U.S.
officials had turned on the group. (The
F.B.I. declined to comment.) Within
days of the Washington Post report, the
them looked up at the café’s sign, and
decided to take the “B” out of the name
and call the new group LiNK—Liberty
in North Korea. It was launched early
the next year, at the Korean American
Students Conference at Yale, which
Adrian had organized.
LiNK was “ninety per cent Adrian,”
PK told me; he became less involved
after a couple of years. LiNK sought out
college students who, PK said, “need to
be a part of something. So many young
people join fraternities. They don’t want
to be alone.” Adrian told me, “I built
LiNK on Xanga,” a blog-based social
network then popular among Asian
Americans, where he had been active
since 1999. (PK said, “Asians were In-
ternet addicts more than most other
groups.”) Travelling to two or three col-
lege campuses a week, Adrian would
change into his one “crappy suit,” and
give presentations about the horrors of
life in North Korea, sometimes screen-
ing the documentary film “Seoul Train,”
which follows defectors escaping to
China. Adrian got Asian American sing-
ers, rappers, and dance crews to accom-
pany his presentations.
Ki Hong Lee, a thirty-four-year-old
Korean American actor who has ap-
peared on the Netflix sitcom “Unbreak-
able Kimmy Schmidt,” met Adrian at a
KASCON event in 2005, when Lee was
an undergraduate at the University of
California at Berkeley. “If you spend three
hours with Adrian, he makes you want
to become a better person, do things you
never thought about doing,” Lee told
me. Lee helped start a chapter of LiNK
at Berkeley, and eventually he and Adrian
travelled to South Korea to volunteer for
an outreach program called Project Sun-
shine, which tried to raise awareness of
the suffering of North Koreans. “You
don’t really call someone to say, ‘Hey, you
know what’s going on in the world that
is messed up?’” Lee said. “He was that
person I could do that with.”
Adrian dropped out of Yale in his se-
nior year, and set up LiNK’s ad-hoc head-
quarters above Kyoro Books, in Man-
hattan’s Koreatown, before moving it to
Washington, D.C. By then, there were
nearly seventy local chapters. A close
friend who helped get LiNK off the
ground told me, “Adrian knew that some-
times you have to work outside a diplo-
matic norm in order to reach something