THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 49
cember showed me that three years after
the North Korean Human Rights Act
has passed, nothing has changed on the
ground for North Koreans.”
Jay Lefkowitz, the special envoy under
Bush, says that Adrian was an “effective
and ardent advocate.” By then, LiNK had
a hundred chapters worldwide. Yet Adri-
an’s experience in China had shifted
something in him; in 2008, he abruptly
resigned from the group. According to
a journalist who knew him at the time,
Adrian appeared to be severing ties with
his former life. Adrian told the journal-
ist that he was leaving D.C. and chang-
ing his phone number. The journalist
wondered if Adrian was going to enter
politics or get involved in intelligence.
Adrian began styling himself to look
older; he grew a beard, and slicked his
hair back. He told a friend, “No one’s
gonna listen to a twenty-something-
year-old.”
That year, Adrian started a think
tank called the Joseon Institute, to gen-
erate a plan for a civil society in North
Korea should the regime collapse.
Adrian pointed out to me that North
Korea lacked independent courts, ac-
countable police, informed citizens,
meaningful.” Since the U.S. Adminis-
tration could change every four years,
the North Korean regime found it easy
to wait it out and maintain the status
quo. Adrian admired people who effected
great change; among them were Ahn
Chang-ho, an early leader of the Ko-
rean independence movement, whom
Adrian compared to Thomas Jefferson,
and Martin Luther King, Jr. Adrian loved
King’s interpretation of the Good Sa-
maritan parable, which tells us, when
confronted with someone in need, to ask
not “If I stop to help this man, what will
happen to me?” but “If I don’t stop to
help this man, what will happen to him?”
I
n 2004, George W. Bush signed the
North Korean Human Rights Act,
which made North Koreans broadly el-
igible for political asylum in the U.S. Two
years later, Adrian and two other mem-
bers of LiNK travelled to Yanji, in north-
east China, where they met four women
and two teen-age boys who had escaped
from North Korea and were hiding in an
underground shelter. If the defectors were
caught by Chinese authorities, they might
be returned to North Korea, where they
would be imprisoned in labor camps and
risk execution. Adrian and the LiNK work-
ers accompanied them on a twenty-hour
train ride to Shenyang, the site of the
nearest U.S. consulate, to apply for asy-
lum. But the consular officers turned them
away, telling Adrian, over a phone line
that had likely been tapped by the Chi-
nese government, to go instead to the
United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees in Beijing, some four hundred
miles away. Adrian got in touch with the
U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which also di-
rected him to the U.N.H.C.R. Finally,
Adrian hired a van for the other LiNK
members and the defectors, while he trav-
elled by plane. Chinese police stopped
the van on the highway and arrested ev-
eryone inside. Adrian was arrested in a
hotel in Beijing, and he and the other
LiNK members were jailed for about a
week before being deported; the North
Koreans were detained for more than six
months. After much pressure from LiNK
and other activist groups, the defectors
were eventually freed and they flew to
South Korea. Adrian called the actions
of the U.S. consulate “unacceptable and
shameful.” In 2007, he wrote on the Web
site Freekorea.us, “My experiences in De-
N.G.O.s, and a free press. There isn’t
much evidence of the Joseon Institute’s
work beyond its now defunct Web site,
which lists a board of advisers that in-
cludes a British Member of Parliament
and former leaders of Mongolia and
Libya. Mustafa A.G. Abushagur, a for-
mer Deputy Prime Minister of Libya,
who spent thirty-one years in exile be-
cause of his opposition to Muammar
Qaddafi, described Adrian as “genuine”
and as being interested in the parallels
between Kim Jong Un and Qaddafi. He
said, “Adrian knew I had been in the
opposition for a long time, and thought
that experience might be able to help
him.” Adrian continued to work behind
the scenes. In 2009, at a LiNK benefit,
the journalist Lisa Ling, whose sister
Laura was detained in North Korea
while reporting along the border and
held for a hundred and forty days,
thanked Adrian for helping to free her
sister. (Neither Lisa nor Laura responded
to a request for an interview.)
Between 2009 and 2012, Adrian served
as a TED fellow; he also spent a year at
Princeton’s Center for Information Tech-
nology Policy. Emeka Okafor, who co-
founded the TED fellowship program,
“He says my eagle tastes fishy, so this year I’m trying something new.”
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