50 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
and it’s been this way since 1948.” The
summits with Donald Trump and South
Korea’s President, Moon Jae-in, have,
if anything, made things worse. The
U.N. Security Council has fifteen mem-
bers. In December, 2019, eight of them
supported a meeting to discuss North
Korea’s human-rights abuses, as the
council has done in the past. In order
to proceed, a ninth member was needed
to sign on; the U.S. declined.
“Raising awareness through college
lectures, tours, concerts, and bake sales
wasn’t enough,” Adrian told me. “Res-
cuing refugees through the underground
work in China and Southeast Asia wasn’t
enough. Advocacy, trying to convince
governments to change their policies to
do the right thing, wasn’t enough. So
then what was left was direct action.”
In 2010, Adrian started Cheollima Civil
Defense, but he did not make its exis-
tence known to the public. Cheollima
is the Korean equivalent of Pegasus, and
during these years he listed his title as
managing director of Pegasus Strate-
gies L.L.C.
In 2014, Adrian sent me a message
asking for advice about a “project to pre-“Throwing a knife pretty well is a long way from being a surgeon.”• •
told me, “Adrian was not excitable. He
was a doer. He understood what it re-
ally took to deal with a certain regime,
and was not starry-eyed about it.” Adrian
travelled to Libya during the revolution,
and after the fall of Qaddafi he and an
activist and TED fellow named Suleiman
Bakhit worked on medical services for
civilian casualties.
Yet Adrian found the world of
N.G.O.s and advocacy groups unsat-
isfying. “We have all collectively ac-
complished almost nothing,” he told
me. For years, the U.N.’s General As-
sembly and the Human Rights Coun-
cil have voted to adopt resolutions con-
demning the human-rights violations of
the North Korean regime. In 2014, U.N.
investigators concluded, “The gravity,
scale and nature of these violations re-
veal a state that does not have any para-
llel in the contemporary world.” In Jan-
uary of this year, when Human Rights
Watch published its latest world report,
John Sifton, the director of Asia Advo-
cacy, said, “The people of North Korea
suffer under constant surveillance and
face the daily threat of imprisonment,
torture, sexual abuse, and execution—
pare new infrastructure for a new North
Korea.” Five years later, at Dallas BBQ,
he explained that he had been trying to
recruit me for Cheollima Civil Defense,
now known as Free Joseon. He said, “I’ve
been preparing for fifteen years. I’ve been
vetting people, interviewing them for a
job, essentially. Some within this field
are motivated by career. Some by narcis-
sism. Some truly believe in the better
world. And those are the ones I was look-
ing for.” Because I had risked my life to
tell the truth about North Korea, Adrian
seemed to view me as someone who
shared his heartbreak about the country.
On January 1, 2015, Adrian stopped
posting on social media. His last tweet
was a quote from Korea’s 1919 Declara-
tion of Independence: “Behold! A new
world is approaching before our very
eyes! The age of might has receded, and
the age of morality has arrived.” His last
opinion piece had run the previous
month, in The Atlantic, about the film
“The Interview,” a slapstick tale of two
white American heroes killing an evil
dictator and saving North Korea, which
allegedly prompted the North Korean
government to hack the computers of
Sony, which had made the film. (North
Korea denied this, but called the attack
“righteous.”) Many people found “The
Interview” distasteful, a case of the most
powerful country in the world enter-
taining itself at the expense of one of
the most devastated. Adrian wrote, “The
day will soon come when North Kore-
ans are finally free, and liberated con-
centration camp survivors will have to
learn that the world was more inter-
ested in the oddities of the oppressors
than the torment of the oppressed.”I
n June, 2019, I flew to Europe to meet
with two members of Free Joseon and
a friend of the group. We met at a dingy,
empty Chinese restaurant in a city I
promised not to name. (According to
Lee Wolosky, Adrian’s lawyer and the
former special envoy for the closure of
the Guantánamo detention facility, the
F.B.I. has informed him that agents of
the North Korean government have been
ordered to kill Adrian and other mem-
bers of the group.) Free Joseon mostly
organizes outside the Korean Peninsula.
There are thirty-three thousand defec-
tors in South Korea, but Ko Young Hwan,
who worked for North Korea’s ministry