54 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
lomatic institution means that one must
respect it as that. Free Joseon entered
the Embassy illegally and tied up peo-
ple. Resistance is good, but it must be
done legally.” But Ko Young Hwan, who
worked at several North Korean em-
bassies for more than a decade, told me,
“It’s a mistake to think a North Korean
embassy is a normal embassy according
to the Western definition. All illegal ac-
tivities—from being the middleman for
weapons trade, to laundering counter-
feit money, to transporting luxury items
for Kim Jong Un—happen inside.”
Thae said, “Why would whoever
wanted to defect have needed Free Jo-
seon to infiltrate the Embassy for res-
cue?” A source with knowledge of the
operation told me that the person who
requested the rescue feared that his fam-
ily, who remained in North Korea, would
be killed if he was known to have de-
fected, so he asked for a kidnapping to
be staged.
Everything went according to plan
until the police arrived. “I put the Great
Leader pin on my chest and went to
the door,” Adrian told me. “My Span-
ish isn’t even that good, you know, I
hadn’t spoken it in a long while,” he
added. “I asked them what they wanted.
I tried to act North Korean, and back
in the main room my team could see
me on the security camera.” Adrian told
the police that it was a false alarm. The
team was jubilant when the police went
away: “When I returned, they were, like,
‘You did it!’”
Yet the appearance of the police had
spooked the North Korean who had re-quested rescue. Soon afterward, the
phones in the Embassy began to ring.
They rang and rang. The Free Joseon
members looked at one another and
wondered what to do. The phones kept
ringing, as though someone outside
knew what was happening inside. The
Embassy’s interior is spartan, its rooms
cavernous and echoing. “They know,were at odds with each other.” Sue Mi
Terry, a former C.I.A. officer and a se-
nior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, told me, “I as-
sume Adrian lost Han Sol to the C.I.A.”
A
drian called losing Han Sol the
second mistake of his career, after
his arrest in China. Yet, though he felt
for Han Sol—he was a defector who
needed his help—his ultimate goal is
the end of the Kim dynasty, and Han
Sol is part of that dynasty.
“Regimes like this don’t collapse
slowly. It happens instantly. Every rev-
olution is that way, and this will be the
same,” Adrian told me. “I don’t mean a
revolution in a figurative sense. I don’t
mean the revolution of the mind. Or
some kind of fantasy where five hun-
dred thousand people protest in Pyong-
yang and the regime just packs their
bags and leaves and some transitional
government comes in place. This is not
like any other country, where offering
them enough money will mean they
will liberalize—any opening or reform
will result in their insecurity. The only
way to make them change is to force
them to change.”
The motivation behind the Madrid
Embassy operation remains unclear.
Members of Free Joseon maintain that
the team, which included Chris Ahn
and an American citizen named Sam
Ryu, flew to Spain after someone at the
Embassy requested their help in defect-
ing; some core members, including
Adrian, proposed trying to take over the
Embassy during the rescue. The Am-
bassador to Spain had been expelled in
2017, after North Korea tested a nuclear
weapon, and they thought that an em-
bassy without an ambassador made a
fitting target. But the North Korean
member of Free Joseon whom I met in
Europe told me that people in Pyong-
yang who are linked to the group thought
that the attempt was premature, and the
group became divided over the question.
The disagreement was apparent even
in interviews with two of North Korea’s
highest-ranking defectors. Thae Yong
Ho, the former North Korean Deputy
Ambassador to the United Kingdom
and a member of the South Korean Na-
tional Assembly, who defected in 2016,
told me, “The fact that the world ac-
cepts a North Korean embassy as a dip-
they know, they know!” the North Ko-
rean said. He felt as if there were eyes
everywhere, and told the team that he
no longer wanted to defect and that
they should leave as soon as possible.
Night had fallen. The Free Joseon
team packed some of the Embassy’s
electronic equipment, then took its ve-
hicles and scattered to different air-
ports, with an agreement that most of
them would meet up in New York. On
Adrian’s instructions, members of Free
Joseon sent an e-mail to the Spanish
government telling it to keep an eye
out for any North Koreans entering
Spain, since people inside the Embassy
might be in danger from the North Ko-
rean government.
In New York, Adrian met with two
F.B.I. agents. For years, they had checked
in with him when he returned from
abroad. The agents asked if he had been
involved in the raid, and if he had seen
the Embassy’s computers. Every North
Korean embassy has a secure commu-
nications room from which covert op-
erations are run. The computers that
the group had with them were from that
room. “You could unlock all their com-
munications around the world,” Adrian
told me. “It’s a game changer.”
Adrian agreed to show the F.B.I.
agents the computers, and they arranged
to come to his hotel. Before the meet-
ing, Adrian met Sue Mi Terry, the for-
mer C.I.A. officer, at a bubble-tea place
in Times Square. He told her “this crazy
story about Madrid,” she said. They
walked to his hotel, where he introduced
her to a handful of young ethnic Ko-
rean men, who showed her video clips
from the Embassy. She was also shown
the computers. Adrian told her that the
F.B.I. was coming to look at them.
When the F.B.I. agents arrived,
Adrian told me, he agreed to turn the
computers over for analysis for a period
of fourteen days; he would also give
them various hard drives and pen drives
from the Embassy, in the hope that
whatever the F.B.I. found would lead
to tougher sanctions against the Kim
regime. The computers were encrypted,
and Adrian thought that the F.B.I. would
have a better chance of cracking them
than his group did. The agents asked
for the names of everyone involved in
the incident at the Embassy, but Adrian
refused to provide them.