When Thae Yong-ho walked out of North Korea’s embassy in London in the summer of 2016, he became the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat to defect in years, and one of the most senior officials ever to leave the regime. He was not a prisoner, a soldier, or a border crosser. He was the deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, a trusted representative of the state, a man who had spent his career speaking for Pyongyang abroad. In this interview with Al Jazeera’s 101 East, he explains why a man with that life, that rank, and that privilege decided to leave it behind, taking his wife and their two sons with him. His account matters because it comes from inside the elite. Most North Korean defectors escape from poverty, famine, or a prison camp. Thae escaped from the top of the system, and his testimony describes a regime that is at once stronger and more fragile than it looks from the outside.
Thae was born into privilege by North Korean standards. He grew up in Pyongyang, was educated in the system, and joined the foreign ministry, where he served in Denmark, Sweden, and finally London. He learned English, he traveled, and he lived in comfortable houses in foreign capitals. He also knew how the system worked at close range. In his account, the life of a North Korean diplomat abroad is not the life of an ordinary diplomat. Every embassy, he says, is watched, and every diplomat is watched by others in the embassy. Loyalty is tested constantly, and a diplomat’s family back in Pyongyang is, in effect, a guarantee of good behavior. Thae describes a world in which colleagues report on one another, in which contact with outsiders is carefully controlled, and in which the regime’s ideology follows a diplomat even to London. That control, he says, is not a side effect of the system. It is the system.
Elite Life, and What It Cost
Life for the elite in Pyongyang, as Thae describes it, is comfortable in material terms and narrow in every other way. Senior officials and their families live in better housing, eat better food, and have access to goods that ordinary North Koreans never see. Their children go to better schools, and they are prepared from an early age for service to the state. At the same time, Thae says, their lives are constrained by fear and by surveillance. A senior official knows that a single mistake, a careless remark, or a family member’s misstep can end a career, or worse. He describes the pressure to send money home, to prove loyalty, and to compete with other officials for the leader’s favor. That competition, he says, is not a sign of a healthy government. It is a sign of a court, in which survival depends on pleasing one man and his family. The elite, in Thae’s account, are not free. They are well-fed prisoners of a different kind.
Slush Funds, Surveillance, and Foreign Currency
One of the most important parts of Thae’s testimony concerns money. According to Thae, North Korean diplomats abroad were expected to earn foreign currency for the regime, through trade, through business ventures, and through other means, and to send that money back to Pyongyang. This system, often described in the outside world as slush funds or loyalty funds, was not a matter of individual corruption. It was policy. Diplomats who raised more money were rewarded, and diplomats who raised less were punished. Thae describes the pressure that system created, and the corruption it encouraged, because officials who were told to earn money by any means often did so in ways that were secretive, unaccountable, and difficult to distinguish from ordinary crime. Those funds, he says, helped finance the leadership’s lifestyle, its nuclear and missile programs, and the security apparatus that kept it in power. They were a lifeline for a regime that could not earn enough money through ordinary trade.
Why He Left in 2016
Thae’s decision to leave, as he explains it in the interview, was not taken lightly. He knew that defection would mean being denounced in North Korea as a traitor, that his relatives left behind could face punishment, and that he would never be able to return home. He also knew that he would be questioned, doubted, and criticized, both by people in South Korea who wondered whether he could be trusted, and by people abroad who wondered whether a former diplomat could ever be a reliable witness. He left anyway, he says, because he had concluded that the regime would not change, that the lives of his sons would be better in South Korea, and that he could do more good by speaking openly about the system he had served than by continuing to serve it in silence. That decision required courage, not only because of the immediate danger, but because it meant abandoning a life of privilege for an uncertain future as a defector in a new country.
Strength and Brittleness
Thae’s assessment of the regime, as he gives it in this interview, is nuanced. He does not describe a government on the verge of collapse, and he does not predict that it will fall soon. He describes a regime that is strong in some ways and brittle in others. It is strong, he says, because it controls information, because it has a powerful security apparatus, and because it has nuclear weapons that make outside intervention far more difficult. It is strong because it can punish dissent, because it can isolate its population, and because it has survived famine, sanctions, and the collapse of its Soviet patron. At the same time, Thae says, it is brittle, because its economy is weak, because its ideology is hollow, and because its legitimacy depends on a single family and on a single leader. A system that depends on one man’s rule is vulnerable to that man’s mistakes, his health, and his choices, and it has no clear way to manage disagreement or change.
The lesson of Thae Yong-ho’s story is that a regime can look united from the outside and be divided on the inside. The man who represented North Korea in London, who lived in a comfortable house and who spoke fluent English, was, by his own account, living in fear, watching his colleagues, and worrying about his sons. His defection did not prove that the regime was about to fall, but it proved that the regime could not keep its own elite. That is a different kind of proof, and a more lasting one. Thae has since become a public figure in South Korea, speaking and writing about North Korea, and his testimony remains one of the most detailed accounts we have of how the regime works at the top. His interview with 101 East is valuable not because he tells us everything, but because he tells us what only a senior insider could know: what elite life cost, how the money flowed, how the surveillance worked, and why, in the end, he decided that the price of staying was higher than the price of leaving.