Podcast Episode #87 - Rescuing North Korea: The Story of Adrian Hong with Bradley Hope
CCTV images showed activists from Cheollima Civil Defense as they took over the North Korean embassy in Madrid, Spain in August 2019.
The group was led by Adrian Hong, dressed in business attire. Adrian had spent the previous two decades on an ever-expanding quest to liberate the people of North Korea from the Kim regime. From his start as a campus organizer, to rescuing refugees trapped in China, and even traveling to Libya during the Arab Spring to witness a regime collapse in real time, Adrian was seemingly an unstoppable force set against an immovable object; the Kim dynasty.
That day at the embassy, Adrian pretended to be an investor named Matthew Chao in order to set up a meeting with the commercial attache, So Yun-suk. Once he was granted entry, he opened the door for the rest of his team, who donned balaclavas and took control of the compound and the six North Koreans inside.
Their plan was the riskiest yet for the group; to facilitate the attache’s defection, who had secretly contacted the group months before. By staging a raid and kidnapping, they hoped to prevent his family in North Korea from suffering the consequences of his defection.
But unbeknownst to the group, a seventh North Korean, the wife of an employee, escaped in the early stages of their raid. She jumped from a high window and fled through a rear exit, flagging down passerby and then contacting Madrid police. From there, events spiraled out of control for Adrian, and within days the highly publicized incident threatened to derail ongoing talks between the US and North Korean governments.
Although they successfully escaped out of the embassy and back to the US, Adrian and the others subsequently faced extradition to Spain, as well as the threat of assassination by North Korean operatives once they were publicly identified. Christopher Ahn, a former US Marine, was arrested and jailed, while Adrian disappeared completely.
For episode 87 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Bradley Hope, author of “The Rebel and the Kingdom”, about Adrian’s incredible journey from idealistic college student to a modern day David versus Goliath.
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