In September 2018, a woman in her late 30s lay on her side in a safe house of the North Hamgyong Province state security bureau amid the acrid smell of cigarette smoke.
Rewinding back to mid-2014, the woman, surnamed Han, had been arrested by the provincial state security bureau for making an illegal crossing into China. After pledging loyalty to the bureau, she was ordered to return to China, this time as a spy.
After taking power in North Korea, Kim Jong Un became concerned about the large number of defections that had taken place during the deadly famine known in North Korea as the “Arduous March.” So on several occasions, he instructed the Ministry of State Security, the military’s state security bureau, and the state security bureaus of provinces bordering China to devise sweeping measures to counter defection attempts.
Subsequently, the Ministry of State Security pressured provincial state security bureaus on the border with China to come up with creative schemes for repatriating defectors, noting that the Supreme Leader had instructed the state security apparatus to bring back each and every citizen who had fled the country because of hardships in the past.
In response, the North Hamgyong Province state security bureau came up with a scheme of assigning spies to lure back defectors from South Korea and ferret out defectors in China who were trying to reach the South. That scheme was implemented immediately.
After screening women who were in detention following repatriation from China, the provincial state security bureau selected the ones with decent backgrounds and social status. The women were ordered to swear an oath of loyalty and then sent back to China. Their mission was to use whatever means necessary to track down defectors seeking to travel to South Korea and report back on their findings.
Han was in the batch the spies selected by the state security bureau at that time. She was assigned to China’s Jilin Province, where she diligently applied herself to her mission.
When Han had smuggled herself across the border because of the privation she faced in North Korea, she faced a new and terrible hardship in China: contempt and scorn. Even so, she had contended herself with getting three solid meals a day without any fear of starvation. And then she was repatriated to North Korea against her will.
Han thought it would be better to serve as a spy for the state security bureau in China than to struggle in North Korea without any viable livelihood. For four years after her recruitment — from 2014 to 2018 — she traveled around Jilin Province, informing on more than twenty North Korean defectors who were hoping to make their way to South Korea.
Han was praised for her performance and was among the “key spies” who were brought back to North Korea on orders from the Ministry of State Security on September 9, 2018 — the 70th anniversary of North Korea’s establishment — for intense training.
At a safe house operated by the ministry, Han was given a four-year assignment to South Korea, where she was supposed to entice defectors to return to the North. Her assignment was to settle her affairs in China and travel to South Korea in the same manner as ordinary defectors. She was to then settle down in the South and await her next orders.
An unexpected turn of events
In October 2018, she returned to the house in China where she had been living with a Korean-Chinese man. According to the original plan, she was supposed to look up a broker in China and head to South Korea, but there was a hitch: she got pregnant.
The provincial state security bureau pushed her to carry out her mission, even if that meant getting an abortion. But Han insisted on keeping the child and waiting until the child turned one before heading to Korea.
And so Han found herself still in China when the calendar flipped from 2019 to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world. She was stuck in China and soon decided to remain there for good. She severed her connection with the North Hamgyong Province state security bureau and relocated to another part of China.
Han reflected upon her past experiences from her current vantage point:
“I decided to become a spy at the age of 34. My hometown was the kind of place where people struggled to make a living and only a handful of officials were comfortable. But when I escaped to China in search of a better life, I was treated like an animal because I didn’t have any civil rights.”
“Then I got arrested and taken back to North Korea. I became a spy because I was afraid of going to prison, where I was sure to die. Many [North Koreans] trying to make it to South Korea were caught because of me. Now I regret becoming a spy.”
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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