November 12, 2021
Agent Chrysanthemum: North Korean Spy Indicted for Coercing Defectors to Return ‘Home’
South Korean media recently disclosed that a female North Korean spy has been operating inside South Korea for roughly three years, coercing defectors to return “home” to support the regime’s political agenda. This raises significant national security concerns for South Korea, as well as the North Korean defector community, as Pyongyang continues to target dissidents living abroad despite participating in diplomatic summits with both Seoul and Washington.
Coercing, and even abducting, defectors is a common tactic for authoritarian regimes to discourage defection as it intensifies the climate of fear often surrounding those wishing to defect.
According to South Korean media, she officially started working as an undercover agent in 2016 under the code name “Chrysanthemum” (국화 in Korean) and then “defected” to South Korea two years later. She confessed to working for the North’s Ministry of State Security to persuade defectors to return to North Korea during a court hearing in Suwon, South Korea. The North’s Ministry of State Security first approached her in 2014 after learning of her experience acting as a money broker between defectors and their families. One North Korean defector reportedly returned to the North in September 2016 following her persuasion operation and began criticizing South Korea through interviews on state-sponsored media outlets.
Read the full article from The Diplomat.
More from CNAS
-
Edward Fishman: Weaponizing Finance and What It Means for Portfolios
Podcast
Edward Fishman, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, explains how sanctions, chokepoints, and financial tools are redefining market risk and opport...
By Edward Fishman
-
Happy Summer from Derisky Business!
Podcast
While Derisky Business goes on summer break, revisit your favorite episodes of the podcast and dive into the Summer Reading List, featuring book recommendations from previous ...
By Emily Kilcrease & Geoffrey Gertz
-
The Derisky Business Reading List
Commentary
While Derisky Business goes on summer break, revisit your favorite episodes of the podcast and dive into the Summer Reading List, featuring book recommendations from previous ...
-
Podcast
Transatlantic Security / Energy, Economics & Security
From Russia with RiskHere on the Bear Market Brief, a lot of what we focus on is, simply put, risk: what might happen, and what might it mean? On this episode, Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fel...
By Rachel Ziemba
