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
-
U.S.-China Competition Accelerates Across the Tech Stack
Congressional Testimony
This article was originally published in Just Security. Over the course of 2025, the United States and China rapidly escalated trade and tech restrictions toward each other, t...
By Geoffrey Gertz
-
Fortress North America: Mexico’s Role in Securing the Region’s Economic Future
Commentary
Executive Summary Economic security has become the new organizing principle of global trade policy, reflecting a fundamental shift in how states define and defend their econom...
By Diego Marroquín Bitar
-
It’s Complicated...
Commentary
Introduction The United States is Canada’s closest economic and security partner. While both countries share many interests, neither their interests nor the means they use to ...
By Jeff Mahon & Wolfgang Alschner
-
Moving On From Free Trade with Mark DiPlacido
Podcast
Geoff sits down with Mark DiPlacido of American Compass to discuss his recent series of essays, On Balance, that advocates U.S. trade policy should move away from the previous...
By Geoffrey Gertz
