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Sometimes stories don’t need a helluva lot of comment. The AFP has recently reported that South Korea has arrested a man allegedly sent by North Korea to assassinate outspoken North Korean defector Park Sang-hak with a poison-tipped needle. Park worked at a propaganda unit of the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League until 1999, when his father, a spy for the government, urged the family to defect to South Korea. He is now best known for his work in sending balloons across the border; the Oslo Freedom Forum has a video of an impassioned speech on North Korean human rights abuses.
Disinformation? Always possible; you be the judge. But as the numbers of refugees and defectors increases, it seems almost inevitable that the number of agents managing to slip through the security screening process will also increase. To date, by our reckoning, we have the following:
In 1997 Lee Han-Young, a nephew of Sung Hye-Rim -- the deceased first wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il -- was shot dead outside his apartment in South Korea.
In July 2010, two North Korean spies were sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to murder Hwang Jang-Yop, the highest ranking defector to ever leave North Korea (Hwang died of natural causes). In January of this year Soth Korea sentenced another North Korean spy to 10 years for plotting to assassinate Hwang.
The pattern: the more visible and highly-placed, the more vulnerable.
