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The N.Y. Times, the Ningpo 12, Minbyun & Yoon Mee-hyang: The Story Behind the Story

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it.

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Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo 12–the 12 young North Korean waitresses who defected from a North Korean government-run restaurant in Ningpo, China, along with their manager. Immediately after the announcement of the defections, the North Korean government claimed that the South Korean National Intelligence Service, or NIS, had either coerced or tricked all 13 into defecting. Despite those claims, all 13 sought asylum in South Korea. At least one has moved on to another country, but none have moved back. Based on their arguments, made through their lawyer, the South Korean judiciary upheld their claims. Two independent investigations–one by South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission and one by the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, announced just last month–have since found that no credible evidence supports the claims of kidnapping or coercion.

In May of 2018, the manager of the Ningpo 12 began telling reporters that the NIS had coerced him to trick the women into defecting. That story made global headlines, driven by prominent coverage in The New York Times, CNN, and other sources. But now, the manager has largely recanted those claims and told us the story behind the story. In doing so, he also reveals how Pyongyang used some of South Korea’s most powerful and politically connected civil society groups to sow its disinformation and terrorize those who would defy its writ. It is a story of how Korea’s most prominent activist against human trafficking and her husband–both of whom have long-standing ideological ties to North Korea–became Pyongyang’s human trafficking enforcers. It is a story of how some of the world’s most influential journalists repeated an implausible story based on the word of the manager, who now says he was paid and pressured to fabricate the claims of involuntary defection, who later fled South Korea out of fear for his safety, and who now says that most of what he told the media was never true.

Minbyun’s Suit to Breach the Refugees’ Confidentiality

Almost immediately after the announcement of the Ningpo defections, a politically powerful, far-left lawyers’ group called Minbyun (Lawyers for a Democratic Society) took up Pyongyang’s accusation in South Korea’s courts. In South Korea, Minbyun is no ordinary advocacy group. Before Korea began holding free elections in 1987, Minbyun defended the targets of the right-wing dictatorship’s prosecutions, and persecutions. Its members included the late ex-President Roh Moo-hyun and include current President Moon Jae-in, both of whom got their start as young activist lawyers defending accused North Korean spies and labor activists. To hear former labor activist and provincial governor Kim Moon-soo and attorney Lee Don-hwan tell it, Minbyun’s 12,000 highly disciplined members have quietly taken control of the Seoul and Korean Bar associations–the latter of which previously published detailed, well-documented annual reports about human rights in North Korea. They also claim that the Moon administration is packing South Korea’s judiciary with Minbyun members.

The nominal clients for Minbyun’s petition were the families of the 13 Ningpo defectors. Exactly how they retained Minbyun’s services is still unclear. Minbyun may have obtained its power of attorney through an unnamed U.S. citizen, or through a Chinese journalism professor. But because the families were acting under the watchful glare of the North Korean security forces, Minbyun was effectively representing the government from which the refugees had fled, taking a position directly adverse to their legal interests and their safety. For all intents and purposes, their real client was Kim Jong-un.

[Seven waitresses who did not defect are presented at a press conference in Pyongyang.

Seated behind them are family members of the 12 who did. N.Y. Times photo.]

Representing the 13 was Park Young-shik, who had been recommended by the Korean Bar Association and retained by South Korea’s NIS, which had brought the women from China to South Korea. The NIS claims that Park’s role as a lawyer and human rights advocate is independent. Presumably, her job is to ensure the protection of intelligence information and the rights of the refugees.

There is nothing inherently unethical about representing terrible clients; I’ve certainly represented my share of them, though none were as terrible as Kim Jong-un. There was, however, something very wrong with what Minbyun’s suit sought to do. Minbyun’s suit sought to breach the refugees’ confidentiality–a right guaranteed by UN convention to protect their safety and that of their families. The suit demanded that the court force all 13 refugees to state publicly whether they defected freely. To allow a state that is accused of persecuting a refugee to intervene in the refugee’s asylum proceeding undermines the sanctity–indeed, the very purpose–of the asylum process. The women opposed Minbyun’s petition and maintained through their lawyer that they had defected of their own free will. As Park argued, “What’s going to happen for a defector’s family if the defector’s motivation and process of defection is revealed?”

The refugees asserted their right to confidentiality, reaffirmed their desire to remain in South Korea, and refused to meet with Minbyun lawyers. When the judge ruled against Minbyun, it tried, unsuccessfully, to remove the judge. In September 2019, Minbyun appealed and lost again (the links to Yonhap’s reports about the appellate history have since gone dead). The South Korean government also maintains that all 13 defected voluntarily.

Pyongyang’s motives to disinform

The Ningpo defections were more than a global embarrassment to Pyongyang; they were also a financial blow. Because restaurants are cash businesses, they’re ideal fronts for laundering larger amounts of money North Korean agents earn by selling coal, weapons, drugs, and software embedded with malicious code. The restaurants never fully recovered from a series of blows that started to fall in early 2016–first, the Ningpo defections and the self-imposed security lockdowns that followed and never quite subsided; second, the enactment of tougher financial sanctions by the U.S. and the United Nations that may have caused banks to close the restaurants’ accounts; third, a December 2019 deadline for all North Korean workers to return home that, while never fully enforced in China, still forced the restaurants to operate less publicly; and finally, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The greater danger the Ningpo defection represented for Pyongyang was political. A group defection by 13 vetted members of elite Pyongyang families was unprecedented. It was not only a global embarrassment to the North Korean government, it revealed cracks in the cohesion of the elite class. That 13 of North Korea’s most trusted citizens would not only defect as a group, but plan and conspire to do so as a group, revealed the state’s carefully managed image of omnipotence to be a facade. The maintenance of that image and the disruption of disloyal conspiracies is what separates Kim Jong-un from Nicolae Ceausescu.

Kim had to answer for this dangerous humiliation, lest there be a cascade of them. Just as it had used the AP’s self-interested credulity to cover the “re-defection” of Pak Jong-suk four years before, it now paraded relatives of the Ningpo 12 before a credulous (who else?) Will Ripley for a group interview. Tearfully, they pled for their daughters to come home to a forgiving and merciful workers’ paradise. This was more than a media strategy for the foreign press. It was an example of what Sandra Fahy calls “love abuse”–Pyongyang’s use of the loved ones a North Korean expatriate leaves behind as human collateral against disloyalty and defection.

Minbyun Finds Heo Gang-il

Defeat in the courtroom would not end Minbyun’s pursuit of the Ningpo 12. I had predicted that Pyongyang and its allies would continue their efforts to track them down and coerce them into “re-defecting,” and so it did. It was only a matter of time before Minbyun found three of them, and their former manager, who has since been identified publicly as Heo Gang-il. The leaking of information about North Korean ĂŠmigrĂŠs from government records has long been a serious problem in South Korea. Those whose identities and whereabouts leak may be threatened, blackmailed into “re-defecting,” or even targeted for assassination. Since 2018, some ĂŠmigrĂŠs have even received phone calls from North Korean Ministry of State Security Agents at their new homes in South Korea, urging them to come back to North Korea, and telling them to think of the “safety” of the loved ones they left behind in North Korea. North Koreans often survive an arduous and dangerous journey through their homeland, China, and Southeast Asia–only to arrive in the South and find that they are never beyond the reach of the oppression they fled.

John Cha, author of this biography of Korean-American World War Two veteran Susan Ahn Cuddy, and a correspondent for the right-leaning Liberty Korea Post, contacted both Heo Gang-il and Minbyun late last month. Both told different stories about the circumstances of their meeting.

Minbyun says that it was Heo who first contacted them in August of 2016 to discuss “the circumstances concerning their arrival and financial conditions.” The author Patrick Winn suggests another (or additional) motive–Heo was angry at the NIS and the Ningpo 12 after a spat. Minbyun lawyer Chae Hee-joon told Winn that Heo had ducked his NIS minders in late 2016 and met with them for several hours. At the time, Heo was angry at the NIS for separating him from the 12 women. This was the final insult that Heo could not bear. He had maintained an abusive, condescending control over the waitresses in China. At some point after the group arrived in South Korea, one of them also sued Heo for assaulting her back in Ningpo in 2014. The NIS may have isolated Heo from the Ningpo 12 because one or more of them asked it to do so. In its more recent statement to Cha, Minbyun says it lost contact with Heo until March 2018, when Heo re-initiated contact.

Heo told Cha a different story. He says that two Democratic Party members of the National Assembly, Pyo Chang-won (who is a piece of work) and Kim Kyeong-yeop, had contacted him. As lawmakers, they would have been well-positioned to obtain confidential information about Heo and the Ningpo 12. Heo told Cha that the two politicians had introduced him to Minbyun. Either way, Heo was not a hard target. He had once been (by North Korean standards) wealthy, powerful, and privileged. By 2018, he was poor, forgotten, and disgruntled. Minbyun found him ripe for the picking. Heo would later tell the New York Times that the NIS offered him “millions,” but actually paid him just $35,500 (a little more than 43 million won at today’s rate). Heo had “worked as a cashier at a convenience store and driven a delivery truck.” Meanwhile, his parents and his sister in North Korea had disappeared.

The JTBC Interview

Around this time, Minbyun says it began discussions with the South Korean television network, JTBC, and other left-leaning “civic” groups about “ways for the women to secure a stable life” in South Korea. Heo Gwang-il and the three waitresses who met with Minbyun still did not go back to North Korea, did not give a press conference, and did not join the lawsuit against the government that Minbyun had already decided to file. But shortly after those discussions began, Heo and three of the Ningpo 12 did agree to an interview with JTBC. The interview, which aired in May of that year, broadly supported Minbyun’s story–and by extension, Pyongyang’s. Heo told JTBC that none of the women knew they were going to South Korea when they left Ningpo. JTBC also quoted one of the women, who said she left Ningpo with Heo because he had threatened her. She said that her family in North Korea would be killed if she didn’t defect (which is counterintuitive), and that she was surprised when she saw that their car was entering an embassy compound in Malaysia flying a South Korean flag.

The interview made global headlines. More interviews would follow. Heo told CNN that he lied to the 12 women because the NIS had told him to. He also told CNN he wanted to go back to North Korea (he never took the opportunity to do so and later, fled to a third country instead). He said that some of the women wanted to go back to North Korea (none went back; by then, all were attending college). CNN, which describes JTBC as its South Korean affiliate, called the allegations “explosive.”

Heo claimed that the NIS told him that if he didn’t bring the women with him, they’d turn him in to the North Koreans (something no spy does if he wants to continue to recruit and maintain informants). Heo also told CNN that President Park had ordered that the defections must proceed (not something any competent spy would tell an informant abroad, and not something an intelligence officer would tell a spy working on hostile soil).

Fraudulent claims swirled with the implausible ones. The left-wing Hankyoreh even referenced unsourced claims that some of the women were on hunger strike, and that one had died. The Ningpo 12’s lawyer said the claims were untrue, that she had just talked to her clients, and that they were all “healthy and showed no problems.” Minbyun also enlisted the International Association of Democratic Lawyers to “investigate” the involuntary defection story. The IADL’s findings supported Pyongyang’s claims–which is to be expected, given that its report relied in part on the statements of the seven women who did not defect in Ningpo, whom the IADL interviewed in Pyongyang. None of the news coverage of IADL’s report mentioned that it has long been a “communist-controlled” group, and is best remembered for spreading disinformation that the U.S. waged biological warfare during Korean War.

The New York Times’s Coverage

No reporter pursued the allegations that the Ningpo 12 were tricked into defecting more doggedly than Choe Sang-hun, the New York Times’s Seoul Bureau Chief. Choe wrote no less than four stories based primarily on Heo’s claims–all of which broadly gave credence to the claim that the 13 did not defect of their own free will, and were heavily biased toward Minbyun. Choe has been reporting from Korea for decades from a consistently left-leaning, anti-anti-North Korean point of view, but he also has a history of loose fact-checking. In 2000, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with Charles Hanley of the Associated Press for reporting on the No Gun Ri incident, through that reporting was later discredited in part by evidence that some of the alleged eyewitnesses weren’t there. More recently, Choe cited a parody tweet by @DPRKNews as an actual statement of the North Korean government.

Choe wrote at least four stories about the Ningpo 12. The first story, dated June 22, 2016, largely narrated Minbyun’s accusation that the NIS had kidnapped them by trickery. It said that Minbyun only wanted to release the women from a “tightly guarded government facility” to “speak for themselves,” without mentioning the women’s right of confidentiality or the legitimate fears that might have been the cause of their choice to exercise it. (Choe almost acknowledges this when he says that “defectors often insist on anonymity because of fears for their families.”) The story accused the NIS of blocking the women’s access to legal services, without mentioning that they were already represented by Park Young-shik. Choe did report that the Ningpo 12 said that they wanted no help from Minbyun, but did not report that they said this though their lawyer.

Choe reported that Minbyun had “a power of attorney . . . obtained from the women’s North Korean families,” without clarifying that the families were inside North Korea and almost certainty acting under government coercion. It did not occur to Choe that Minbyun was trying to represent both sides in an adversarial proceeding, despite the direct conflict of interest this would raise–something that would be just as unethical for a South Korean lawyer as it would be for an American lawyer. He did not mention that under the Refugee Convention, the families had no right to intervene in asylum proceedings. Choe caricatured Minbyun’s critics as a shouty mob at the courthouse steps that called the Minbyun lawyers “commies,” but disregarded more thoughtful concerns from ĂŠmigrĂŠs and human rights advocacy groups, including the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

Choe’s third story, dated July 10, 2018, quoted U.N. Special Rapporteur Tomás Ojea Quintana’s call for an investigation of the incident. But as of this date, Choe has not reported that the investigation found no evidence to support Minbyun’s claims, or that Minbyun had no standing to intervene in the matter. Nor did Choe report last year that South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission (HRC) also investigated and found no evidence that the 12 women had come to South Korea involuntarily.1  

One of the reasons for the HRC’s findings was its determination that Heo was not a credible witness. There is, for example, the fact that seven other waitresses had chosen, apparently freely, not to “relocate.” (A report from the Daily NK holds that the other seven reportedly backed out at the last minute for fear of retribution against their families.) Instead, they reappeared in Pyongyang, where they were hailed as heroes. But refusing a transfer is not the sort of choice a waitress in a North Korean restaurant could have made of her own free well. Historically, North Korean waitresses have been selected for their appearance while they are only 9 or 10 years old. The prettiest, most talented ones are assigned to Pyongyang’s showpiece musical acts; the rest are vetted carefully and sent abroad to earn hard currency for the state. While abroad, they live well, at least by North Korean standards. They have enough to eat and live in dormitories above the restaurants. But state minders hold their passports and control their every move. Sometimes, waitresses get to keep 30 percent of their pay; sometimes, they don’t. They must attend regular criticism sessions and snitch on each other–and on returning to Pyongyang, on themselves. They are the very archetype of how human trafficking works in modern times.

Then, there is the Reuters report quoting witnesses from the Ningpo neighborhood near the Ryugyong Restaurant. They said that the day before the defection, the waitresses went shopping for new $30 backpacks and didn’t even haggle with the shopkeepers about the price. He asked them, “Are you going on a trip?” They said yes, he said. They seemed happy.

[The Ryugyong Restaurant in Ningpo. Reuters photo.]

Choe reported that Heo claimed that the women blindly followed him to Malaysia and South Korea because they “were trained to obey their manager,” who held their passports. But in his fourth story, dated August 4, 2018, Heo told Choe that five of the women managed to simply vanish “during a break” (!) on Defection Day. This does not fit with the accounts of witnesses in Ningpo, that the women were “under military-like management, and not free to go anywhere.” For this version of Heo’s story to be accurate, NIS spies would have had to shepherd 12 (presumably, terrified) North Koreans past their minders, through Chinese customs and immigration inspections, and onto at least two international flights. The docile, obedient women blindly obeyed Heo this entire time, but disobeyed the Great General when, on arriving in Malaysia, they entered a building with a large South Korean flag. The South Korean government maintains that all 13 confirmed their intention to defect “before their arrival” in the South.

Finally, by 2016, there were already 30,000 North Korean ĂŠmigrĂŠs in South Korea. Only a handful had defected in the other direction. Thousands more would-be defectors were hiding in China or traveling clandestinely on a desperately risky journey to the relative safety of Southeast Asia, and from there, asylum in South Korea. Why, then, would the NIS go to the trouble of staging an elaborate covert operation to extract some of the relatively few North Koreans in China who (allegedly) did not want to defect? And if the NIS was willing to kidnap North Koreans, why waitresses instead of someone with more intelligence value, such as spies, hackers, proliferators, generals, diplomats, or money launderers? After all, the NIS would eventually have to release 12 kidnapped women into an open society and trust that they would all accept their fate quietly.

The common themes in Choe’s reporting were to tell the parts of the story that made the South Korean government look evil, but to gloss over the parts of the story that made the North Korean government look evil; to repeat the claims that made Minbyun look like saviors, but leave out the facts that made them look like unethical interlopers; to be piercingly skeptical of Park Geun-hye and the NIS, but to reveal no skepticism about Heo’s shaky story, or about how Minbyun was clearly catering it to the press, apparently including himself. He reported breathlessly on the initiation of investigations, but went silent about the outcomes of those same investigations when they undercut the improbable narrative he had chosen to believe.

Terrorized by Fears of Sacrifice & Repatriation  

The effect of those reports on the rest of the Ningpo 12 was shock and terror. To leave Heo’s claims unanswered was to give credence to claims that they hadn’t defected of their own free will, and as such, that Seoul would be justified in sending them back to North Korea. To identify themselves and insist that they defected of their own free will could have been a death sentence to their loved ones in North Korea. The Ningpo 12 had no good choices. Instead, they told a South Korean friend, a restaurateur, that Heo was lying, that they all wanted to stay in South Korea. The aforementioned report suggests that this number may have included the three women who had spoken to JTBC, and to Minbyun, which gives a sense of the intense pressures they were under. It is also likely that those pressures had opened a split among the women.

With Pyongyang repeatedly demanding their repatriation, the Ningpo 12 had every reason to fear the worst. They must have known that if they returned to Pyongyang, their fate would be a bleak one. Their fears were well-grounded. A year later, the Moon administration tied, blindfolded, gagged, and repatriated two North Korean fishermen who had allegedly killed their abusive captain and shipmates, sailed South, and asked for asylum. The repatriations were a clear violation of the UN Refugee Convention, and one of many signs that Seoul was starting to elevate Pyongyang’s demands over international and democratic norms. Only later, when news of that repatriation leaked, did human rights groups raise an outcry. Other ĂŠmigrĂŠs were terrified even before that incident. One woman who had come to South Korea in 2008 told the Chosun Ilbo, “I haven’t slept more than an hour a night since the inter-Korean summit. People like me who have been living quietly could be dragged off to North Korea any moment.”

In the spring of 2018, in the atmosphere following the Pyeongchang Olympics, the Panmunjom summit, and the announcement of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un, public and media sentiment had shifted overwhelmingly in favor of giving Kim Jong-un just about anything he wanted, with as little scrutiny as possible. The South Korean government had previously said it was satisfied that the 12 had defected of their own free will. Now, the Moon administration announced a fresh investigation of the defections, and refused to deny that it would send them back to North Korea. The 12 were so terrified that the Moon administration would sacrifice them and send them back to Pyongyang that they were literally lying awake at night in fear for their lives. A timely petition by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea may have saved them from repatriation.

Perhaps the very fear of repatriation was the point of Pyongyang’s (and Minbyun’s) lawfare against the Ningpo 12. If Minbyun could not break any of them and pressure them into “re-defecting”–where carefully staged press conferences were sure to follow–then its next-best outcome was to deter other defections. In fact, there is evidence that higher-ranking North Koreans in China decided not to defect to South Korea because of Minbyun’s petition.

The Yoon Mee-hyang Connection & “National Liberation”

At this point in the story, disgraced “comfort woman” activist Yoon Mee-hyang and her husband also enter our story. (The author of this blog dislikes the term “comfort women” intensely, and refers to women enslaved and raped by the Japanese military as wartime rape survivors, or survivors.) As head of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, Yoon was the leading activist for their cause.

Recently, however, one of the last remaining survivors, 92-year-old Lee Yong-su, alleged that Yoon’s true cause was displaying the survivors like “bears doing tricks” for the pursuit of her own wealth and power. She claims that Yoon and the Council misappropriated donations for the survivors’ care, pressured them into rejecting a settlement offer from Japan that could have provided for them for the rest of their lives, and “preached hatred” of Japan at weekly rallies to inflame and profit from nationalist sentiments. Since 2015, when the Japanese and Korean governments reached an agreement to compensate the survivors, their number has dwindled from 46 to 17. Emotional anti-Japanese nationalism recently provoked a trade war between Korea and Japan, caused significant harm to Korea’s economy, and briefly broke the countries’ trilateral intelligence-sharing alliance with the United States. All of this was bad for Korea, but it was good for Yoon Mee-hyang, who recently won a seat in the National Assembly with President Moon’s Democratic Party. Prosecutors are now investigating the misappropriation allegations. Yoon denies the allegations and has refused calls to resign her seat.

For her trouble, online mobs now accuse Lee Yong-su of being a “fake comfort woman,” a puppet of right-wingers, or affected by dementia. Ms. Lee has endured years of similar abuse by Japanese nationalists. Now, she must endure it from the same people who had so recently weaponized her suffering. Exactly how much exploitation and abuse can one person can endure in a lifetime?

Yoon Mee-hyang’s husband, Kim Sam-seok, is a convicted North Korean spy. He met Yoon when both were student activists espousing the pro-Pyongyang “National Liberation” ideology. At least one of Kim’s fellow NL activists has since gone on to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. In 1994, seven years after South Korea’s democratization, Kim and his sister were both convicted of violating the National Security Law for meeting with, and receiving 500,000 yen (about $5,000) from one Han Tong-ryun, a representative of a North Korean front organization in Japan. Kim was sentenced to a four-year prison term.2 A second article reports that the court also found that Kim passed secrets to North Korea. In 1999, after his release from prison, Kim gave an interview to an English-language student newspaper at the Hangkuk University of Foreign Studies, protested his innocence, and denounced left-leaning President Kim Dae-jung for continuing to arrest “unification” activists.

To give you some idea of just how far the NL ideology goes, here’s a photograph of Kim Sam-seok with Lee Seok-ki, also an NL adherent and a former lawmaker, before Lee’s 2012 arrest and treason conviction for plotting attacks against South Korean infrastructure targets in support of a North Korean invasion … over an open conference line. An appellate court affirmed Lee’s conviction but reduced his sentence from 12 to nine years (which can only mean that South Korean law has a sentencing guideline for aggravated stupidity).

[Lee Seok-ki is on the left, Kim Sam-seok is on the right. Photo credit: MediaWatch]

There is much public speculation, so far unrealized, that President Moon will pardon Lee or commute his sentence. In 2014, Kim petitioned for a review of his conviction; the court largely re-affirmed it in 2016. Kim tried again in 2017, after Moon became President. The third time was the charm. In 2018, the court vacated Kim’s conviction–not for lack of evidence of guilt, but based on the circumstances of his warrantless pretrial detention. It also awarded him just over $150,000 in compensation for his troubles. Somewhere along the way, Kim had also accumulated charges for blackmail, extortion, and other crimes.

Minbyun’s Pitch: Bribes, Veiled Threats & Revolutionary Sing-Alongs

Last month, South Korea’s largest-circulation daily, the right-leaning Chosun Ilbo, also found Heo in his new country of residence and interviewed him. Heo told the Chosun Ilbo that in June 2018, after the JTBC interview, Yoon Mee-hyang and Kim Sam-seok invited him and at least three of the 12 ex-waitresses to a weekend retreat at a shelter for the wartime rape survivors. It was the first of a series of such meetings. Also present at the meetings were representatives of various “civic groups,” including the Japan-based North Korean front group Chongryon, a “prisoners of conscience” organization, and Minbyun. The most notable Minbyun attendee was a lawyer named “Jang.” It may also have been around this time that at least some of the Ningpo 12 began volunteering at the Council’s shelter and befriending the elderly survivors.

Heo claims that at the meetings, Jang offered him and three of the ex-waitresses a stipend of 300,000 to 500,000 won per month. Heo says that Jang also told him he could earn “a lot more money” by suing the South Korean government for coercing a defection under false pretenses. Jang also began to suggest that the four refugees go back to North Korea. He asked Heo to tell this story at a press conference. At one point, Minbyun lawyers handed some of the women photographs of their family members back in North Korea, posing before lavish banquets, which they had obtained from their “clients.” They also gave the women letters from their families, urging the women to return to the “open arms” of their motherland. Heo also recently told Yonhap TV that Kim Sam-seok urged them to go back to North Korea to save their families.

[Photo credit: Chosun Ilbo]

Here is an excerpt from one of the Minbyun texts that Heo showed to Cha:

KimXX: Be brave, trust MINBYUN, and act boldly. If you work with those in the unification movement freely within the law, you will become Heo-dongmu [comrade Heo], sure to be loved by the suryong-nim.[great leader]

Heo: Thank you.

KimXX: Some of us are getting ready to go to [Pyongyang] for the 9.9 Day celebration [day of the foundation of the republic] (appears possible as of now..), and please help us contact the women’s family. We are still in a preliminary stage, but we plan to request interviews with [the women’s] families. [link]

Minbyun denies that its members urged Heo or any of the Ningpo 12 to go back to Pyongyang. It also denies giving Heo more than one donation, but the bank records Heo provided to the Chosun Ilbo say otherwise. Screenshots of Heo’s bank records show an October 2018 deposit of 500,000 won (about $400) from someone named “Jang.” A separate Korean press report notes that a Minbyun lawyer named Jang Kyung-uk, pictured here, was at the center of Minbyun’s claims that the 13 were coerced or tricked. The bank records show a stream of similar payments over the next few months, through at least March 2019, for a total of 3 million won, or just over $2,400, at which time Heo left South Korea. Heo told the Chosun Ilbo that three of the ex-waitresses also received 300,000 won per month. By contrast, the Council gave the remaining survivors of wartime rapes by Japanese soldiers was just 440,000 won for an entire year–combined.

Over the next several months, the money flowed from Minbyun to Heo, and Heo continued to meet with Minbyun lawyers and at least some of the ex-waitresses at the shelter run by Yoon Mee-hyang. Also present at one of the meetings were at least three members of the Japan-based North Korean front group Chongryon, which was (ironically, given Pyongyang’s allegations) implicated in the abduction of dozens of Japanese nationals to North Korea, including a 12 year-old girl. In December, Kim Sam-seok invited Heo and three of the women to a three-day meeting at the Council’s shelter in Anseong to eat pork belly, share fond memories of Kim’s visits to North Korea (always referring to Kim Jong-un with the honorific “suryeong-nim”), and sing revolutionary songs. The women thought this was rather weird. Then, Jang said that they should go back to North Korea, which alarmed them. Three of the women had said they did not know they were defecting to South Korea, but by then, all 12 wanted to stay. Jang wanted Heo to hold a press conference and say that none of the women knew where they were going. Heo refused. At this point, Jang’s ideology got the better of him:

Attorney Jang reprimanded Heo, saying that Heo should reflect and atone for the crime he had committed. Heo replied, “Atone? [The women] do not want to go back to North Korea because they like the South. Do you even know how well they are doing? If they thought they were victims, they would have sought you and asked you to send them home. Do you even know what North Korea is like? If you think that giving them freedom and happiness is a crime, you should go live in North Korea.” Heo added, “I was appalled when he said we committed a crime by defecting. We defected despite the danger. It was a matter of life-and-death for us.” [Liberty Korea Post]

Heo Gang-il flips again

In March 2019, Heo Gang-il left South Korea for a third country, reportedly Australia. That’s where he remained, in relative obscurity, until a few weeks ago, when the Yoon Mee-hyang scandal attracted a new wave of media interest in Yoon’s finances and associations. Now, Heo tells us that he fled South Korea because he feared that he wouldn’t be safe there, in part because he received threats, and in part because of pressure from Minbyun and its confederates to re-defect to North Korea. He is now telling the Chosun Ilbo a different story than the one he told to JTBC–that nine of the 12 women knew they were defecting to South Korea, and just three did not. But Heo says the Minbyun lawyers told him to say that none of the 13 knew where the NIS agents were taking them–in other words, that they told him to lie.

Of course, the old and new allegations–the old ones about the Ningpo defection (which Minbyun supported and catered to the media) and the new ones about Minbyun paying him, threatening him, and encouraging him to lie (which Minbyun denies, naturally)–all rest on the credibility of Heo Gang-il. Heo has changed his story multiple times in significant ways. There are holes every version of the story he has told about the circumstances of his defection. Although he said at one point that he wanted to go back to North Korea, he has since freely emigrated to a third country. Multiple court decisions and two independent investigations contradict his allegations about NIS shenanigans in Ningpo to one degree or another. The Ningpo 12 have said through their lawyer, through friends, and presumably to UN and HRC investigators that they don’t want to go back to North Korea. And Heo’s job description already included human trafficking and money laundering, which are not hallmarks of upstanding moral character. There is no question that Heo lied; the only question is when.

In the end, the Chosun Ilbo’s version has the support of documentary corroboration from Heo’s bank records that a man matching the name of a Minbyun lawyer paid him 500,000 won a month after he began accusing the NIS in media interviews. It has additional corroboration from the correspondence Heo showed both the Chosun Ilbo and Cha. The New York Times‘s reporting rests primarily on Heo’s word, with some corroboration from three of the women, but is now contradicted by two independent investigations, several court decisions, his own partial recantation, and basic logic.

The Times should retract its reports.

But given the increasingly fraught state of affairs for North Koreans in the South today, the reasons why Heo changed his story are somewhat understandable. If the NIS promised Heo a good life in South Korea, it either couldn’t or didn’t deliver. There were many reasons for the 13 to lose confidence in the South Korean government’s ability to protect them, including Minbyun’s petition to expose their identities, the easy breach of their confidentiality in South Korea, and the fact that people with undisguised pro-Pyongyang sympathies tracked them them down and delivered the subtle extortion of letters and photographs from their loved ones. By 2018, Heo and the Ningpo 12 must have felt completely exposed and unprotected. When they were vulnerable to coercion and in need of financial support, Minbyun was there to offer both. Heo might also have thought that by denying that the Ningpo 12 (or all of them) defected of their own free will, he might give their families back in North Korea enough plausible deniability to avoid “love abuse.” Heo might have believed that by telling JTBC that the NIS coerced him and tricked the Ningpo 12, he was protecting the families of the 12. Or, he might have thought that he was getting even.

Minbyun’s Unethical Conduct

If Heo’s new allegations are true–and some of them certainly seem to be–the Minbyun lawyers engaged in serious breaches of the ethics rules that apply to Korean lawyers. Heo alleges that Jang approached him and solicited a fraudulent lawsuit at the same time Park Young-shik was already representing him and the 12 waitresses. The Minbyun lawyers interfered with an existing attorney-client relationship between Park and the 13. They encouraged at least four of the 13 to file a suit that would assert facts they knew to be untrue–that is, they attempted to suborn false statements. Because they also represented the Pyongyang-based families who had intervened in the 13 South Korean asylum cases in a manner that was directly adverse to the legal interests and positions (and indeed, to the safety) of the 13, representation of any of the 13 would have been a clear conflict of interest. That conduct is grossly unethical in any legal system.

Minbyun also peddled a story to the press, knowing full well that their “source” was not credible, was fearful, and was soon to be on their payroll. With supreme cynicism, its lawyers alternately cajoled him, recruited him to give false testimony, and publicly smeared him as a “troublemaker” who mistreated the 12 waitresses and colluded with the NIS. Heo was clearly a sketchy, opportunistic witness. That much was probably written into his job description in Pyongyang. But the defamatory comments of the Minbyun lawyers about Heo, a prospective client who may have told them embarrassing facts in the expectation that Minbyun would keep those facts confidential, rule out any sincere concern for his legal interests as a motive for cultivating him.

Cha’s report, though harshly critical of Minbyun, published its response to Heo’s claims here. Minbyun admits trying to obtain information about the 13 through the courts, filing criminal complaints and complaints to the HRC, and carrying out an “outreach effort in the international community.” It denies paying Heo or the three women, but instead claims that Kim Sam-seok and a member of a “prisoners of conscience” group made individual contributions to Heo and the three women, and gave them to Jang–the Minbyun lawyer–who bundled the contributions and transferred them to Heo and the three women. But given the close collaborative relationship between Minbyun, Jang, and the other “civic group” representatives that paid Heo, the denial is absurd.

Minbyun now attacks Heo’s credibility for being at the center of the “abduction” of the Ningpo 12–the very same allegation Minbyun had used to publicize his claims. Minbyun now says Heo “deceived us and caused confusion,” and made “repeated irresponsible statements via media.” It implies that Heo is lying and, after having all the news coverage its own way for two years, wishes the press would stop telling only his side of the story and would report “objective, confirmed facts” instead. Don’t we all. But Minbyun admits that its lawyers were present for the meetings with Yoon Mee-hyang and Kim Sam-seok, facilitated the JCTB interview with Heo Gang-il, and arranged for like-minded “civic” groups to pay Heo and the three women–coincidentally, right about when Heo agreed to the interview. The reader need not infer much.

A Failure of Journalism & its Broader Context

Collectively, those new facts still don’t prove exactly what happened in Ningpo. Respect for the women’s confidentiality means that we may never know their side of it–and perhaps never should. But Heo’s corroborated claims do discredit the reporting of JTBC, CNN, and The New York Times. If the Times is the paragon of journalistic standards it represents itself to be, Heo’s word by itself was never credible enough to form the basis of four New York Times stories. Of course, the reporting of shady affairs sometimes rests on the words of shady people. When a witness isn’t credible, a good journalist investigates and corroborates. The Chosun Ilbo did that; the Times did not. A good journalist scrutinizes sources for bias and motives to fabricate. Here again, the New York Times’s Seoul Bureau Chief and others also failed. The result was a series of dubious stories, based primarily on one source with an implausible story and low credibility, who has being paid by the people who arranged media access to him, and whose new-found beneficiaries had both direct and past clandestine links to the government of North Korea, whose motive to fabricate was the greatest of all–survival.

The story thus revealed is of journalists who did not lie willfully, but who told the lies of others. Their dubious reports crossed the world, not only jeopardizing the lives of the 12 young women and their families, but also of other North Koreans who were deterred from defecting by Minbyun’s suit, and by the reporting of it. For now, the Ningpo 12 are safe. Some of them may have fled South Korea, as Heo Gang-il has done. But that does not mean that Minbyun’s behavior failed to achieve its intended effect, if one views it as part of Pyongyang’s broader strategy.

Like all human beings, North Koreans are individuals with their own strengths and weakness of character. Heo’s weaknesses must have been obvious enough to put a target on his back, but most of the Ningpo 12 were stronger. On the left, one often sees sweeping bigotry and categorical marginalization directed toward “defectors” that would attract universal and well-justified outrage if directed against African-Americans, Jews, or gay people. But if I’m right that Pyongyang is advancing a coherent, well-thought-out, and plausible plan to control South Korea through a compliant government in Seoul, without war or occupation, the silencing of North Korean ĂŠmigrĂŠs is an essential prerequisite to that strategy. Theirs are thoughts that must be controlled. They are, after all, the most knowledgeable witnesses to the character of the regime in Pyongyang, who might cause South Koreans to hesitate to trust that regime’s intentions. Minbyun’s lawfare, and its subsequent actions to groom Heo Gang-il and the Ningpo 12, were consistent with a strategy to silence all ĂŠmigrĂŠs by sending the thinly veiled message that none of them is beyond Pyongyang’s reach.

One can see other elements of Pyongyang’s emerging strategy in the online bullying of the most prominent ĂŠmigrĂŠs, former diplomat Thae Yong-ho, into apologizing for stating, even with appropriate caveats, that Kim Jong-un may have had health problems recently–a claim that still finds more support in the limited evidence available than official South Korean government position that Kim was perfectly healthy all along. A set of Orwellian media “guidelines,” now being circulated to reporters by the South Korean government, on how to avoid reporting “fake news” about North Korea, is also consistent with that strategy.

Here, too, Pyongyang’s writ increasingly controls what news South Koreans read. The North has demanded that South Korea ban the publication of news it deems to be “fake,” and the Moon administration is proceeding with plans to make the publication of “fake news” and “distorted” historical argument punishable by lengthy prison terms.

The case of the Ningpo 12 was only one of the lower moments in the recent history of journalism in Korea. Its failure to inform the world about the Moon administration’s election fraud, obstruction of justice, and assault on the rule of law was a particularly grievous lapse that should follow every correspondent and bureau chief in Korea today for the remainder of his or her career. But no error they have committed in recent years may be greater than the fact that they continue to describe the architects of this encroaching air of nacht und nebel as “liberal.” For today, something deeply illiberal is quietly asphyxiating the freedom of “free” Korea.

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1. The HRC did find, however, that the government had violated the privacy rights of the Ningpo 12 by publicizing their defections. This is a fault for which the South Korean government and the Park administration deserve to be criticized. They should have known that the publicity would result in unwanted attention on the women. The same criticism should also apply to Minbyun for its legally frivolous and abusive petition, and for its subsequent actions to breach the confidentiality of the 12. 

2. The Chosun Ilbo also alleges that Kim Sam-seok’s brother-in-law, with the surname Choi, was also somehow involved in and “punished” for the Ilshimhoe spy scandal in 2006. It doesn’t specify further, but the elephantine OFK archives reveal that one of the five men convicted in that case was one Choi Gi-yeong, then 40, a former Vice Secretary-General of the since-dissolved Democratic Labor Party.

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