The Passcode to the Third Flooring: An Insider’s Account of Life Amongst North Korea’s Political EliteThae Yong-ho, Translated by Robert LaulerColumbia College Press: 2024.Here’s Thae Yong-ho’s story: a boy with a aptitude for languages research on the Nanpo Revolutionary Institute and the Pyongyang Overseas Languages Institute earlier than visiting Beijing and Moscow. He enters the Democratic Folks’s Republic of Korea’s (DRPK) overseas ministry and is assigned to the European Division. He marries into an elite household however his father-in-law, an outdated comrade of the North’s founder Kim Il Sung, will get purged. This briefly derails Thae’s profession however doesn’t kill it fully. He’s later posted to Scandinavia, then to his nation’s embassy within the nondescript suburb of Ealing, London. He manages to bypass the principles and convey his spouse and two kids with him.
The Thae household get pleasure from their life within the UK—tennis, golf, a son at Imperial Faculty, one other at an area faculty. This consolation is threatened by one other spherical of purges again residence, throughout which Thae is recalled to Pyongyang. He decides to defect. Smuggled out of Britain to Seoul in 2016, he’s now one in all North Korea’s most high-level defectors. He made historical past once more in 2020 by changing into the primary defector elected to South Korea’s nationwide meeting, the place he served as a consultant for the Seoul district of Gangnam till Could 2024.
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