Passcode to the third floor; an insider’s account of life among North Korea’s political elite

Ford, G. (2024) ‘Passcode to the third floor; an insider’s account of life among North Korea’s political elite’, Asian Affairs, pp. 1–3. doi:10.1080/03068374.2024.2410614.

Thae Yong-ho claims to have been the Deputy Ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to London, although that is not a post that formally exists in the organigram of Pyongyang’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Nevertheless, he was the Embassy’s number two and ranks as the North’s second-most significant political defector to date. He is only outshone by the star defection of Hwang Jang Yop in 1997. Jang had spent eleven years as Chair of the Supreme Peoples’ Assembly and had helped shape and mould Kim Il Sung’s heterodox revision of Marxist-Leninism with Korean characteristics – Juche. I had the opportunity to spend some hours in discussion with Hwang in Seoul after his defection. My summary at the time was that he was still a Catholic, they’d just chosen the wrong Pope. Thae echoes Hwang here. For him, there was a ‘golden age’ of socialism in the North in the sixties and seventies, but it was undermined and destroyed with the coming to power of Kim Jong Il. Kim’s evangelicalism resulted in him imposing an obscene and extreme cult of personality on the country. Thae shares Hwang’s characterisation of the system as socialist feudalism. Thae was a member of the National Assembly in the South until this year’s elections and was subsequently appointed Secretary-General of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council in July 2024. He must know that he is in for a long-haul.

What does Passcode to the Third Floor tell us that we didn’t know? There is a myriad of helpful details filling out, at least for a non-South Korean audience, the institutional architecture within which foreign policy is made in the North, and the tensions between the MFA and the International Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). Here, to no surprise, Thae comes down in favour of the former, a judgement in contrast to the consensus of the ‘Kremlinologists’ of communism. He takes us through Pyongyang’s pantheon of the good, the bad and the purged. Ri Su Yong, Party Vice-Chairman and International Secretary of the WPK until the failed summit with President Donald Trump in Hanoi in 2019, was a powerful advocate for economic reform and political engagement. He was compulsorily retired. His predecessor, Kang Sok Ju, died in time. Ri Yong Ho, the Foreign Minister alongside Ri Su Yong, was less fortunate and ended up ‘revolutionised’ with his family in camp or field. Kim’s infamous uncle, Jang Song Thaek, executed in 2013 on Kim’s orders for colluding with China, and Kim’s assassinated half-brother Kim Jong Nam, took down a claimed 10,000 with them.

The book also reveals that the British government’s engagement with the North went back well before diplomatic relations were formally established in 2001 by Robin Cook and Tony Blair – after goading by the then South Korean President, Kim Dae-jung. The first contact was made as early as January 1995, under Prime Minister John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. These secret meetings continued around the globe over the next six years. Thae’s view is that Whitehall was acting as Washington’s handmaiden, a surrogate partner to police Pyongyang’s commitment to the 1994 ‘Agreed Framework’ that ended the first nuclear crisis on the Peninsula and provided the pause that the US needed to await the North’s anticipated collapse. Kim Jong Il followed where London led, seeing the EU as a potential check on US military adventurism. We also learn of the North’s attempt to extract a price of $1 billion from Israel in exchange for Pyongyang not selling its missiles and technology to states in the Middle East, the opening and rapid closing of the door to a Human Rights Dialogue between the EU and DPRK, the ‘pitiful’ figures making up the ranks of Britain’s Juche warriors, and the pleasures of taking Kim Jong Un’s elder brother to two Eric Clapton concerts in London.

Passcode to the Third Floor, which tells much, leaves two blanks. First, the choreography of the defection of Thae and his family, with only a hint of collusion with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. Second, any explanation of the charmed life he led. In a repressive, marshalled regime of rigid rules and deep suspicions, Thae was a serial ‘first achiever’ boldly going where no man had gone before. He seems to have been accompanied by a guardian angel that excused serial indiscretions that would have consigned – on the basis of his own writing – almost anyone else to be ‘revolutionised’ or worse. The reality is that Thae was a member of the court’s magic circle with a wife who was a close relative of O Paek Ryong, one of Kim Il Sung’s comrades in arms from the Korean War. First class defections are for the few, not the many.