High-profile North Korean defects – and ex-CIA analyst faces charges of spying for the South

Back in November, a senior North Korean diplomat based in Cuba defected to South Korea — but we didn’t learn about it until this week. On Tuesday, South Korea’s spy agency confirmed a Chosun Ilbo newspaper report that diplomat Ri Il Kyu defected with his wife and children last fall. “Disillusionment with the North Korean regime and a bleak future led me to consider defection,” Ri told the paper.

This marks the most high-profile defection of a North Korean diplomat since 2016.

“This defection is related to the surprise announcement in February 2024 that South Korea was establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba [a longtime ally of North Korea]. Ri appeared to be involved in the effort to thwart that campaign,” says Jeremy Chan, a Korea expert at Eurasia Group, adding that Ri also seemingly defected over personal grievances, such as a poor performance review.

The defection is also linked to a broader trend of North Korea shuttering embassies around the globe, says Chan, which has been a cost-saving maneuver that’s also opened the door for Pyongyang to “redirect more diplomatic resources to Russia, with which North Korea is rapidly developing closer ties.”

As a result of Ri defecting, Chan says that Pyongyang is likely to place its diplomats under greater scrutiny, and “this trend of closing embassies to save funds will likely continue.” With an elite background, Ri is likely to provide intelligence that could be useful for South Korea and its allies like the US, says Chan. While such information is unlikely to ever go public, Ri has already alleged that two North Korean officials assigned to negotiate with the Trump administration have been punished — claiming one was sent to a penal colony and the other was executed.

Washington saw its own K-drama on Tuesday as well, when news broke that former CIA and NSC official Sue Mi Terry had been indicted for allegedly acting as an unregistered agent for Seoul. The government says she accepted luxury gifts in exchange for promoting South Korean policy positions in US media and policy circles from 2013 to 2023.

Terry’s lawyers denied the charges and said they would prove in court that the US government had made a mistake. Nonetheless, Terry admitted in a 2023 interview with the FBI that she had resigned from the CIA in 2008 because she was facing dismissal over the agency’s concerns about her contacts with South Korean intelligence.