SEOUL – When Ri Il Gyu, North Korea’s No. 2 diplomat in Cuba, finally decided to flee to South Korea in frustration over his highly repressive, corrupt homeland in November, he finished all necessary prep work alone. About a week later, he told his family to be ready to leave Cuba together in less than eight hours.
“My wife first told me not to make such a dreadful joke. So I showed her our plane tickets, and she was speechless,” Ri said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. “I told my kid that there is no future or hope for North Korea.”
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His family followed him to a Havana airport at dawn the next day, taking a flight to a third country and then South Korea in one of the most high-profile and dramatic defections by North Koreans in recent years.
The defection by Ri — a former political counselor at the North's Embassy in Cuba — was only made public in July. It likely has angered North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, because it could prompt his other diplomats to follow suit in a blow to his grip on the country’s elites, observers say. Ri said the North Korean Embassy in Cuba has about 20 diplomats, making it the North’s third-biggest mission abroad after China and Russia.
Ri, 52, is the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea since Tae Yongho, a former minister of the North Korean Embassy in London, arrived in South Korea in 2016.
The news of Ri’s defection came as animosity between the rival Koreas soared to one of the highest points in years, with North Korea flying trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea and continuing its provocative weapons tests. South Korea responded by restarting front-line loudspeaker broadcasts of anti-Pyongyang messages and K-pop songs, a challenge to Kim’s efforts to limit access to foreign news for his 26 million people.
“The Kim Jong Un regime will likely be in a very bad mood if they see me speaking publicly in media interviews like this,” Ri said. “They might think it's in their interest to eliminate a person like me. But I'm not going to worry about that so much, because the South Korean government has made a priority of keeping me safe."
About nine months after his arrival in South Korea, Ri is under a South Korean government protection program. North Korea allegedly has a long history of assassinating or making attempts to kill high-level defectors, the estranged relatives of the Kim family living abroad, and top South Korean officials.
Kim might personally remember Ri, because Ri said he briefly met Kim many times with other officials in 2018 over preparations to receive top Cuban officials on two occasions. Sometimes Kim asked him questions.
In each meeting, Ri recalled that Kim smoked continuously and was short of breath like “an asthmatic patient” so he could hear the rasp of Kim’s breathing. South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers Monday that North Korean officials are looking for new medicines abroad to treat Kim’s suspected obesity-related health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
“At the first meeting, I clearly shuddered though it wasn’t like I couldn’t answer. But during the second and third meetings, I didn’t shudder.”
Ri said he had long thought about fleeing North Korea, which he called “a world of darkness" and “a republic of corruption.” He said his monthly pay was about $500 so he smuggled Cuban cigars to China via diplomatic pouches to make a living. He said North Korean diplomats in other countries have been involved in the smuggling of ivories, rhino horns, whiskeys and automobiles.
But he said what decisively triggered his defection was the North Korean Foreign Ministry's rejection in early November of his hope to visit Mexico to treat a ruptured disc in his neck. Ri suspected his boss in Pyongyang was behind that decision because Ri earlier had refused his boss' request for bribe.
“That made me so mad,” Ri said. Without that incident, “I probably would have kept thinking about defecting, but without ever leaving."
Ri's defection came before Cuba established diplomatic ties with South Korea in February. As there was no South Korean Embassy in Cuba at that time, he said he couldn't get as much support from South Korean diplomats as other North Korean defectors managed to get elsewhere.
South Korean officials were eventually involved in Ri's defection. But the government in Seoul and Ri declined to provide details about that because that could cause potential diplomatic troubles for countries involved, and could help North Korea thwart future escape attempts by other North Koreans.
At the Havana airport, Ri said he and his family waited for the plane for an hour that felt "like hell.”
He fretted that fellow North Korean Embassy officials might find out he was leaving and chase him. He looked at his wristwatch about a hundred times before he and his family finally boarded the plane safely, he said.
If caught, Ri said he and his family would have faced a future worse than death in a prison camp where people have to eat insects to survive.
Ri is not sure yet what he will do in South Korea, but is encouraged by other North Koreans who have successfully resettled in the South. Tae, the former North Korean minister, was elected to the South Korean parliament before receiving a vice minister-level job in July. Ri said he's read Tae’s memoir about 10 times.
Some 34,000 North Koreans have resettled in South Korea since the late 1990s to escape poverty and political oppression at home — most of them women from the North's poorer northern provinces. In 2023, about 10 North Koreans considered to be elites arrived in South Korea, the highest such number in recent years, according to South Korea's government.
“I can't guarantee that my departure will lead to more defections by North Korean diplomats,” Ri said. “But I think my defection will surely give them some courage to do so."