North Korean Diplomat Defects to the South, Talks of Execution
Two senior North Korean diplomats who negotiated with the United States when the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, exchanged threats of war and later held summit talks with President Donald J. Trump were purged a few years ago — one executed and the other sentenced to a penal colony, a North Korean defector said this week.
There was no independent confirmation of the allegations nor was it clear whether the punitive actions stemmed from the failure of the diplomatic efforts. But the breakdown of the talks was widely seen as a major embarrassment for Mr. Kim.
The defector, Ri Il-kyu, 52, made the comments in an interview with a newspaper in Seoul, which was also the first time his defection became public. Mr. Ri was a political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba when he fled to South Korea last November. He is the most senior North Korean official known to defect to the South in nearly a decade.
In the interview, conducted by the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo on Sunday and published on Tuesday, Mr. Ri spoke about the fates of Ri Yong-ho and Han Song-ryol, the former a foreign minister and the latter a deputy. They were among the best-known North Korean diplomats dealing with Washington. But they soon disappeared from North Korean state media.
Mr. Ri, the former foreign minister, accompanied Mr. Kim to his two summit meetings with Mr. Trump. He was sent to a prison camp in December 2019 on charges of collecting bribes from a North Korean diplomat in Beijing, the defector said. Mr. Ri, the foreign minister, was the most senior North Korean official to have been reported as “purged” in the wake of the breakdown of Mr. Kim’s talks with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Han was executed in February 2019 on charges of spying for Washington, Mr. Ri told the Chosun Ilbo. Senior officials of the North Korean Foreign Ministry had gathered to witness his execution by firing squad at a military academy in a suburb of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, he said.
“For days, those who watched it could hardly eat anything,” Mr. Ri said, adding that he did not attend the execution because he was preparing to travel to the North Korean Embassy in Cuba at the time.
The South Korean spy agency on Tuesday declined to comment on the allegations.
Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump held the first summit meeting between their two countries in Singapore in June 2018. But their diplomacy collapsed when their second meeting, held in Hanoi in February 2019, ended without an agreement on how to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or when to ease United Nations sanctions imposed on the North.
Mr. Han, who had long worked at the North Korean mission at the United Nations, was best known as Pyongyang’s point man in the so-called New York channel, a rare diplomatic conduit between Pyongyang and Washington. He returned home in 2013 to become vice foreign minister in charge of U.S. relations.
But Mr. Han was sidelined a few months before the Singapore meeting and, according to Mr. Ri, the defector, executed a couple weeks before Mr. Kim’s second summit with Mr. Trump.
North Korean defectors living in South Korea have alleged in recent years that Mr. Han was charged with spying for Washington after he was discovered to possess a large sum of American dollars following his stint at the U.N.
Since taking power in 2011, Mr. Kim has engineered a series of bloody political purges to remove or execute many senior officials seen as obstacles to his power or blamed for policy failures. Jang Song-thaek, Mr. Kim’s uncle, was executed in 2013 on charges of corruption and plotting a military coup against Mr. Kim. The leader’s half brother, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated by North Korean agents in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017.
Mr. Ri told the Chosun Ilbo that he decided to defect to South Korea after his bosses at the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang demanded bribes and the ministry rejected his request to travel to Mexico for treatment for back pain. He was the most senior North Korean diplomat to defect to Seoul since Thae Yong-ho, a minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, fled to South Korea in 2016.
Mr. Ri said he once shared tea with Mr. Kim.
“When you see him in person, the first thing that comes to your mind is: ‘He must have a very high blood pressure,’” he said, echoing widespread speculation on Mr. Kim’s health. “His face is red as if he is always drunk. It is redder than you see it on TV.”
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