On Feb. 22, 2019, a man calling himself Matthew Chao knocked on the door of the North Korean embassy in Madrid, with a gift for the embassy’s highest-ranking official. The North Korean worker who answered the door escorted the visitor inside and went to fetch his boss. At that moment, five intruders hiding outside, led by the visitor, slipped into the building, produced handcuffs and what looked like pistols—they were actually pellet guns—and forced everyone to the ground.
The North Korean captives probably thought the vigilantes were paramilitary operatives on a mission to kidnap or kill them. But “Matthew Chao” was an activist and human-rights campaigner, not an assassin. His real name was Adrian Hong Chang, and his plan was to fake a kidnapping of North Korean diplomat So Yun-suk, who had asked for his help defecting. Mr. Hong’s life and his campaign to end the rule of a brutal regime are the subjects of Bradley Hope’s suspenseful nonfiction political thriller, “The Rebel and the Kingdom.”
Mr. Hope, a journalist, sets out on a trail of global power and intrigue, revealing a world teeming with undercover activists, missionaries, operatives and their supporters in Washington, D.C. Many pursue a daunting but noble goal: saving the people of North Korea from their despotic leader, Kim Jong Un. Mr. Hope takes us on a page-turning journey to the “underground railroad,” describing the daring escapes of North Korean refugees through China and Southeast Asia, Libya and finally Spain, where Mr. Hong’s crew broke into the North Korean embassy.
“The Rebel and the Kingdom” is a worthy successor to Mr. Hope’s first two books. “Billion Dollar Whale,” written with Tom Wright, unearthed the story of Jho Low, the fugitive billionaire accused of masterminding a scheme to funnel $4.5 billion from Malaysia’s state investment fund into his personal accounts, inveigling Wall Street and Hollywood investors in the process. “Blood and Oil” covered the ruthless rise of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
In a welcome turn, Mr. Hope focuses here on the hardships of an idealist on a winding, sometimes unreliable path to heroism. Mr. Hong, a Mexican citizen of Korean descent who grew up in California, appears stronghearted but flawed—sometimes placing trust in the wrong people for the right reasons, sacrificing normal adulthood but frustrated with obstacles to saving North Korea from despotism.
The only child of Christian missionaries who lived in Tijuana until he was 7 and then in the San Diego area, Mr. Hong was instilled with a “sense of mission” from his parents, who ran martial-arts schools and reinvested their earnings in their charity for impoverished children. He studied at Yale but found it too sheltered. “For all the lofty talk, most of his fellow Ivy Leaguers were on a glide path to the traditional trappings of success,” Mr. Hope writes. Wanting something more, in 2004 Mr. Hong co-founded a group called Liberation in North Korea—LiNK, later renamed Liberty in North Korea.
“The Rebel and the Kingdom” shows Mr. Hong contending with maddening truths about the limitations of U.S. commitments to human rights. State Department officials, concerned with “geopolitics, the balance of power, and nuclear weapons,” dismiss his worries about North Koreans’ suffering. In 2006, six North Korean refugees, “believing the United States was true to its pledge to offer shelter to refugees from North Korea,” traveled under Mr. Hong’s protection to Shenyang, China, where other refugees had already found haven in the U.S. consulate. But embassy officials denied safe harbor to this group.
Exposed, Mr. Hong spent 10 days in a Chinese detention center before he was deported. China was prepared to send the refugees back to North Korea—a longstanding government policy—where a grim fate probably awaited them. But the U.S. government worked out a deal to allow them to go to South Korea instead.
Disappointed, Mr. Hong aged into a bold and radical operative. In 2012, he started the secret Cheollima Civil Defense, named for a winged horse so swift it travels hundreds of miles in a day. In February 2017, Cheollima ferried Kim Jong Un’s nephew, Kim Han-sol, to safety from Macau to Taipei, after his father—Kim Jong Nam, erstwhile rival to the throne—was assassinated with nerve gas in Malaysia. With an unexpected CIA assist, the activists got their charge on a flight to the Netherlands, but felt slighted when Kim Han-sol, well-positioned to lead a resistance movement against his uncle, then disappeared onto another flight out of Amsterdam. He was still in company with the CIA officer.
Two years later, the staged “kidnapping” would be Mr. Hong’s downfall. The North Korean diplomat, Mr. So, got cold feet and decided to stay. Meanwhile, an embassy worker had escaped out a window and alerted the police. Mr. Hong and his crew barely escaped in an Uber and embassy cars.
Mr. Hong and his accomplices have since been exploited and discarded. After they returned to the U.S. and handed over files and drives to FBI contacts, the FBI decided “these guys are on their own,” Mr. Hope writes. In April 2019, Mr. Hong’s longtime friend and accomplice, a Marine Corps veteran named Christopher Ahn, was arrested in Los Angeles; he now faces extradition to Spain. Mr. Hong is a fugitive and his whereabouts are unknown.
Mr. Hope unfolds the tragedy of this activist group—but also the larger tragedy of the North Korean people, whose suffering has continued for decades, and whose heroes rarely see recognition. Dozens of books have analyzed North Korea and its leaders from a distance. Few have obtained Mr. Hope’s deep access to his subjects. Though the author does not always clarify where he gets his information, skipping footnotes and citations, “The Rebel and the Kingdom” is a vividly reported and engaging story about a regime that seems never to change, despite all those trying to change it.
Mr. Cain, senior fellow at Lincoln Network, is author of “The Perfect Police State” and a former correspondent in South and North Korea.
By Geoffrey Cain
