Tag: Jayu Joseon

I am sympathetic to the Jayu Joseon group’s goal of removing the Kim regime, but it is a slippery slope to support raiding foreign embassies:

Spain has issued two international arrest warrants in the case, one for a Mexican national residing in the U.S., Adrian Hong Chang, and the other for an American citizen. After lifting a secrecy order in the case, a Spanish investigating judge revealed the identities of seven of the alleged 10 intruders in a court document on Tuesday.
It remained unclear if the Spanish government identified the suspects in the raid through their own investigation or whether U.S. authorities had passed on the names of the alleged intruders.

The group has alleged the U.S. betrayed its trust after members approached the FBI.

“The organization shared certain information of enormous potential value with the FBI in the United States, under mutually agreed terms of confidentiality,” the group said on its website. “This information was shared voluntarily and on their request, not our own. Those terms appear to have been broken.”
Lee Wolosky, an attorney for Free Joseon and a former U.S. envoy for Guantanamo, told NBC News that “when all the facts come out regarding Madrid, it will be clear that the Spanish judge reached a number of inaccurate conclusions.”

“Certainly the decision of the Spanish judge to publicly disclose the names of those working in opposition to the Kim regime — which routinely assassinates its adversaries — was irresponsible and put these individuals in unnecessary jeopardy.”

NBC News

You can read more at the link, but if the Jayu Joseon group was not on North Korea’s hit list already, this raid has definitely made them a target for some Kim Jong-nam style retaliation.

If I was this group I would keep a very low profile because I would not be surprised if the Kim regime is plotting to give their leadership the Kim Jong-nam treatment:

A political group that claimed responsibility for a raid on the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month announced on Thursday it will temporarily cease all activities, but said it will eventually shake the North’s Kim Jong-un regime “to its roots.”

Free Joseon, also known as Cheollima Civil Defense, defined itself in a statement released on its website as an international group composed of North Korean refugees around the world mobilized under the “conviction to break [North Korea’s] dynastic succession under the Kim family.” 

Adding that it had no links to North Korean defectors residing in the South, whose activities are monitored by Seoul, the group also asked international media to stop paying attention to its structure and members for security reasons, since “greater acts lie in store.”

A Spanish High Court investigation report released on Wednesday said 10 assailants from Free Joseon stormed the North’s embassy in Madrid on Feb. 22. Armed with knives and fake guns, the group allegedly stole computers and pen drives reportedly containing sensitive information before successfully escaping to the United States.

Court papers named the mastermind behind the attack as Mexican citizen Adrian Hong Chang, a longtime figure in North Korea-related activist circles in the United States. Upon returning to the United States after the successful raid, Hong apparently tried to offer the information he obtained to FBI officials. It remains unclear whether the FBI accepted the offer, but the State Department denied the U.S. government had any ties to the group on Wednesday. According to Reuters on Thursday, an FBI investigation into the raid is currently in the works.

Hong is said to be one of the co-founders of the North Korea refugee support group LiNK, or Liberty in North Korea, and the head of a strategic consulting firm called Pegasus Strategies LLC, which he described in a published article as a company that uses modern technology to “penetrate closed societies and empower people in those nations.”

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest article on the North Korean embassy heist in Spain:

The 10 men in dark suits who raided the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month had one goal in mind, it would seem: to overthrow the regime of Kim Jong Un.
Although the scene of the Feb. 22 crime in Spain was many thousands of miles from the DMZ, analysts view the 10 involved as the cutting edge of a North Korean dissident group that’s now named Jayu Joseon, “Free [North] Korea.” It allegedly has the backing of some wealthy Koreans and foreigners as well as ties inside the North—apparently the first organization to have set up an operational challenge to the leadership in Pyongyang.

The immediate purpose of the break-in was to seize computers and cellphones on which intelligence analysts could find top-secret message traffic to the former North Korean ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok Chol. 
He was expelled by Madrid in September 2017 after the United Nations imposed new sanctions on the North for its nuclear and missile tests. But at the time of the raid last month he had a much more sensitive position: Pyongyang’s envoy to the nuclear talks with Washington and Seoul. (……)

The Madrid 10 are assumed to have transferred the computers and mobile phones to a foreign intelligence agency. An auction to the highest bidder would not be unprecedented in such matters, but most of the suspicion is focused on the CIA, which, if it could access the encrypted material in time, could have found information potentially useful for the Hanoi summit and afterward.

“We can be 99.9 percent sure that Cheollima [Jayu Joseon] carried out the raid,” says Lee Sung-yoon, professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “They had all the incentive.”
As noted, Ambassador Kim Hyok Chol, after his expulsion, emerged as the North’s chief negotiator in the very difficult pre-summit dialogue with the U.S. envoy on North Korea, Stephen Biegun, and some of the message traffic since his departure from Spain was presumed to concern those talks. The messages may have kept on coming for some time through the embassy in Spain even though he would see them elsewhere. Or at least that may have been the assumption of the Madrid 10.

The Daily Beast

You can read much more at the link.