The Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider’s Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite
Thae Yong-ho, Translated by Robert Lauler
Columbia University Press: 2024
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Here’s Thae Yong-ho’s story: a boy with a flair for languages studies at the Nanpo Revolutionary Institute and the Pyongyang Foreign Languages Institute before visiting Beijing and Moscow. He enters the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DRPK) foreign ministry and is assigned to the European Department. He marries into an elite family but his father-in-law, an old comrade of the North’s founder Kim Il Sung, gets purged. This briefly derails Thae’s career but doesn’t kill it completely. He’s later posted to Scandinavia, then to his country’s embassy in the nondescript suburb of Ealing, London. He manages to circumvent the rules and bring his wife and two children with him.

The Thae family enjoy their life in the UK—tennis, golf, a son at Imperial College, another at a local school. This comfort is threatened by another round of purges back home, during which Thae is recalled to Pyongyang. He decides to defect. Smuggled out of Britain to Seoul in 2016, he’s now one of North Korea’s most high-level defectors. He made history again in 2020 by becoming the first defector elected to South Korea’s national assembly, where he served as a representative for the Seoul district of Gangnam until May 2024.

• Tags: Issue 37, North Korea, Paul French, Robert Lauler, Thae Yong-ho