Did this US activist mastermind raid on North Korean embassy?

The man Spanish authorities accuse of orchestrating a daring raid on North Korea’s embassy in Madrid is a US-based human rights activist who was once detained in China while helping a group of North Korean defectors seek asylum.

Adrian Hong, a founder of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a non-profit organisation that helps North Koreans escape their homeland, was detained in 2006 along with six defectors who had sought asylum at the US consulate in Shenyang.

Chinese authorities deported Hong and two colleagues to the United States after several days, but detained the North Koreans in Shenyang for months before allowing them to resettle in South Korea.

Hong, who serves as managing director of advisory firm Pegasus Strategies, had not been involved in LiNK for more than a decade, the NGO said.

“We have no knowledge of his recent activities, and we have no information on the Madrid embassy incident other than what has been published by the media,” said LiNK CEO Hannah Song.

Spain’s High Court on Tuesday said “Adrian Hong Chang”, a US resident with Mexican citizenship, was the leader of a group of 10 people who stormed the embassy on February 22 and tied up staff before making off with computers and mobile phones. The court also named a South Korean citizen, Woo Ram Lee, and an American, Sam Ryu, as taking part in the raid.

The two Hongs are the same man, according to two sources who spoke to the South China Morning Post and a report on NK News, a specialist news site for North Korea.

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Cheollima Civil Defence, a shadowy organisation that claimed credit for extracting Kim Jong-un’s nephew from Macau after the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong-nam (Kim Jong-un’s elder paternal half-brother), on Wednesday claimed responsibility for the embassy invasion without mentioning Hong or any other individual by name.

In a statement on its website, Cheollima – which is also known as Free Joseon – denied using violence and accused US government sources of betraying its confidence by leaking information about the group to the media after it had shared sensitive material stolen during the raid with the FBI.

“We did not begin this work without full knowledge of the risks we bear,” the group said. “Freedom has already been paid with the blood of families and colleagues.”

Hong’s associates and public statements paint a picture of an activist fiercely committed to overthrowing the North’s ruling Kim dynasty, which is in its third generation since Kim Jong-un succeeded his father Kim Jong-il after his death in 2011.

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“Adrian has always struck me as a young man seeking to make the kind of transformational changes that he witnessed as a youngster in a missionary home in Central America, but doing so in a secular context,” said a Christian activist and associate on condition of anonymity. “If Adrian was involved in the Madrid operation, I would see it as a logical and more radical extension of his founding of the NGO, LiNK.”

A Washington-based activist who has met Hong several times since the mid-2000s described him as a “brash” figure who was “obviously very hard on Kim Jong-il and the human rights violations perpetrated by the regime”.

Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation, said he was shocked at the allegations that Hong was involved in the raid.

“From my interactions, he was a compassionate private citizen who wanted to help the North Korean people,” he said.

In a 2008 comment piece for The New York Times, Hong said he had been wrong in his previous hesitance to call for regime change in the totalitarian North.

“We must now rid ourselves of the delusion that we can bring about real change without real sacrifice,” he said.

In a piece for Foreign Policy in 2011, Hong advocated sanctions, diplomatic isolation and funding for radio broadcasts and other communications in the country to push the regime towards collapse.

“The very progress of our global civilisation is for naught if we continue to let the very idea of North Korea exist,” he said.

In 2015, Hong founded the Joseon Institute, which lists Mustafa A.G. Abushagur, a former Libyan deputy prime minister; Mongolian democracy activist and former prime minister Rinchinnyamyn Amarjargal and British Conservative MP Fiona Bruce on its board of advisers. On its website, the organisation describes its mission to “manage a transition and prepare for a brighter future in a new North Korea”.

In testimony before the Canadian Senate the following year, Hong criticised governments and activists who believed dialogue and engagement could improve human rights conditions in the North, arguing that everyone had a responsibility to “fix this problem before it becomes our children’s bigger problem”.

Spanish authorities have issued two international arrest warrants, one of them for Hong, over the raid.

According to a document released by Spain’s High Court, the group have been accused of burglary, false imprisonment, assault, document forgery, threats and robbery.

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Judge José de la Mata, who unsealed information in the case on Tuesday, said Hong had been in touch with someone in the embassy who had been deemed “susceptible to defect” before the raid.

The court said that Hong visited North Korea’s business envoy So Yun-sok a couple of weeks before the raid under the pretence that he was a businessman with offices in the United Arab Emirates and Canada, who wanted to invest in North Korea.

The judge also said that the North Korean business envoy, the only accredited diplomat of the embassy in Spain, was pressured during the attack to defect, but he refused. In the days leading up to the raid, the group allegedly bought ammunition, four combat knives, six mock handguns, one shoulder holster, four pairs of shooting glasses, five flashlights, five ski masks and shackles.

The intruders seized a couple of pen drives, two computers, two hard drives – one of them containing CCTV images – and a mobile phone, according to the court.

Two of the group escaped using the Uber ride-hailing app with an account under the name Oswaldo Trump. Soon after the break-in, Hong called the hotel where he was staying in Madrid, claiming he had an urgent trip to Paris, the court document said, but the group in fact flew to Lisbon and then New York after splitting into four smaller groups.

Four days later, on February 27, Hong got in touch with the FBI and shared information about the raid, according to the court. The US government has denied any involvement.

Hong, whose Twitter account features a quote from Voltaire, “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do”, faces up to 28 years in prison if extradited and convicted.