THE REBEL AND THE KINGDOM

A fast-paced, true-life thriller pitting a merciless North Korean state against a band of high-tech, courageous activists.

The events of 9/11 affected different people in different ways. In the case of Adrian Hong Chang, then a student at Yale, the terrorist attacks focused his attention on a terrorist state: North Korea. Hope, the author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil, writes that Chang’s “growing obsession…would lead to hundreds of rescues of international refugees and a confrontation with one of the most brutal regimes on earth on its own soil.” The author opens with a thrilling exploit in which Chang and a band of associates invaded the North Korean Embassy in Madrid after receiving word that the ambassador wanted to defect. Things didn’t quite work out; one embassy insider escaped and told the Spanish police, “Some people have entered the embassy and are killing and eating people.” In this thoroughly engaging narrative, Hope writes that in the end some of the self-taught secret agents with Chang’s organization, Cheollima Civil Defense, wound up in jail, while Chang himself has gone underground. The reason: They trusted the Trump-era FBI when the administration was determined to sideline them so that Trump, believing that “his unparalleled business negotiating experience would finally hit home with ‘rocket man,’ ” could take credit for wrestling Kim Jong-un to accommodation. The administration failed, while Chang and company infiltrated North Korea many times to smuggle defectors out. More than that, Cheollima revealed much about the nefarious, shadowy North Korean state, whose ambassadors abroad have to fund themselves, essentially, through often illegal activities such as drug smuggling and arms sales. By eroding the North Korean ideology that its leaders are “godlike and undefeatable,” Hope amply shows, Cheollima’s people deserve medals instead of being prosecuted.

A page-turner of a spy-vs.-spy tale that, one hopes, will eventually see the good guys carry the day.