CIA/MEDIA/NORTH KOREA/SOUTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Kim Dong-chul, an American businessman in Rason, a North Korean special economic zone near the border with Russia, was leaving a local government office on Oct. 2, 2015, when he was stopped by a 34-year-old army veteran he had hired as a secret informant…Mr. Kim knew he had just been set up, but it was too late. It was the beginning of a 31-month incarceration in North Korea that included torture, a conviction on espionage charges and forced labor in a prison camp. Mr. Kim was the longest-held American in North Korea when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew there in May last year. Mr. Pompeo returned home with Mr. Kim and two other American hostages, a triumphant moment for President Trump. Now, in a memoir entitled ‘Border Rider,’ published in South Korea in June, Mr. Kim, 65, recounts how he became a decorated foreign investor in North Korea, then spied for the Central Intelligence Agency and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, and ended up as Prisoner No. 429.”
–Choe Sang-Hun, “Missionary, Businessman, Prisoner, Spy: An American’s Odyssey in North Korea,” The New York Times online, August 9, 2019