Mick Hartley

No sighting yet of the former North Korean Ambassador to Italy Jo Song-gil, who disappeared with his family last November. According to the Corriere della Sera they escaped to a third country but were discovered by Italian intelligence officials and taken back to Italy to be placed in protective custody.

The Italian newspaper said Jo was ordered to return to Pyongyang in September last year but disappeared as he was handing over his duties to his successor.

The Italian government is not giving out any details on Jo's whereabouts. Some media reported that North Korea dispatched secret agents to Rome to find him but failed. The U.S. government declined to comment on Italian media reports saying that Jo had escaped there. One source said, "It's not true that Jo had already fled to the U.S. He is still believed to be in Italy."

Former U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill said in an interview with Radio Free Asia that the U.S. government "would not reject" a request for asylum by Jo, since it is a "humanitarian issue." But Hill added that Jo would have to undergo thorough vetting to determine the motive of his defection because of his status as a North Korean government official with close ties to the leader. Hill speculated that it could take "months" just to complete the debriefing.

Meanwhile Thae Yong Ho, the deputy ambassador to the UK who defected in 2016 and is now living in Seoul, has written an open letter to Jo, urging him to move to South Korea:

"Song Gil, I have no way to contact you directly, so I am posting a long letter to you on my blog that you used to often read," wrote Thae Yong Ho, Pyongyang's former deputy envoy to the United Kingdom.

"From the day reports that your family disappeared in Italy came out, when my family wakes up in the morning, we go to the internet and look for news of your family."

A prominent South Korean newspaper reported Thursday that Jo was seeking asylum in the West, citing anonymous South Korean government sources. South Korea's National Intelligence Service did not confirm if he defected.

In the blog post, Thae addresses the rumors, saying the unification of the Korean Peninsula is dependent on more North Korean officials like Jo making the decision to defect.

"For you and me who are members of the people and North Korean diplomats, coming to South Korea is not a choice but an obligation," Thae wrote. "If you come to Seoul, more of our colleagues will follow after us and come to Seoul, and then the unification will happen on its own."

Thae also goes into several details about his life in Seoul as a North Korean defector.

"When you come to South Korea, you do not have to worry about personal safety. To protect me, several security guards stick closely and guard me every day," Thae wrote. "The country also provides rental housing and resettlement funds until you safely settle down."

A spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in said his office had no information about the case.

It's not all been straightforward for Thae, of course. There was, for instance, the case of the Paektu Protection Squad – a bunch of South Korean leftists who objected to the publication of his columns in the Daily NK as an insult to the sacred Paektu bloodline of North Korea's Kim dynasty.

Perhaps, though, Jo Song-gil is not looking for the life of an activist, like Thae, but would prefer a quiet life. That seems the most likely scenario according to Andrei Lankov in NK News, who's been looking at the history of defectors:

Precedent suggests, then, that Jo Song Gil’s defection is not necessarily going to have much impact on the current situation. Judging by what is known now, at the time of writing, it seems that Ambassador Jo is going to settle down in the U.S.

If this is indeed the case, there is a high-probability that he is going to choose the security, comfort and anonymity provided by the “American option.”

As we have seen, this has been a surprisingly common choice for elite defectors, who it seems have little belief in South Korea’s ability to protect them against assassins, and less of a desire to change the world and their country.  

From this author’s point of view, the choice of the United States makes even more sense in the current climate. The people in charge of South Korea are deeply suspicious of defectors and likely see them as an obstacle to their current policy, whose major aim now is to repair relations with the North.