To say that Song Chun Son's life in North Korea wasn't great wouldn't be much of a stretch. She was thrown into a labor camp from 2007 to 2009 after illegally traveling to China in search of food during a famine. She later did illegal work as a broker, helping North Korean defectors living in the South send money home—until the Ministry of State Security found out in 2016. It gave her a choice: prison camp or work with the ministry to lure defectors back home. She chose the latter, and was handed the code name Chrysanthemum. She worked with a secret police agent who had her use her connections with defectors to track down a handful of them and pressure them to come home by putting their own relatives on the phone with them. Then, in 2018, she fled.
As Choe Sang-Hun writes for the New York Times, if Song thought she would find a respite in South Korea, she was wrong: She had "unwittingly stepped into the fierce spy war over North Korean defectors." When she arrived in the country she explained what she had done for the ministry, and expected to be cleared and begin afresh. Instead, South Korean officials arrested the 44-year-old in May on charges of helping the ministry as part of their own counterespionage work to break up the North's effort to lure defectors home. On Tuesday she was sentenced to three years. "I was coerced to do what I did," Song wrote to her sister, who also defected to South Korea, "but they say that doesn’t erase the crime." (Read the full piece.)
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