Thread by @gatamchun

An actual North Korean spy story that gets deserved to be made into a TV show/movie: the story of Muhammad Kansu, AKA Jeong Soo-il

Jeong (affectionately called Prof. Kansu) was an ethnic Korean-Chinese man who was born to ethnic Korean parents in Manchuria and later attained North Korean citizenship in ‘63. He was trained as a spy in the late 1970s.

He first went to Beirut, Lebanon, to launder his identity and attain Lebanese citizenship, and after much travelling (Tunisia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea) he managed to create an identity as a half Lebanese, half Filipino researcher who could safely enter South Korea.

He first started by learning Korean (which he obvi did not need) at the Yonsei Korean Academy as part of his academic research on Korea’s role in the Silk Road, and to this day he remains the foremost Korean scholar on Silk Road studies.

He was named professor of Dankook University in ‘94 and became a much beloved teacher to his students, who thought of him as a kindly foreign professor who spoke shockingly good Korean.

He was caught faxing 🤦🏻‍♀️ information from a hotel in Seoul to the NK embassy in Beijing in ‘96, which was when he was revealed as a spy working for NK. Amusingly, the info he sent to NK for over a decade was almost useless, harmless material from major newspapers.

He was initially sentenced to death. However, his South Korean wife persuaded him to submit a conversion statement (switching fealty from NK to SK), his “espionage” was judged to be toothless, and his research was recognized as impeccable and valuable. He was pardoned in 2000.

Someone said “if this was a drama about a PhD student desperately trying to hold on to their academic career and get their degree after finding out his “Tunisian” adviser was actually a NK spy, twitter would have responded very differently”

https://twitter.com/frombc7197/status/1476356609937125382

Imagine speaking 12 languages but you have to pretend you only speak like, 7 because 5 of those languages were from the Communist bloc lmao

Also imagine being so valuable to ACADEMIA that you literally get pardoned from treason 😭