Around 3 p.m. on June 16, North Korea destroyed the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, which gave off a faint boom that was heard from across the border and a thick swell of gray smoke. 

The move was hardly a surprise. In the days leading up to the demolition, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, had condemned the South Korean government for failing to stop defector-activists from launching anti-regime leaflets across the border using helium balloons. 

In the typical North Korean vernacular, she referred to these defector-activists as “mongrel dogs” and “human scum.”

The South Korean government’s proceeding response drew criticism for playing into North Korea’s calculations and violating free speech: Officials swiftly filed a police complaint against the two defector-led groups in question and enacted administrative orders banning them from border regions, which they designated as “danger zones.” 

But this was not enough to save the liaison office, nor the once-promising renewal of inter-Korean engagement. Those dreams have now been scuttled — however improbably — by a few colorful pieces of paper sent by activists from the South.

AN ACTIVIST’S ROOTS

The man behind the leaflet launches — and the target of Kim Yo Jong’s verbal attack — was Park Sang-hak, the 52-year-old defector who leads Fighters for a Free North Korea. Park has been sending hydrogen-powered balloons carrying anti-North Korean fliers, USBs and dollar bills over the border for over a decade now. 

And with his launches having sparked some of the worst inter-Korean tensions in years, Park’s activism is increasingly under sharp scrutiny (Park declined to be interviewed for this story). 

Numerous accounts from fellow defector-activists interviewed for this story paint a picture of a provocateur whose sloganeering and brash methods have alienated even his partners. 

The interviews also offer a glimpse into a grassroots activism community mired by questionable incentives and misappropriation of finances – and a culture where winning foreign grants has become an end unto itself. 

And though Park has become the poster child of dissident activism against North Korea through awards ceremonies, high-profile international campaigns and many media appearances, he has long been much more controversial in his home country.

North Korea, unsurprisingly, reviles him. In 2011, Pyongyang tried to kill him using an ex-commando defector in South Korea, who unsuccessfully tried to lure him into a subway station. When intelligence officials arrived at the scene, they found poisoned-tipped needles in the assassin’s possession. 

But Park’s approach has also made him something of an enfant terrible in South Korea, even in the close-knit world of North Korea human rights activism.

At his launch sites in villages near the North Korean border, he has scuffled with local residents, who oppose his work for fear that the balloons put a target above their heads (in the past, North Korea has fired artillery rounds at balloons launched by similar activists). 

When faced with this sort of resistance, Park has been known to fly into a rage, accusing anyone who stands in his way of being a communist. Wherever he shows up with his balloons, a group of police officers is usually waiting. 

Park’s methods have also recently taken an even more reckless turn. Earlier this year, he began to experiment with drones instead of balloons, claiming to have sent one across the border on May 31. 

While Park said that the drone must have reached Pyongyang — hence North Korea’s ire — the South Korean military has stated that it never detected a flying object on its radars.  

In response to the government’s June crackdown on leaflet launches, Park vowed to use drones to “send even more leaflets into North Korea” in the future.

This even unnerved other balloon activists — one defector, Lee Min-bok, told NK News that it “would be an act of war.” 

Now, Park’s balloon-launching operation may be under threat, as the government places him under increasing examination. In mid-June, the South Korean government promised to revoke Park’s nonprofit license. The police are also investigating Park on a number of charges, including fraud, misappropriation of funds, and violation of the Inter-Korean Exchange and Cooperation Act.

In response to the joint liaison office’s demolition, the Gyeonggi Province government also banned leaflet activity within the designated “danger zones,” which Park responded to by conducting a secret balloon launch and announcing it the next day. 

So far, Park has claimed that his group sent more than $2,000 in single dollar bills using the balloons, along with at least 1,000 SD cards and 500,000 leaflets. Authorities found one balloon in Hongcheon, Gangwon Province the day after the launch, but no cash or SD cards were attached.

FROM NED TO DFF

The well-to-do son of relatively privileged parents in North Korea, Park studied electrical engineering at the Kim Chaek University of Technology and briefly worked as a propagandist in the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League before escaping from the DPRK with his father — who worked as a spy — sometime between 1997 and 1999 (Park named different dates across multiple media interviews).

His entrance into activism in the early 2000s coincided with a broader, expedient shift in North Korea policy in both the U.S. and South Korea. Following the devastating famine in North Korea in the late 1990s (known as the “Arduous March”), defections to South Korea spiked dramatically starting in the early 2000s, peaking in 2009. 

The sudden influx of North Korean refugees provided unprecedented firsthand accounts of shocking human rights abuses inside North Korea. 

“You began to hear more accounts of things like political prisons, torture, executions,” says Andrew Yeo, the director of Asian Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. 

In the United States, in the wake of George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, a more coercive and hardline North Korea policy emerged. A new wave of “naming-and-shaming” human rights activism stood in stark contrast to the previous aid-and-engagement approach. 

Many defectors entered activism after settling in South Korea, focusing primarily on refugee rescues, research into human rights violations, or, like Park Sang-hak, working to lift the information curtain. 

In addition to what Yeo calls a “marriage of convenience” between defector-activists and neoconservative hawks, researchers say the growth of defector-led activism in South Korea during this period was at least partly born out of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit, grant-making foundation that was founded in the 1980s with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad.

Though officially non-governmental, the NED is funded primarily by Congress, and its history of interfering in domestic politics abroad has spurred critics from both sides of the aisle to variously call it “a byword for American intrusiveness” or “the flagship for U.S. political meddling abroad.” 

Following the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004, the NED — which had been awarding North Korea-related grants to South Korea-based organizations since 1999 — began to fund many of the defector-run groups. The NED focused on funding research into human rights abuses, raising awareness about “the brutality of the North Korean system,” and sending information into North Korea.

Past grantees include the Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag (currently NK Watch), Free North Korea Radio, North Korea Strategy Center and the Daily NK. 

While supporters often credit the NED for empowering important research and activism on North Korean human rights, South Korean civic groups have long accused the NED of being a political lever to pressure North Korea under the guise of human rights advocacy.

The political impact of its grants is undeniable: Two defector activists — Ji Seong-ho of Now, Action and Unity for Human Rights (NAUH) and Thae Yong-ho of the Coalition for Change in North Korea — have recently gone on to win parliamentary seats. Both are NED grantees.

For some defectors in South Korea, the incentive to turn to activism is obvious. Defectors face steep social and economic hurdles, such as high unemployment rates, income disparities and discrimination.

“It’s not just the material interests North Korean defector-activists were after, but also political, ideological, and reputational incentives,” says Song Ji-young, a senior lecturer of Korean studies at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne who has researched and written about defector activism. 

“These multiple factors have driven many North Korean defectors into activism in the process of their survival and adaptation.”

And upon arriving in South Korea, defectors quickly become aware of the primarily right-wing interest groups invested in them, Hong Kang-cheol, a former North Korean border guard who defected in 2013, tells NK News.

“[Defectors realize] that there’s no money from the progressive side,” Hong said. “But if you engage in violent demonstrations and get arrested and things like that, you get the attention of conservatives, and then they give you a bunch of money.”

The deluge of NED money during this period gave rise to a marketplace for activism, in which grants from the U.S. were seen as a way to make a living rather than a means of realizing human rights projects, several former defector-activists say. 

“At the time, NED money was seen as the ideal — everyone doing human rights activism knew about it, but it was in effect a living allowance,” Kim Young-soon, a former detainee of North Korea’s Yodok Concentration Camp who later worked at the Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag, recalls.

“The spouses of [defector-activists] bought department store handbags and financed their households with NED money,” she continued. 

Kim Kwang-il, a defector who previously worked at the Committee for the Democratization of North Korea, said that factional infighting over financial matters was frequent. 

“It was like this [a decade ago] and it’s like this now: Those who say they are doing North Korean human rights activism are really just running a profit-making business under the guise of North Korean human rights,” he said.

NED grants also facilitated Park Sang-hak’s first forays into activism. In 2005, he was appointed co-president of the Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, which had begun receiving grants from the NED in 2004. 

“The grant was like a lifeline to us,” Park said in a 2007 interview. Although the NED funds were awarded on the condition that the group “publish a report on human rights and the North Korean gulag that included a directory of victims and missing persons,” Park occupied himself with balloon launches, which weren’t always successful. 

In March 2006, for example, a balloon launched by Park near the border fell into the Seoul’s Han River, about 50 kilometers in the opposite direction. The same happened again in September of that year, this time landing even farther off the mark, near the South Korean presidential Blue House. In general, it’s difficult to verify how many launches actually reached North Korea.

But Park’s colleagues grew unhappy with Park’s increasingly combative ways, along with his seeming diversion from the group’s original mission of illuminating the realities of North Korean life. 

On September 19, 2007, Park — along with several other right-wing civic group members— gatecrashed a meeting of the Korean Veterans Association in Seoul. The conservative Grand National Party (known today as the Liberty Korea Party) lawmaker Chung Hyung-keun was set to publicly outline a new, more conciliatory North Korea policy than typically espoused by the right. 

When Chung entered the building, however, he found himself baptized by a volley of eggs hurled by Park and his entourage. 

Meanwhile, others in the group said they felt that Park was too self-serving.

“Park Sang-hak wasn’t even a former gulag detainee, like the other members of the Democracy Network,” said Lee Min-bok, a balloon activist who has worked with Park. “But during U.S. visits, when he should have been helping his coworkers do interviews and introducing them to U.S. figures, he would do all of it himself.” 

By 2007, the NED cut off funding to the Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag due to “problems with the organization’s reporting on program activities and its failure to meet the obligations of the grant agreement,” NED president Carl Gershman told NK News.

That same year, Park was unanimously voted out of the group for “misappropriation of funds” and “focusing on self-promotional, violent demonstrations,” according to a Newstapa report.

In an email, Gershman said: “Our decision did not have anything to do with Mr. Park’s other activities, but was due rather to administrative issues within the organization and its loss of programmatic focus.” 

MONEY MATTERS

Ejected from the Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag in 2007, Park took his balloon project with him and founded his current organization, Fighters for a Free North Korea (FFNK). 

He had some help from an old friend. Sometime around 2004, Park had become acquainted with Suzanne Scholte, the president of a U.S.-based non-profit called the Defense Forum Foundation (DFF) and the renowned face of the neoconservative, evangelical human rights camp. 

Running on grants from well-known conservative institutions like the Carthage Foundation and its successor, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Scholte had begun financing some of Park’s balloon launches shortly after meeting him. Together, they shared a distaste for liberal engagement with North Korea and a hatred of “pro-communist” groups in South Korea. 

Impressed by Park’s fervor for the cause and performative flair, Scholte and her colleagues nicknamed him “fireball.” 

Scholte, a devout Christian who has said that broadcasting the gospel into North Korea is one of her primary motivations, first took an interest in North Korean human rights in the wake of the mass defections of the late 1990s.

She reoriented the Defense Forum Foundation — founded during the Reagan presidency to hold Capitol Hill forums on national defense and foreign policy issues — toward North Korean human rights projects such as defector rescues, testimonies, information dissemination, and evangelization. 

Positioning herself as a point person between Congress and defector-activists in South Korea, Scholte made a name for herself by arranging congressional hearings for high-profile defectors like Hwang Jang-yop, the creator of Juche (North Korea’s state ideology). 

As chair of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, she played a decisive role in the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004. And unlike the NED — which has been skeptical of the effectiveness of balloon launches — Scholte has said she believes them to be a “nuclear missile of truth and hope.” 

Between 2007 and 2018, the Defense Forum Foundation disbursed at least $120,000 specifically for balloon launches, according to the organization’s tax filings. But this number leaves out several sums that could not be accounted for.

Scholte’s support proved to be transformative for Park, whose balloon launching joined Free North Korea Radio — which broadcasts radio into North Korea — as one of the Defense Forum Foundation’s flagship North Korea projects. 

Park’s balloon launches would often cap off North Korea Freedom Week, an annual advocacy event hosted by North Korea Freedom Coalition that has held rallies, vigils, and meetings with State Department and other government officials.

In 2008, Scholte arranged for Park to meet then-President George W. Bush, who called him a “great freedom fighter” (Park later launched balloons emblazoned with Scholte’s name). 

International media coverage and speaking engagements followed, and in 2013, the New York-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation awarded Park the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, as well as funding to support his launches. 

Despite Scholte’s unsuccessful attempts to provide FFNK with money from State Department grants — which she had obtained for Free North Korea Radio in 2008 — Park proved to be a savvy fundraiser on his own, leveraging the controversy growing around his launches to attract donations. 

North Korea’s increasingly hostile reactions, Park found, were especially profitable. 

“[Park Sang-hak] … said the publicity generated by the DPRK’s opposition to the leaflets had resulted in a flood of visitors to his website, many of whom made donations,” a Nov. 7, 2008 diplomatic telegram detailing a conversation between Park and U.S. embassy officials stated.  

During the conversation with embassy officials, Park said he believed that Pyongyang’s anger with the leaflets had to do with the $1 bills he started slipping inside in order to entice North Koreans to pick the propaganda fliers up.

Park’s confrontational ways, however, began to aggravate both fellow balloon launchers as well as the South Korean public, which was growing uneasy about North Korea’s aggressive posturing against leaflet launches. 

In March 2011, after North Korea warned that it would open fire on any balloons sent over the border, residents of Baengnyeongdo — an island off South Korea’s northwestern coast once favored by balloon activists for its advantageous wind conditions and proximity to North Korea — rallied to stop Park and his crew from ferrying into the island.

Lee Min-bok, another defector-activist, said he and other balloon launchers were barred from the island because of Park’s “blabbing.”

Lee, who is generally recognized as the first civilian to begin launching leaflets via balloons in 2004, said that Park had approached him in 2008 to learn the ropes of balloon activism (up until the 1990s, balloon launches from both sides of the border were primarily conducted by the government).

“At first, he seemed like a fellow fighter, so I decided to try working with him,” Lee said. Not long after, Park broke off to launch balloons on his own. While Lee preferred to operate discreetly, Park tended toward bravado and open conflict.

“[Balloon launching] is a form of psyops, so you have to do it quietly,” Lee said. “But Park Sang-hak intentionally creates a lot of noise in order to become famous and attract donations, which is why he launches balloons even when the wind conditions aren’t right.”

During a launch on Dec. 2, 2008, Park threatened counter-protestors with a gas pistol, which he fired into the air (his brother also struck another counter-protestor on the head with a monkey wrench that same day). 

The following year, Park fired the same gas pistol at a cavalcade transporting a North Korean delegation who had come to pay their respects to the recently deceased former president, Kim Dae-jung.

Above all, Park’s insistence on launching into blatantly unfavorable winds has drawn the most criticism. In November 2014 — a month after North Korea fired anti-aircraft artillery shells at a balloon launched by Lee Min-bok — conservative lawmaker Ha Tae-kyung examined data obtained from the Korea Meteorological Administration and found that the wind had been blowing away from North Korea for six out of seven of the balloon launches Park publicly announced that year. 

Four of those launches were confirmed to have landed in the South. The incident, Ha said, “exposes the problems with leaflet launches that have media promotion rather than the North Korean people in mind.” 

Then, in 2015, a group of defector-activists held a forum criticizing Park’s public leafleting in a similar vein. 

Kang Chol-hwan, a former Yodok Camp prisoner and head of the North Korea Strategy Center, called for “measures to put an end to public leafleting that is only interested in promotion without any sincerity in [its aim of] delivering information.” Launching leaflets as publicly as Park, he said, would just give Kim Jong Un a pretext to create an atmosphere of fear and strengthen control over the North Korean military.

“The way I see it, a performative element is necessary sometimes,” said Han Chang-kwon, a defector-activist who launched balloons until 2016. “But if you’re sincere about it, you would take wind direction into account. A lot of the balloons [Park Sang-hak] launches end up landing in South Korea.” 

“He has behaved in a way that can only make people think he’s not doing this out of an interest for North Korean human rights, but in order to make money,” Han added.

In recent years, various inconsistencies in Park’s financial reports further inflamed these suspicions. 

FFNK’s 2014 financial statement, for example, shows that the organization reported approximately 43 million won (around $36,000) in donations that year. The breakdown of donations from that year provided by FFNK on their website however, adds up to about $40,000 in total overseas donations (including $5,000 attributed to Scholte) and at least 56 million won in local contributions. Together, that’s more than twice the 43 million won amount reported. 

Similar discrepancies were found in FFNK’s 2015 and 2016 financial statements.

In 2015, FFNK reported around 12 million won ($9,974) in total donations on their financial statement, but their first overseas donation listed on an FFNK web page for that year is $25,000. Then in 2016, FFNK reported 34 million won ($28,258) on their financial statement, despite also writing that they received 35 million won ($29,081) from donors within South Korea and another $60,000 in overseas donations on their website.

Little financial oversight seems to exist other than Park’s own word. In 2014, South Korean investigative news outlet Newstapa reached out to five individuals listed on FFNK’s board of directors and discovered that some of them were unaware that they were on the board. In fact, these individuals told reporters that not a single board meeting had ever convened. 

One of FFNK’s largest domestic corporate donors, Namyang International — which recently discontinued funding — told local media that Park never provided any proof of his activities to the company, despite receiving their money. 

But Scholte, for her part, recently told NK News in an email: “I have absolute confidence in FFNK’s accounting and never saw anything that was questionable.” 

Yet the total sum that Park has received from DFF over the years also remains a mystery, due to discrepancies between FFNK and DFF’s financial statements. Scholte also personally delivered at least some of DFF’s funding to Park in cash when she would visit South Korea, a former DFF employee told NK News.

According to FFNK’s financial statements, Park received $5,000 from Scholte every year from 2013 to 2016. DFF’s relevant financial statements, however, state that a total $15,000 was disbursed specifically for balloon launches in 2014 alone, though it’s unclear who that money was disbursed to. 

Similarly, DFF’s 2017 financial statement shows $31,000 in balloon launching expenses — an amount that is equal to or greater than the entirety of FFNK’s reported 2017 revenue of 33,520,300 won. Park did not report any donations from DFF in his 2017 financial statements.

In an email, Scholte stated that this “amount does not represent any funds sent to FFNK by DFF in 2017,” claiming that the “balloon launching” category in DFF’s financial statements encompasses other activities such as “rescues and shelters, rice bottle launches, cross border projects like cell phone smuggling etc.” She declined to share which groups received DFF funding for these projects.

FFNK’s 2017 financial statement did not include a breakdown of donors and the sum of their contributions. 

And while NK News could only account for $20,000 out of the $120,000 that DFF spent on balloon launching expenses between 2007 and 2018, Scholte claims that she has also funded balloon launches conducted by groups other than FFNK.

“If you visit our website, you can see that we’ve worked to support many groups,” Scholte wrote in an email to NK News. “We’ve helped other balloon launches.” 

However, the only balloon activism group listed on DFF’s North Korea programs page is FFNK. Likewise, the “Balloon Launches into North Korea” section in DFF’s 2017 newsletter — the most recent version available on their website — only mentions FFNK. At the same time, all five of the prominent South Korea-based balloon activists interviewed for this story said they never received funding from Scholte or DFF.

To date, Scholte has not responded to questions asking what portion of the roughly $120,000 disbursed as balloon launch program expenses between 2007 and 2018 went to FFNK. Scholte also declined to share the names of the other groups that DFF ostensibly funded with this money.

EFFORTS UNDETERRED

As the inter-Korean joint liaison office went up in plumes of smoke this summer, more allegations against Park Sang-hak and his financial dealings have surfaced.

Several defectors claimed that Park has been inflating the cost of his balloons by as much as tenfold, though these accusations have not been confirmed.

In late June, reporters discovered that Park was using his personal bank account to solicit donations on his website, which accounting experts have said carries the risk of embezzlement. Since, a senior investigator at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency told NK News that, as of July 8, Park’s bank accounts are being reviewed.

The Ministry of Unification’s view is that, based on meteorological data, none of Park’s balloons launched on June 22 appear to have made it to North Korea. NK News also independently reviewed wind direction data published by the Korea Meteorological Administration and found that there were no winds blowing toward North Korea when Park claims to have launched.

Still, Park continues to insist that the launch was successful. 

Arguing that the government restricted his freedom of expression, Park also recently announced that he would be filing a complaint with the United Nations against South Korean President Moon Jae-in. 

Park’s former partners and fellow balloon launchers, however, wonder whether he will survive the current standoff with the government. Balloon activism has always been a game of tug-of-war no matter who’s in power, they said.

“It’s not just one particular administration that has tried to stop balloon launching. Every administration has done the same thing,” says Choi Sung-yong, the head of South Korea’s Abductees Family Union, who used to launch balloons with Scholte and Park. 

So far, adapting to the ever-changing political winds and making the occasional compromise sustained this delicate equilibrium. 

But this time, defector-activists in Seoul wonder if Park has pushed it too far. 

Edited by Kelly Kasulis and Oliver Hotham