Two North Korean Spies, a Ukrainian Jail and a Murky Tale
ZHYTOMYR, Ukraine — The North Korean spy, posing as a member of his country’s trade delegation in Belarus, thought he was photographing a secret scientific report on missile technology as he snapped away with a small camera in a dingy garage in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, the home of Ukraine’s Soviet-era rocket industry.
But the report he took pictures of was a fake, part of a sting operation mounted by Ukraine’s security service to prevent the leak of missile secrets, and now the spy, 56-year-old Ri Tae-gil, is in prison convicted of espionage. He sleeps on the bottom bunk in a cell shared with eight Ukrainian inmates, four of them convicted murderers.
His July 2011 arrest in eastern Ukraine along with a fellow North Korean spy, which was first reported earlier this month by CNN, shows the extent to which Pyongyang has scoured the world for foreign technology to reinvigorate what had been a faltering program to develop long-range missiles.
Mr. Ri and his partner, Ryu Song-chol, 46, were arrested just a few days before North Korea’s then leader, Kim Jong-il, announced during a visit to Russia that Pyongyang was considering a moratorium on missile production and nuclear weapons testing. The moratorium never came about.
Instead, following Mr. Kim’s death in December 2011 and the ascent to power of his son Kim Jong-un, Pyongyang ramped up both its nuclear and missile programs. In July this year, North Korea for the first time launched missiles that experts said were capable of hitting the United States.
While speaking good Russian, which is widely spoken in Ukraine, Mr. Ri does not talk much, his cellmates said, but he does watch a lot of television, particularly reports on the accelerating progress of a North Korean missile program that he had tried in vain to serve. Instead of prized secrets, he received an eight-year prison term for espionage.
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