Troublemaker for Tyrants

His knowledge of the subject is not theoretical. After exposing government corruption while working as Venezuela’s drug czar, his father was tortured in a Caracas prison. His mother was shot in an anti-Hugo Chávez demonstration. His first cousin Leopoldo López—a perpetual challenger of the Chavista regime that failed to die with its namesake—is currently gutting it out as a political prisoner in a Venezuelan jail. But unlike many in the human-rights racket, Thor spends no time playing the stereotypical activist sad-sack. He doesn’t emit sour world-weariness, or cluck over the evils of American hegemony, or adopt the default gloomy-Gus disposition of one who loves humanity and hates people. 

“I love people!” Thor says, as he says most things: emphatically. Those he loves most are dissidents and defectors, freedom’s troublemakers who blow spitballs at authoritarians while standing up against tyranny. Thor had Václav Havel serve as HRF’s chairman until he died in 2011, only to replace him with Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and political activist/Vladimir Putin scourge. It’s not a ceremonial title, either. By 2012, Kasparov was carried off and repeatedly punched by Russian police while protesting the guilty verdict of Pussy Riot, the Moscow punk band sentenced to two years in prison for the crime of singing an anti-Putin song.

Thor himself has been beaten black-and-blue for the cause. In 2010, he and a cameraman traveled to Ho Chi Minh City to interview the patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, Thich Quang Do, whose church had been banned, and who’d spent 28 years under house arrest. After Thor snuck into his monastery, they taped an interview. On the way out, Vietnamese authorities decided to use Thor as a heavy bag. He was arrested and detained until convincing police he was a Buddhist seeker. (He’s actually a lapsed Catholic.) His cameraman snuck out a side door with the video card hidden in his rectum. “Someone else had to download that one,” Thor grimaces. HRF’s unofficial motto, it seems, is don’t just talk about human rights, roll up your sleeves and get dirty. 

In some quarters, Halvorssen is thought of as a right-winger for his serial criticism of left-wing Latin American dictatorships and receipt of some funding from traditionally conservative foundations. He admits one progressive deep-pockets philanthropist, Sigrid Rausing, walked out of their meeting in a huff when she found out HRF had received a check from the conservative Bradley Foundation. “A sense of intolerance that was almost crippling,” he says, still chapped. “No concern for our track record, achievements, political prisoners freed. All that waved away based on perceived politics. Meanwhile, Bradley doesn’t even fund us anymore.”

Thor adamantly rejects the conservative label, considering himself a “classical liberal” in the John Stuart Mill tradition and pointing out that he’s pilloried Chile’s right-wing Pinochet (in the pages of National Review, no less), just as he has Venezuela’s left-wing Chávez. He stands against dictators of any stripe. “Why discriminate?” he says. He doesn’t even ask about the political inclinations of anyone who works for him, so long as they’re on the same mission: to rid the world of tyranny. HRF staffers tend to range from dishwater democrats to the legal brains behind the operation, a Bolivian attorney named Javier El-Hage who grew up a Che-worshipping Marxist, but who eventually realized that “Cuba’s dictatorship was just as despicable as any other Communist or anti-Communist dictatorship around the world.”

The daily toil of HRF’s modest staff of 12 involves covering various corners of the globe, striving to shine a light on authoritarianism and lend a megaphone to dissidents and political prisoners. Considering nearly half the world lives under outright despotism, they have plenty of corners to choose from. So they waste no time on democracies, worrying, say, whether Guantánamo prisoners are getting three square halal meals a day, plus Klondike Bars (even the hunger-strikers at Gitmo have been known to gain weight), or writing 138-page reports, as Human Rights Watch recently did, on “Tobacco’s Hidden Children,” which examined child labor practices among American farm kids. HRF might be smaller than other blue-chip human-rights organizations, but they’re only after big fish. And besides, other professional worrywarts clearly have the rest covered. An analysis that Thor commissioned on the total output of sister organizations like Amnesty International (with which he sometimes works) showed that from 2000 to 2014, Amnesty’s Americas chapter spent 56.5 percent of its output decrying U.S. injustices, but only 4.3 percent on a stone-cold dictatorship like Cuba that, up until last year, still had 114 political prisoners.  

HRF’s annual Oslo Freedom Forum has become its signature, now widely recognized as a can’t-miss event for human-rights beat reporters, who’ve come to shorthand it “Davos for Dissidents.” In addition to the media rubberneckers and movers’n’shakers—the likes of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Google’s Sergey Brin are major HRF donors—Thor and his crew host lesser-known Solzhenitsyns from the world over, assuming they’re not currently in hiding or imprisoned. Think TEDTalks without the self-indulgent gasbags.

In Oslo, dissidents are given the stage and the “rocket fuel” of moral support and connections to people who can help their causes. (Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, after introductions made through an HRF conference, has fixed up North Korean defector groups with full sets of Korean-language Wikipedia USBs to smuggle into the Fatherland.) Held at Oslo’s Grand Hotel—the very same hotel where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded—the Oslo Freedom Forum awards dissidents the “Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.” The award is a bit like a harder-earned Nobel, minus the Nobel committee’s head-scratcher selectees, such as Yasser Arafat and Al Gore. 

A longtime inhabitant of his orbit tells me, “Thor’s like the director, and we’re all bit players in his movie.” And indeed, Halvorssen, who often emphasizes the importance of “good production values”—he enjoys watching televangelists like Pat Robertson and Creflo Dollar, just to study how they ply their trade—recalls with relish a scene from the first Oslo Freedom Forum in 2009, which he engineered and repurposed from one of his favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption. (He’s seen it at least 20 times.) The movie involves a wrongly convicted man, played by Tim Robbins, finding camaraderie with fellow prisoners. In one scene, Robbins’s character breaks into the warden’s office, locks himself inside, and over the loudspeaker treats the prison yard to an aria from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Another inmate, played by Morgan Freeman, can be heard in voiceover, saying: “It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” 

Similarly, in the Grand Hotel’s majestic dining room, Halvorssen had the German mezzo-soprano Friederike Krum sing the same aria. “And most important,” Thor says, “in that room was Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso (33 years in a Tibetan prison), Harry Wu (19 years in a Chinese labor camp), Armando Valladares (22 years in a Cuban prison), Ales Bialiatski (prisoner from Belarus), Vladimir Bukovsky (12 years in Soviet prisons), Leyla Zana (Turkish prisoner for 10 years), and many others. It was epic, and very moving.” Thor views his mission in life as giving such people a platform: “I talk to these dissidents, and in five sentences, they can destroy a government more than some graduate-degree’d exile in Miami can. It’s poetry. The truth is the only thing that matters. But sometimes, you’ve got to turn the light on for it.” 

The people Thor is not quite as moved by are the professionals in his racket who seem to find it “fashionable to place dictatorships and democracies on the same level, and criticize them as if they were in the same bag. .  .  . I’m talking about the gray suits, most of them just angry that they made career choices that didn’t make them a lot of money. The overwhelming majority of human rights activists you meet in Europe? You’re like, ‘Get this person a therapist!’ ” 

The man the New York Times once called “a maverick mogul, proudly politically incorrect” and that BuzzFeed labeled “the face of a new global human rights movement” seems to regard sleep as a mortal enemy on a par with the dictators and tin-pot thugs that he and his merry band of associates seek to eradicate, from Equatorial Guinea to Venezuela to North Korea.  

You can’t always be sure from where exactly Thor is checking in via one of his three laptops or five phones. In the course of our dealings, he might be communicating from a human-rights confab in Geneva. Or from having drinks with surviving Charlie Hebdo staffers in Paris. Or while taking meetings in Los Angeles, since Thor moonlights as a film producer, having founded the Moving Picture Institute (see The Weekly Standard, August 13, 2007) the same year he founded HRF, which nurtures young filmmakers interested in “promoting freedom through film.” And even attracts the occasional big dog like Quentin Tarantino, with whom he coproduced Freedom’s Fury, the story of the 1956 Hungarian uprising told through the prism of their Olympic water-polo showdown with the Soviet Union.

But check in Thor does, frenetically and at all hours, his nimble mind wheeling wildly from subject to subject. He’ll tell you how juiced he is to have just set up a big-budget deal at 20th Century Fox to coproduce Robert Heinlein’s 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, with the X-Men franchise’s Bryan Singer set to direct. (“Sci-fi allows the writer to address any cultural or political topic in a total vacuum—a terrific way to exercise the mind philosophically.”) He’ll tell you why he selected his Wickr secret-messaging service moniker “summerwind” (he’s a sucker for Sinatra). He believes so strongly in the impenetrability of Wickr’s end-to-end encryption and self-destructing emails and texts—a necessity in his trade—that he invested in the company. He’ll loop you in with his South Korean assistant, with whom he enjoys easy badinage as she calls him a dictator, while he threatens to send her back to North Korea, making oblique dog-eating jokes about her canine-rights activism (“perhaps, deep down, there is some kind of karmic issue being addressed”). 

He’ll tell you about his health-nut habits (emphasis on “nut”), which involve ingesting or injecting some 35 supplements a day—everything from tree-bark extract (against aging) to tryptophan, the sleep-inducing agent in your Thanksgiving turkey which he hopes helps settle him down a bit. His colleague Alex Gladstein says it isn’t working: When HRF staffers bunk two-to-a-room on the road, even when Thor steals three hours of sleep, he still keeps roommates awake with his restless leg syndrome. 

He’s even trying to dodge the Big Sleep, having made plans to be cryogenically preserved upon his death. He worries a bit about his hereafter: “Have you met any of the cyronauts? The most bizarre mix of nerds, hippies, and plain weirdos. I tell my friends, because frankly, I want them to join too. The future is gonna be real lonely if I’m stuck with some of the current clients.” 

But what animates Thor most in his round-the-clock correspondence is the mission that lies before us: to set the good people of the ironically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea free. Or at least to set their minds free, since through 70 years of totalitarian rule by three generations of Kims, a good many of the Hermit Kingdom’s citizens have had their heads hermetically sealed from all outside sources of information. Without the thought distractions that go with free speech, this leaves North Koreans plenty of time to: deify portly dictators with bad haircuts and Dennis Rodman fixations; hear their stomachs growl even though there are fewer mouths to feed since the 1990s state-stoked famine may have killed as many as 3.5 million people (nearly a third of the country is still thought to be undernourished, and there are recent reports of cannibalism in South Korean papers); be subjected to preposterous state-crafted propaganda slogans (“Let the strong winds of fish farming blow across the country!”); and live in constant fear—for crimes as minor as watching a South Korean soap opera—of being transferred to one of the country’s unspeakably brutal prison camps, still thought to enslave some 200,000 people, after hundreds of thousands have already died in them. 

By January, the media hubbub over the Sony hacking scandal is still on full-boil. The Guardians of Peace—thought to be a North Korean hackers’ collective—have pulled off the largest corporate-hacking heist in history. They bill it as a vendetta against Sony for making The Interview, a frat-boyish comedy, whose plot turns on a couple of talk-show dunderheads being recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un. While you could see how the general narrative arc might bug the Supreme Leader (not to be confused with his Dear Leader dad or his Great Leader grandpa), it’s hard to imagine anyone getting that exercised over a Seth Rogen/James Franco film unless they were trying to get their money back. But one presumes Kim Jong-un never saw it in Pyongyang theaters, where titles like The Respected Comrade Supreme Commander Is Our Destiny are more typical fare.

HRF is never one to let a human-rights-atrocity spotlight pass. Unlike a lot of humanitarian outfits that incessantly court celebrity to represent their causes, HRF regularly and publicly lights celebrities up for performing for dictators, raising holy media hell when, say, Mariah Carey or Jennifer Lopez tries to go nonchalantly collect a seven-figure payday for a private concert. It’s not a stunt, Thor says, but an effective strategy. Not only can HRF instantly undo years’ worth of image-polishing that dictatorships often pay Western lobbying firms to do on their behalf. But instead of expecting people to read dreary white papers on human rights abuses, those very same abuses will now be splashed on Access Hollywood, while Howard Stern does 20 minutes of material on Turkmenistan, which he previously couldn’t locate on a map. (Stern impersonating J. Lo: “I want to say everybody raise your glasses, let’s hear it for concentration camps! Now I’d like to sing ‘Jenny from the Block.’ ”)

Similarly, Thor’s team is all over the North Korean concern. They have been for years, anyway, conducting hackathons for defector groups, coming up with innovative ways to smuggle goods into North Korea—such as stealth USBs and giant slingshots that fling contraband across the river from China. They also send unmanned balloons loaded with antiregime leaflets, cash, and entertainments (everything from Braveheart to Desperate Housewives) wafting north from South Korean border towns. Even though the seasonal winds aren’t quite right for ballooning in January, The Interview publicity bubble is too good to miss. Not only does HRF instantly launch a “Hack Them Back” campaign, attempting to raise a million dollars that it will disperse among defector groups who are ballooning, smuggling, or broadcasting information to their isolated countrymen. But it also publicly vows to place copies of The Interview in balloon payloads, just to thumb Kim Jong-un in the eye.

As news of HRF’s intentions hits the Hollywood Reporter and other atypical outlets, Thor’s logistics messages are coming in a-mile-a-minute. We will meet up in Seoul and head to the border. His people have reserved a bank of rooms in a secure hotel. Oh, and he forgot to mention one thing: “North Korea has threatened to kill us, send assassins, and ‘pull out’ of dialogue talks with South Korea if the balloons go.”

He sounds positively over the moon. 

When I meet up with him in Seoul, Thor does not look like a man who’s just been threatened by the most brutal regime on earth. Or rather, he looks like a man who’s at ease with such threats, as it’s hardly his first rodeo. Before a 2013 balloon launch, North Korea put out a “warning message,” calling HRF “human scum” and “thieving Americans,” while promising to “slit their throats” and buy them a “one-way ticket to hell.” (They might not have watched The Interview, but they clearly watch a lot of bad movies.) 

With chiseled features and a laser-beam intensity, Halvorssen has a bit of a Tom Cruise/cult-leader air, making you think that he could take over Scientology if David Miscavige pulled a hamstring. Throughout the week I spend in his company, his default demeanor seems best described as caffeinated calm—exuding natural tension, without being tense. 

I haven’t dropped my bag in the hotel lobby before he ushers me to the bar, where he’s already two drinks in. He knows that I’m jetlagged and bronchial. So he pulls out of his pocket what looks like a dehydrated caterpillar. “It’s a cordycep!” he says enthusiastically, a rare combination of caterpillar and fungus. Traditional healers in North Sikkim love it. He shows me, on his phone, a BBC video of an ant who’d eaten one, went out of its mind, then had the caterpillar/fungus erupt out of its head, as if in an Alien movie. “Wanna try one?” 

No, thanks, I’m all set with Robitussin. 

Much as Halvorssen exhibits caffeinated calm, he paradoxically seems to be a closed open book. On the one hand, he is exceedingly transparent. He thinks nothing, while talking to me, of grabbing a fistful of 35 supplements from his “tackle box,” as he calls his oversized dispenser, and swallowing them all in one gulp. Or taking a hypodermic needle, lifting his shirt slightly, and shooting himself up in the stomach with Genotropin (a growth hormone) in my presence. “The fountain of youth!” he gleams. 

When I ask Thor if he’s married, he tells me he’s gay. I would’ve guessed eventually anyway, from his red suede Zegna shoes, his penchant for ordering “Twinkle Twinkles” at the bar (Talisker, Tanqueray, and peach juice), and his mention of dating a guy named Colt. (I’m a quick study that way.) All his friends and family know, but it’s never been in print. “Can I use it?” I ask him. He thinks for about two seconds, then says, “Yeah, why not?”

But when I repeatedly ask him where he lives, he refuses to tell—not even the state. “Why are you so nosy?” he bristles. “That’s my job,” I say. “Why are you so secretive?” I inquire. “That’s my job,” he responds. 

His colleagues say he’s fearless. But he’d be a fool not to take some precautions, especially since South Korean police let it be known that North Korean agents are casing the comings-and-goings at our hotel. (They subsequently post a cop in our lobby.) Seven defectors we meet with are on a published DPRK hit list. And Thor’s closest ballooning co-conspirator, a defector named Park Sang-hak who heads Fighters for a Free North Korea and whom the DPRK has labeled “Enemy Zero,” would have been assassinated a few years back if South Korean authorities hadn’t intercepted his would-be killer, who’d planned to do him in with a toxic needle concealed in a ballpoint pen. Park now has an around-the-clock bodyguard. 

Such are the charms of dealing with North Korea: the decades of their juggling our carrots and sticks, the misappropriated famine relief, the futile South Korean sunshine policies seeking to normalize relations, the nuclear tests, the kidnapping of foreigners, the sinking of South Korean ships, the seemingly random acts of aggression that by insider accounts are shrewdly calculated. It’s why they are able to terrorize people well beyond their reach, and why the failed state is allowed to keep failing. For of all the loon-ies in the loony bin, they’re still the hands-down looniest. This is a country, after all, where Kim Jong-un’s own uncle was recently executed for, among other things, not clapping loudly enough when his nephew waddled into the room.

North Korea might talk like a cartoon villain, calling the South Korean president “a crafty prostitute” and the U.S. mainland a “boiled pumpkin.” But even though they often sound like a joke, nobody knows when they’re serious. From a safe distance, we have a good laugh at reports that Kim Jong-un drinks cobra wine for his erectile dysfunction, or that he cuts his own hair since he’s terrified of barbers, or, as DPRK propaganda has it, that he doesn’t defecate. (That would explain a lot.) But to the 25 million North Koreans who’ve yet to perish from purges or hunger, but who’ll end up dead or in prison camps if they try to leave, the joke’s never seemed terribly funny. 

Our liberation delegation includes some HRF staffers, a couple North Korean defectors, a few Silicon Valley friends of Thor’s providing technological expertise, and a small scrum of journalists. Our bus pulls into a field just outside the border town of Paju, bunkered by a small ridge, to better conceal us since we’re just a stone’s throw from the demilitarized zone, where North Korean artillery batteries lie itchy on the other side of the Imjin River. We’ve deliberately arrived way after dark, though the closer you are to North Korea, the darker it gets, since the DPRK has typically had higher spending priorities (the military, Dear Leader statuary, Kim Jong-il’s $1 million-per-year Hennessy habit, etc.) than keeping the lights on. 

Thor and Park, who over the years has sent tens of millions of leaflets into North Korea, are trying to operate more stealthily to avoid repeats of recent circuses. North Korea tried to shoot down balloons at a non-HRF-sponsored launch last October. And the South Korean government is forever nervous that balloonists will provoke its belligerent neighbors, getting civilians killed. In the past, Park and Thor have attracted unwanted attention, everything from Park being arrested after plowing through a police barricade with his truck, to a Paju cop taking a shine to Thor. “He started petting me like I was a cat,” he says. “It was hilarious and creepy. Poor guy is so deep in the closet he’s in Narnia.” 

Park’s troops arrive with all the necessities: leaflets, hydrogen tanks, cash (Park estimates he’s given away up to $30,000 over the years). Everything, that is, except the balloons themselves. Park’s nickname is “Fireball,” and when he’s informed of the screw-up, we see why, as he barks’n’boils in Korean at his comrades, who will now keep us waiting a few more hours while they go retrieve the balloons. Henry Song, our South Korean translator, informs the bus of the bad news. Park, who doesn’t other-wise speak English, mounts the freezing bus, yelling, “I sowwwwwy!” 

Thor covers for him, suggesting it gives us an opportunity to quiz Park about his background. HRF staffer John Lechner pulls some rotgut Soju out of his bag, and we all take hits and pass it around to keep warm, like vagrants around a barrel-fire. Park’s father was a spy for the North Korean government, and once even received a gold watch from Kim Il-sung. Park himself had a job in the propaganda office. But after intelligence officers started getting purged—a semiregular occurrence among the elites (all eight of Kim Jong-il’s pallbearers were purged by his son inside a year)—his father worried for his life. While in the field, he defected, later sending for his family. After they crossed the Yalu River on foot into China, their father hooked them up with fake passports, and they were off to South Korea. Park gained his freedom, but had to leave his fiancée behind. 

As I pass the bottle to Park and he takes a nip, Thor elbows me, saying, “Look at Mr. Park for a moment, in his baseball hat and chewing gum with a massive smile on his face, and you’d never think that his uncle was beaten to death. There’s something about that spirit that is so important.” Indeed, Park discovered his uncle had been killed in retribution for the family’s escape, a possibility that weighs on any North Korean leaving someone behind. When asked how he feels about it, Park swigs his Soju bitterly, then murmurs in low-register Korean. “He still feels the hatred,” our translator says. 

Hours later, Park’s troops return with balloons. Other balloonists send everything into North Korea from Bibles to Choco Pies to photos of Kim Jong-un’s wife purportedly starring in a porno before she became first lady of North Korea. Park keeps it simple tonight, though in the past, he’s included such extras as DVD cartoons portraying Kim Jong-il as a transvestite. Thor says they’d planned to include in our drop the bootleg copies he’d made of The Interview (still not out on DVD), but the subtitles weren’t completed in time. Next run, however, The Interview is going in. 

But there’s still a huge flapping banner attached to one of the balloons that says in oversized script THE INTERVIEW—a trailer, of sorts, for the annoyance that’s coming. Above it is a big, baby-huey picture of Kim Jong-un, his lower lip protruding as though he’s about to cry. Though I can’t read the waterproof plastic leaflets that Park is enclosing, it’s clear they’re not puff pieces. Henry translates the Korean inscribed on the bookend missiles abutting Kim’s head on the banner, which reads, “Kim Jong-un will be assassinated” and “I am afraid of the people’s court.” A nice change of pace for North Koreans, who are typically treated to state news service headlines such as “Kim Jong-il’s Feats Lauded by Foreign Personages.” 

Fireball’s team works furiously and fast. Five balloons 30 feet high are inflated from hydrogen tanks. Everyone is forbidden from smoking, or Park won’t be the only fireball around here. Lechner hits the play button on a phone connected to a loudspeaker, his launch playlist derived from The Interview soundtrack. But as Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” starts blasting, Thor makes him cut the music, having noticed a civilian’s house in the near-distance. Just because we’re trying to topple a dictator doesn’t mean we should be rude.

The whooshing hydrogen fills the balloons, and the payload bags are connected. Once airborne for a spell, the latter will burst open when time-release acid burns through a metal fastener, scattering antiregime sentiments like fluttering leaves. The communication method might seem primitive, but you’d be surprised what has turned the hearts and minds of North Koreans over the years. In a land where everybody is starving for outside information (black-market DVD players, computers, and Chinese cell phones pervade North Korea now, though the Internet is still a distant dream), even a crumb can seem like a feast. Defectors say that while still in the DPRK, they were turned around by something as simple as a bootleg copy of Titanic, which demonstrated the possibility of dying for love, rather than for the regime. Lim Young Sun (who runs Unification Broadcasting, airing broadcasts of North Korean television in the south so South Koreans can see what they’re lucky enough to miss) was influenced by the likes of the smuggled writings of Marx and bikini calendars, not necessarily in that order. “Reading a book about Marx hurts your brain,” he says, “but looking at the pictures was a delight, to be honest.” 

As Park’s people prepare for simultaneous release, Park starts a chant in broken English: “Free-a-North-a-Korea!” We echo his call. The cylindrical balloons ascend, looking like giant runaway condoms, bringing the message of freedom to God-knows-who-or-where. 

We all re-mount the bus, flushed with the warm glow of accomplishment. Thor chomps a victory cigar. But as we travel back to our hotel, we are alerted by Pink Hair (a techie buddy of Thor’s who prefers the alias, since he has pink hair). It appears the Winds of Change are blowing the wrong direction. Pink Hair had wired up one of the balloons with a GPS tracker—the kind climbers typically use, he bought it at REI—so they could tell how far the balloons travel. While we thought we had a wind from the south, the GPS says otherwise. We watch the dot on his phone drifting back towards Seoul. “It’s beating us home,” says Pink Hair. 

“Let me see that,” Thor says, leaning into Pink Hair’s iPhone, slapping it while speaking to it in exaggerated fashion: “Siri, make the balloons turn the right direction.” 

By the next morning, Pink Hair determines that the balloon landed near a South Korean highway, and somebody carried it off in a car. Not only is Thor not discouraged, he’s actually adrenalized. This is precisely why he connects his Silicon Valley buddies with defectors—to help them perfect their craft. If you can measure something, you can improve it. Park usually doesn’t know where his balloons end up. This time, he does, and can make the appropriate weight and timing adjustments. 

Thor never believes that just because something has always been done a certain way, that’s the way it should be done. He doesn’t assume he knows anything, but he does assume he knows lots of people who do—smart, rich, resourceful people. Maybe better answers can be had, if better questions get asked. As he describes HRF’s modus operandi to one defector group: “We tend to bite off a lot more than we can chew, then spend a lot of time chewing.” Maybe balloons are yesterday’s news, he thinks. After all, what are the chances of them floating hundreds of miles to Pyongyang? He has another idea, one that makes his staffers recoil in horror.

“Drones!” he says. “What about drones!!!?” 

Thor’s best friend from college, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Alex Lloyd, speaks for Thor’s troops when he says, “Dude, you’re seriously on crack.” 

One night over dinner, I ask Thor to tell me about his Caracas upbringing. “My father was a miner and my mother a schoolteacher,” he deadpans. “They instilled in me values, values that I bring to my election here in the district, because I know the suffering of working families.” He breaks character as he takes another Twinkle Twinkle hit. “No, I grew up in the lap of luxury, man! It was crazy. We had a gardener, driver, bodyguard, butler, cook, governess, and that was just the skeleton crew. There was a calligraphy teacher—a calligraphy teacher!—I’m not joking. In a house that had a pool, sauna, billiard room, library, and a servants’ wing. It was a throwback to another century. I must add that these people were like family, and my parents made it very clear that we were to treat domestic staff better than our friends.” 

Thor’s mother is directly descended from the author of Venezuela’s declaration of independence. Her own family did well, though nothing to match the days of the Mendozas’ silver-mining fortune, long since depleted from funding independence fights. On his father’s side, his Nazi-fighting Norwegian grandfather stayed on in Venezuela after the war, made a killing in all manner of businesses, then died while Thor’s father (also named Thor) was still a teenager. After college, Thor’s dad and his Uncle Olaf took over and expanded the family businesses—real estate, insurance, and representation of international companies like Dunlop. (Plenty of their real-estate holdings would later be expropriated by Hugo Chávez.)

They also became what the New York Times called “Venezuela’s most eligible playboys.” They drove Jaguars and flew to Paris for weekends. Olaf dated Candice Bergen, and the brothers kept a pet lion named Petunia in a Philadelphia apartment. “It was a good hook, telling the girls, ‘You wanna come back and see my lion?’ ” Uncle Olaf tells me from his home in Miami. “It ate us out of sofa and shoes.” 

The profligate spending was not ideal, Thor allows. But he absorbed another lesson from his family’s buccaneer spirit. “There were no limits. You could do anything,” he says. “If there’s one thing my parents gave me, it was this sense that I shouldn’t be afraid of anything, and I certainly shouldn’t be afraid of people. Also, that there’s a shortcut to everything and that if there’s a wall you don’t like, you can have it moved. So many people grow up thinking things are the way they are and you can’t change them.”

When Thor read his father’s obituary in the Miami Herald (he died last summer), he learned things about his dad that he’d previously understood only vaguely. About how extensively his father was himself immersed in the work, serving on the boards of numerous human rights groups, taking up the cause of Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, spotlighting violations by Marxist rebel groups all over Central America. (Not for nothing has his father been accused of being a CIA asset, which Thor denies, though he allows that in his lines of work, he certainly had contact with them.) 

His father is best described, he says, with the Tim Burton film Big Fish: “It’s a movie about how this father tells his son all these tales which are almost all not believable. At the end, when he’s burying his father, all the people from the tall tales show up at the funeral. The giant, the midgets, and suddenly the son is like, ‘My God, it was all true.’ The craziest thing is when somebody meets me and says, ‘You’ve done exactly the same thing your father did 25 years ago in this very town.’ What? ‘Oh yeah, he held a meeting here for a whole bunch of dissidents.’ That’s pretty trippy.” 

Thor describes his idyllic childhood as “magical-realist.” Barred from television during the week by his strict mother, he’d sneak off to watch Batman and over-the-top Spanish soap operas with staff in the servants’ quarters. He played with the family’s battalion of dogs. He witnessed the decadences and grotesqueries of an oil-booming narco-state on the verge of becoming a socialist horror show, all of it on display side-by-side: “the Rolls Royce driving past the one-legged man in the street asking for money with some kind of deformity that’d be unthinkable in a place like Germany.” 

But his parents ended up divorcing, and his mom moved to London, partly because of his father’s drinking (which he later got a handle on). “He was the most lovely drunk you’ve ever met,” Thor says. “He’d wake us up in the middle of the night to tell us he loved us. We were like, ‘Dad, we know. Can we go back to sleep now?’ ” 

Thor ended up in a British boarding school, where he got his first real taste of what would become his life’s work: kicking bullies in the shorts. “There is no crueler being on the face of the earth than the British schoolboy,” Thor says. His schoolmates decided to haze the new kid, and for a while, he found his bed covered nightly in tea leaves. Rather than look like a whiner, Thor would sleep in a bed that looked like a Lipton bag. After a while, however, he’d had enough. 

“I informed my schoolmates that if this continued to happen, I would pee in their beds every night for the rest of the year.” The tea leaves kept coming. So realizing he didn’t have enough urine to go around, he squirted in a pitcher and mixed it with water, soaking all his tormentors’ beds. “All I heard was [doing a British accent] ‘Joe, is your bed wet? My bed’s wet,’ ” Thor recalls. “I said, ‘Gentleman, that was me. Tea on my bed? Pee on your beds. Pee on my bed? S—t on your beds.’ ” He didn’t have another problem the rest of the year.

Upon finishing school, Thor decided to leave Britain “before I became British.” (A natural mimic who speaks four languages, he took two years to shed his British accent.) He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude while double-majoring and double-minoring, and also earning his master’s in history—all in four years. “And I was drunk through half of it!” he says with some pride. “And in a fraternity and running the newspaper.” 

Thor started writing for the campus’s conservative paper, Red and Blue, around the time the campus exploded in howls of protest over a satirical Haiti article decried as racist. Upon being elected editor of the paper, he fired most of the people who’d voted for him, cleaning house of what he calls the three-piece-suit-and-cigar set, faux Anglophiles and affected young fogeys who “seemed much more interested in being the assholes on campus” than publishing engaging articles.

Thor went more counterintuitive, publishing pieces that disoriented campus liberals such as reporting on a group called White Women Against Racism, who prohibited a black woman from attending because “this is a space for white women to address their racism.” At the same time, his adventures in student government left him sour on thought-police and grievance-group bean-counters. He wearied of hearing indignant young know-nothings, such as the head of the Latino student association, wielding their ethnicity like a cudgel, saying, “On behalf of the Latino people I would like to speak.” To which, responds Thor, “I would say, ‘Point of order, you can’t say on my behalf because I’m not represented by you.’ They’d get sassy with me, and so I’d talk to them in Spanish, which they couldn’t actually speak.” 

While at Penn, Thor received a much more serious education from the outside world. Thor’s father had been appointed by Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez to head the state-owned telephone company in the 1970s. When Pérez was again elected in the late ’80s, he made Halvorssen his antidrug czar, enabling Thor Sr. to make enemies of half of Venezuela, including the Medellín cartel, powerful banking interests, and even his own boss, whom he found keeping a $19 million slush fund for his mistress (Pérez was impeached in 1993).

In the middle of one of his investigations of a now-defunct bank for money laundering, Halvorssen was fingered as being a conspirator (by a single witness who later recanted, saying police tortured the accusation out of him) as one of the “yuppie bombers” who were said to have set off a series of bombs in Caracas to manipulate the stock market.

Halvorssen was never charged, let alone convicted. But that didn’t stop Venezuelan authorities from detaining him for 74 days, some of it in El Retén De Catia, a prison so squalid raw sewage was known as a water source and Pope John Paul II condemned it. (It has since been demolished.) While in custody, Thor’s father was kept in a pit with snakes and rats, had a rib broken by interrogators, and was even urinated on. The family found out through a government source that he was supposed to be killed in prison, though it would have been made to look like a suicide.

Still a college student, Thor and his Uncle Olaf went to work, doing anything and everything to attract attention to his father’s plight. They were successful. Amnesty International, British members of Parliament, and New York’s legendary district attorney Robert Morgenthau all protested his innocence. The first political prisoner Thor ever helped get released was his own father. 

“That’s what really awoke me,” he says. “That crystallized the idea of what it looks like when you actually stare into the abyss in a country with no rule of law. Every day of the week, my daddy is dying here. I’m tired, and can’t go to sleep, but every moment of every working day is spent trying to push the ball forward, to get journalists to understand, to get someone involved, and so on. So when I talk to some [dissident’s relative] whose parent is in prison, I tell them I know what you’re going through. And let me tell you how I went to sleep, and let me tell you how I passed the nights, and they immediately get it. That doesn’t mean our case was particularly special, but it’s a bond like no other.” 

What nags him still is that the ordeal helped ruin his father financially: “I loved my father deeply. Profoundly. .  .  . But he never truly recovered after the destruction he suffered, personal and financial, at the hands of these very bad men—looters all of them. He kept his dignity and his optimism all his life. He died in a slip and fall. Senseless accident. And he was planning his comeback. But age takes a toll on your cognition, on your energy. It’s heartbreaking. On his death bed, I made promises to him. And told him plenty. In some odd way sometimes I think I’m finishing some of the things he was doing. It just happened.” 

After college, Thor went on to help cofound the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the anti-p. c. organization that has done as much as any in the country to combat the campus Idiocracy Industrial Complex, meaning they’re never shy of material. Thor would often find himself in the papers, calling attention to the theater professor whom feminists tried to blackball for teaching Shakespeare (privileged white male), or defending the Christian group that was temporarily banned from meeting on campus for refusing to select a lesbian as its leader. (“We are delighted and relieved that the Tufts Committee on Student Life does not have to seek shelter in catacombs beneath the Tufts campus,” Thor said at the time.)

But in 2004, a decade after his father’s ordeal, he received another wake-up call. His grandmother was turning 80, and the entire family went back to Venezuela to celebrate her birthday. Concurrently, a protest about the results of a recall-referendum against Hugo Chávez was taking place. Being a family of freedom-fighters, his mother and grandparents showed up for what they thought would be a peaceful assembly. Thor skipped it, while trying to straighten out having been thrown off the voter rolls in what was widely suspected to be voter fraud. 

“Jimmy Carter was doing his ‘Cartering’ down there,” says Thor, by which he means election monitoring/sucking up to dictators. The protest aimed to persuade Carter not to certify the results (which he did, before leaving in a flash to attend his wife’s birthday). As described by Thor in a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, 100 or so Chávez supporters, many of them in Chávez’s trademark beret, descended on the protest square. Three men, wearing red T-shirts with government-funded “Bolivarian Circle” insignias, opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd. (All of which was captured on television, which Thor watched from his grandparents’ house.) A grandmother was shot in the back, later bleeding out in an emergency room. Thor’s mother was taken down with a hollow-point bullet from a high-caliber pistol; he wrote his account in her hospital room. She survived, though she was convinced she was going to die. “Every f—ing day of her life since then has been affected by this bullet,” he says. “My mother has been in pain every day since the day she was shot.” 

He believed in FIRE’s mission, but began to reconsider priorities. “Chávez has taken over Venezuela,” says Thor. “So like, why am I defending the rights of student cartoonists at the Harvard Business School, who are getting in trouble for publishing cartoons of the administration, when journalists in Venezuela are getting shot? Okay, this is not exactly where I need to be.” He founded the Human Rights Foundation a year later. 

Even now, though, Thor’s Venezuelan family members are still not in the clear. His cousin Leopoldo López, a former mayor of the Chacao municipality in Caracas and the founder of the Voluntad Popular party (Popular Will), served as a perpetual thorn in the side of Chávez and his acolyte, current president Nicolás Maduro. According to the Los Angeles Times, López has been taken hostage by armed thugs, had a bodyguard shot, and was detained and assaulted by the state intelligence service.

For over a year now, López has been rotting in a Caracas military prison for imagined crimes. According to reports, his family has had to take him food (not provided by the prison), guards have flung feces against his cell walls, and just the other day, a group of men in ski masks breached his cell, destroyed his books and notes, and placed him in isolation without toilet or running water. Bill Clinton has called for his release, and Amnesty International—after much pressure from Thor’s family—has named him a Prisoner of Conscience. (“Last ones on the bus,” Thor says with contempt.) Since López has tested higher in national popularity polls than Chávez did when he was alive, Thor suggests the only reason his cousin hasn’t been killed in prison is that “if they kill him, the price they pay will be incalculable.” 

Thus, when Thor gets wind that a colleague told me Thor himself is fearless, he quickly amends the record: “That’s a crock. Fearless is López, who from inside a dungeon has the guts to face down his would-be executioners. Fearless are those Oslo people. Perhaps the use of that term is simply an admission of the decline of courage in Western (free) society .  .  . [which instead] prefers self-gratification and the transitory satisfaction of material wealth. We give priority to the immediate and superficial. And Cubans, North Koreans, Kazakhs, Equatoguineans, Gambians, Ukrainians—all targets of man-made tragedies—are not visible or prevailing. It’s decadence, [which doesn’t] reflect well on a digital world that is supposed to be more ‘connected’ and empathetic than ever before. And so we must compete to conquer hearts and minds and ultimately spread a common morality through story, narratives, appeals to love based on humanizing utterly preventable suffering.” 

A long-time acquaintance of Halvorssen’s who doubts whether he’ll ever achieve true mainstream acceptance within the human-rights community tells me there’s a stark difference between him and many establishment-activist types: “Thor’s a guy who will slingshot sh— over the river. He’s a f—ing doer. It’s not Michelle Obama making a sad face on an Instagram photo saying I really wish those people from Boko Haram would call me so we can ‘bring back our girls.’ He’s not a hashtag. He’s the kind of guy who says, ‘Let’s go find them.’ A man of action. And that is not human rights. Human rights is typically ‘We’re going to have campaigns to raise awareness.’ Well, everyone’s aware of North Korea, but doesn’t do anything. So he actually does things like let’s come up with slingshots and shoot copies of USB drives that they can watch, that will change people. Balloons? Not an incredibly revolutionary idea. But you do it, you get out there and breathe on every microphone and sweat on every television, and you’re there. He’s like the America’s Got Talent for victims of dictatorship, and that’s not a pejorative either.”

During our time in Seoul, we meet plenty of North Korean defectors, both in our hotel and in the dingy cubbyholes in ratty office buildings that seem standard-issue for their perpetually underfunded activist groups. Reunification of the Korean peninsula is low on the priority list of prosperous South Koreans. They bustle along modernized, indistinguishable streets, ear-budded and smart-phoned, partaking of authentic Korean cultural spoils like KFC, Yankee Candle, and Starbucks, as their former countrymen, a short distance over the border, live lives not many care to fathom. 

We meet radio broadcasters, like those at Free North Korea, who keep spitting truth into the wind to an audience that Arbitron can never measure, despite the blood-stained axes and knives that regularly arrive in their mail: not-so-subtle promptings for them to take up another line of work. 

We meet Yeon-mi Park, a living doll of a 21-year-old, who Thor’s personally taken under his wing, helping her navigate the shoals of Western culture that confront her at blinding speed. He insists she dip into his tackle box for “an osteo pack” in case she has lingering effects from malnutrition during her North Korean childhood. He teaches her American idioms, like “freezing my balls off,” which makes her collapse in a pile of shameful laughter on the floor. She embarrasses easily, showing reluctance to admit that she’s seen Pretty Woman, “because the North Koreans want to kill you for the sexually bad things.” Thor has to tell her that in the West, Pretty Woman is practically considered a children’s film.

She tells me she learned English from watching Friends “30 times, all 240 episodes. I took the quiz about Friends and I got 100 percent correct.” Her English is coming along nicely, which is lucky for her, since she’s a star of the defector circuit, giving knockout performances from Oslo to Dublin, while getting a Penguin book deal that has her yoked to Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriter for support. It’s a long way from her 2007 escape across a frozen river into China, after which, she’s said, a smuggler raped her mother in front of her. And that’s the part she’s talked about in public. The parts she hasn’t, Thor assures, “are so much worse.” 

While Yeon-mi’s father was in a labor camp, she’s said she was reduced to eating grass and dragonflies. Since her escape, she’s tried lobster, once, with Thor. “I loved it,” she rhapsodizes. But the list of things she hasn’t tried is long. One night, I watch her eat a can of minibar mixed nuts, as she sorts the cashews from the almonds. She says the almonds remind her of the nuts she’d had back home, which come from the pumpkin. “Those aren’t nuts, honey, those are seeds,” says Thor. “Oh really? I thought this was a seed or something,” says Yeon-mi. “So you’ve never had nuts?” asks Thor. “What is this ‘nuts’?” she asks, puzzled. 

We meet Jang Jin-sung, who was a poet laureate for Kim Jong-il, as well as a psychological warfare officer within the United Front Department. He gives his prognosis on matters North Korean—the need to un-deify the Kims and the shoddy state of outside scholarship on the country—sounding like an armchair pundit.

Left unspoken is how he and a friend had to escape across the frozen Tumen River, afraid they’d be shot in the back, because he’d lent his friend a forbidden book, which his friend lost on a train. (The government immediately traced it back to Jang.) Or how he and his fellow escapee had to spend months on the lam in China, dodging authorities who would have repatriated them, as the Chinese often do, to certain death in North Korea. Or how their food supply was so meager and circumstances so dire that his friend spent their last won buying a blade to kill himself if he was caught. Or how Jang was separated from his friend, who eventually was caught and jumped to his death off a roadside cliff while in transit.

These details come from Jang’s memoir, Dear Leader, which is both riveting and beautifully written. So I couldn’t help but ask, in the prurient way journalists do, how a man of his talents could go to work every day, writing poetry glorifying the Dear Leader, and whether he was proud of any of it. As the translator conveys my question, I watch the look of shame cross Jang’s face. I’m immediately ashamed of myself for asking. After a very long pause, he says that his poetry was “cringe-worthy.” Then he adds, “The best way to answer your question is the books that I’m doing now are a way to repent for all the things I wrote while I was in North Korea.” 

We meet Kang Chol-hwan, whose work with the North Korea Strategy Center is so secret—they help smuggle goods and information overland from China—that he won’t let us quote a single word he says, for fear a stray detail will get one of his people killed. Left unsaid is that he is the author of the highly acclaimed Aquariums of Pyongyang. Or that as a child, he and his entire family spent 10 years in Yodok concentration camp because his grandfather had been accused of treason. Or that he had to watch fellow prisoners get executed, then was forced by prison guards to throw rocks at them. Or that his food ration was a fistful of corn kernels once a month, so he had to survive by eating rats and earthworms. Or that the only way he’d get a change of clothes was to take them off of dead prisoners. 

But the one who gets me—who gets everyone—is Ji Seong-ho, who runs a group called Now, Action, Unity, and Human Rights. He’s 34 years old but appears about 19. He has an artificial hand that looks like a mannequin’s. He’s missing part of one leg, too. When he crossed the Tumen for the first time, it wasn’t to defect, but just to secure food. (He lost his grandmother to starvation during the ’90s famine.) He noticed that the Chinese fed their dogs better than most North Koreans ate. When he returned, authorities snatched him, confiscated his rice, and tortured him. Another person was arrested along with him but didn’t get beaten as badly, since the government has a special distaste for the disabled. (Some witnesses say the DPRK conducts experiments on them.) 

Compelling as this is, Ji blows through the details of his life as most of the defectors do: quickly, as though he doesn’t want to impose on us. When I stop him, asking him to tell us how he lost his hand and leg, he calmly and matter-of-factly relates the particulars of his life. Feeding himself during those years meant either begging in the streets, going to the mountains to eat tree bark, or jumping a coal train that came out of one of the prison camps, so he could steal coal and sell it.

Ji and his cohorts would climb aboard while the train was moving, trying to remain unseen by guards, while filling rucksacks with as much coal as they could carry, before jumping off. One night around 2 a.m., he was feeling particularly weak from malnourishment. He passed out and fell. When he woke up, he was sprawled on the tracks, feeling intense pain. The train had run over the left side of his body. His leg was hanging, but not completely detached. When he tried to stop the blood, spurting everywhere, he realized two fingers were missing. None of his friends had jumped off to help, since that would’ve meant no coal, and they couldn’t feed their families. 

Ji screamed for help. His body was freezing, the open wounds freezing even faster than the rest of him. A railway worker found him and took him to the hospital. Ji couldn’t see anything, he was so blinded by coal dust and blood. He required a four-hour surgery, but this being North Korea during the Arduous March (the propagandists’ word for the famine), there was no anesthesia. “Looking back,” Ji says, “I remember the indescribable pain when they were using the saw to sever my limbs.” 

His mother repeatedly passed out in the waiting room from hearing the screams of her son. The surgeons botched the procedure, and had to do a corrective surgery the following day. His leg ended up getting gangrene, and for his father to afford the medicines Ji would need, the family had to go even hungrier than usual. “My younger siblings resorted to eating grass and wild mushrooms,” says Ji. “They were left with stunted growth. For that, I am eternally sorry.” 

Upon recovering, Ji and his brother decided to escape from North Korea. They would run the traps, sending word back to their father, which would make it easier for him to do the same. “Before we left, my father and brother and I had a drink together and toasted one another, saying we will meet again in about three months,” Ji says. “I remember my father crying. I became very heavy-hearted also. I did not know whether I would make it out alive. So I was very sad to see my father sad. We embraced one another very tightly. I took one picture of our family with me.” 

Ji and his brother crossed the Tumen. But Ji had to do so holding a crutch, his useless hand dangling. While wading, he fell into a deep seam in the river. He didn’t know how to swim, and thought he’d die. “I began to swallow water, I felt my life ebbing away.” His brother spotted him, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him across. “I owe my life to my brother,” he says. 

Once on the other side in China, they were hardly safe. The brothers decided to split up, in order to be less conspicuous. Better that only one of them be repatriated, if caught. Using an underground railroad network, it took Ji seven months, instead of three, to wend his way to South Korea. It took his brother even longer. In the interim, the rest of his family left North Korea too, except for his father, still awaiting word from his sons. Once Ji was able to make contact with North Korea, he found out from a friend, who cursed him, that his father had passed away. Ji couldn’t believe it. His dad had been healthy when they parted. What happened? 

His father had grown increasingly despondent, not hearing from his sons. He finally tried to cross the river himself, but was caught by North Korean border guards. He was transferred to a state security department, where he was tortured by agents. His friend wasn’t sure if his father had died in his holding cell, or had gone home to die after being released. “There was some talk,” says Ji, “that because he had no family left, the officials just carried him in a wheelbarrow, and left him in the house.”

The room falls silent. Our translator, Henry, an ordinarily stoic type, openly cries twice while translating, for which he profusely apologizes. Afterwards, Thor approaches me, saying, “Nice work, this isn’t the tearjerker tour, dude.” But what he’s really saying is welcome to the world of the dissident and the defector, the people to whom freedom means something that those of us who are born free can only play at understanding. Ji’s story is just one more variation on an endless theme. And this is how it’s often delivered: matter-of-factly, without pyrotechnics or waterworks or emotional manipulation. The truth stands hard enough by its lonesome. Maybe they’re numb. Maybe they’re just tougher than we are. But that’s how it usually comes, Thor says: “My parents got executed, now pass the ketchup.” 

Thor is ready to leave Seoul to return to wherever he lives—he’s still not saying—so he can get cracking on his drones-for-balloons scheme. His usual approach with HRF’s staff is to use them as a pitch-back net. He throws an idea at them (often a wild screwball) as hard as he can, to see how hard they toss it back in his face. He then uses their suggestions/ridicule to hone the concept or discard it. When he first suggests drones, the pushback is fierce. They tell him drones connote weaponry. They warn him of violating North Korean airspace. (“What are you, the State Department?” Thor scoffs.) Balloons make people happy, they say, drones make people sad. His Silicon Valley buddy, Alex Lloyd, asks why not just drop leaflets from an ICBM? 

Everyone laughs at Thor’s expense. Until they stop laughing, and start thinking. What if it works? Who do they know? How much would it cost? What walls can be moved? Within a couple weeks, Thor is relating their findings: talking payloads and weights and split-bay doors and ram air scoops and a manufacturer he’s located who’ll donate a drone at cost. “This is for real, pal!” he says. 

But first, there’s one more mission to carry out. He’s not here merely to send a message to North Koreans, but to South Koreans, too. To rouse them from slumber. Their brothers and sisters languish right over the border, living through a modern-day Holocaust. Why does some Venezuelan-Norwegian, running an American NGO, have so much skin in the game, and they can hardly be bothered? Thor and the HRF crew, including Fireball, pack several cabs and head for Channel A, a national South Korean news network. 

In our cab, besides Thor and Lloyd, is a new translator. She’s a young, attractive Arizona State University-educated South Korean named Sarah. Lloyd met her last night at a Chinese restaurant called Mao’s. “He texted me like an hour ago to ask if I’d translate,” says Sarah, who’s never been on television. “I’m like, seriously?” 

Thor has a bit of a caper planned today, and so wants to clue Sarah in on what’s in store. He’s brought with him large glossy photos of the three Kims—junior to grandpa—and he’s going to rip them in half on national television. When he says the name Kim Jong-il, Sarah asks who he is. She’s never heard of him. Lloyd and I look at each other in disbelief, but Thor kindly explains. Just to make trouble, I ask Sarah who her favorite Kim is. She thinks for a moment. “Kardashian,” she says. 

Once she understands the plan, she worries aloud that Thor’s ploy might look slightly aggressive. “The anchor could freak out,” he concedes, “but that’s okay. This is what makes live television so exciting. You just need to look straight ahead, and enjoy the ride.” Sarah nods dutifully, scared out of her mind. 

Inside Channel A, Thor, Fireball, and Sarah head to the set, while the rest of us cool our heels in the green room with Fireball’s bodyguard, watching a monitor. The segment begins, and while I have no idea what the South Korean anchors are saying, Thor, with Sarah faithfully translating, talks about the information monopoly North Korea has over its people, and the importance of getting them real information, by way of smuggling or radio broadcasts or balloons. He adds: “What surprises me, what saddens me, is that so many South Koreans are not interested in helping the North Korean people. Some South Koreans don’t care. Some South Koreans are afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of this man, and this man, and this man.” 

He then displays a photo of each Kim, dramatically ripping all of them in half. “Do not be afraid of them!” he commands. “They are afraid of freedom!” (Technically, two of them are already dead, so they’re not afraid of anything. But the youngest Kim has their totalitarian spirit, and so is presumably scared on their behalf.) The anchors look ashen and unsettled, as Fireball mentions the “d” word (drone), and Thor gives them a “hackthemback” T-shirt, inviting their viewers to join the fight. 

In the days that follow, the DPRK will put out a release denouncing the “human scum” and the “plot-breeders of the U.S.” who “conducted [the] anti-DPRK leaflet-scattering operation” and who should “go home at once.” But in the cab on the way back, returns are already coming in. Sarah gets a text from a friend, saying, “I saw you translating on TV, I didn’t know you were interested in human rights. Good on you.” We figure she’ll be happy at her newfound celebrity. Instead, Sarah covers her face, moaning in pain. Her day-job is translating for a cosmetics company. She’d told her team managers she was leaving for two hours on a personal matter, having no idea she’d appear on national television. “I hope no one sees this,” she says. 

“Absolutely everyone saw it,” Thor crows. Though he tells her not to worry. He’ll straighten it out with her boss if she runs into trouble. But only a monster, he offers, would penalize her for caring about the rights of North Koreans. “We spread the love, baby!” he says. “We spread the love!”

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.