SEOUL—A senior North Korean diplomat who vanished from public view while serving as Pyongyang’s acting ambassador to Italy in 2018 has been secretly living in South Korea for over a year, according to South Korean lawmakers briefed by the country’s spy agency.
The whereabouts of the envoy, Jo Song Gil, who the Journal has reported fled with the help of a clandestine group dedicated to toppling Kim Jong Un’s North Korean dictatorship, had been a mystery until the legislators confirmed his presence in South Korea late Tuesday local time.
Mr. Jo, one of the most senior North Korean officials to defect in recent years, and his wife at one point hid in an undisclosed Western country after his escape, according to people familiar with the matter. He arrived in South Korea in July of 2019, the South Korean lawmakers said.
The legislators, a group of ranking members on the South Korean National Assembly’s intelligence committee, said they wouldn’t discuss details of Mr. Jo’s journey to South Korea or disclose where in the country he is living out of concern for his safety, according to lawmaker Ha Tae-keung.
Mr. Ha said the group decided to publicly confirm Mr. Jo’s presence in South Korea after a local TV station on Tuesday said he was in the country. Lawmaker Jeon Hae-cheol, the chairman of the committee, told reporters that Mr. Jo had repeatedly expressed an intent to come to the South, but declined to say more. South Korea’s foreign ministry and spy service declined to comment.
The former North Korean diplomat could be a valuable source of intelligence for the South and its allies, including the U.S., because of his likely ability to shed light on the ways Pyongyang employs its diplomats and others in efforts to evade sanctions and raise cash abroad for the regime.
North Korean diplomats posted to Europe have a long history of helping the Kim regime secure cash through illicit methods, according to a 2018 memoir by Thae Yong Ho, another senior North Korean diplomat who defected to the South four years ago.
Members of Pyongyang’s foreign service were caught smuggling cigarettes, to help pay the maintenance costs of North Korean embassies, Mr. Thae said. In 1999, North Korean officials in Stockholm demanded Israeli officials to give them $1 billion in cash. Pyongyang officials offered to stop selling weapons to the Middle East if Israel accepted. It refused.
More recently in 2017, French authorities failed to catch a North Korean spy who had been using bank accounts in their country. The spy used his status as a staff of an international organization in Europe to help secure visas for other North Korean officials suspected of funneling illicit cash for the regime, according to a United Nations report.
Mr. Jo’s presence in the South also threatens to chill already-frayed relations between the two Koreas, especially if he decides to become an outspoken critic of the North and its leader.
North Korea demolished an inter-Korean liaison office near the demilitarized zone that separates North and South in June, citing Seoul’s failure to clamp down on antiregime North Korea escapees in the South.
News of Mr. Jo’s defection comes just weeks after North Korea’s navy killed a South Korean civil servant. North Korea’s Mr. Kim said he was very sorry for the killing, in a rare, swift apology.
Mr. Thae is now a conservative South Korean lawmaker and an outspoken critic of Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons development and human-rights abuses.
“I’ve known him for 20 years,” Mr. Thae said Wednesday, describing his relationship with Mr. Jo. “In North Korea, if a diplomat escapes and quietly lives in a third country, he’s considered an escapee. If the diplomat goes to South Korea, he’s branded a traitor.”
The families and friends of those considered traitors can face political imprisonment or worse, Mr. Thae said. Mr. Thae said he was concerned about Mr. Jo’s daughter, who he said got separated from her parents during their escape and was taken back to North Korea.
North Korea has lashed out at defectors and, in some cases, tried to kill high-profile escapees who have criticized or leaked intelligence about the ruling Kim family.
In 1997, North Korean agents shot and killed an in-law of the Kim family in front of his South Korean apartment, while multiple assassination attempts against other escapees have been foiled by South Korean authorities, according to South Korean officials and defectors.
“It depends on what acting ambassador Jo decides to do,” said Go Myong-hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Policy Institute, a Seoul-based think tank. “If he becomes a public critic against the North, it’ll complicate relations. If he stays quiet, this incident will probably be forgotten.”
Mr. Jo has a calm and composed character, said Mr. Thae, who was also one of Mr. Jo’s bosses when the two both served at the Pyongyang foreign ministry’s Europe department. Mr. Thae told reporters that Mr. Jo was seen as an Italy and France expert. His father and father-in-law were both senior career diplomats. “He’s from a very upper-class family in North Korea,” Mr. Thae said.
An unknown number of North Korean elites have quietly defected to South Korea like Mr. Jo, defectors and North Korea experts say. Seoul officials have almost without exception respected their goal of staying off the radar of Pyongyang, which is sensitive about the defection of elites because they may encourage other upper-class North Koreans to follow their lead.
Though some like Mr. Thae choose to come out publicly, many live in private, due to fear of endangering relatives still in North Korea, or a wish to avoid media attention. More than 33,000 North Koreans have resettled in the South.
Write to Andrew Jeong at andrew.jeong@wsj.com
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