Little Pyongyang

There is perhaps one thing that unites radicals and revolutionaries from all countries, and most ages: London. At some point or another, most of the great political dissenters and activists, Voltaire, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Sun Yat-sen and even Ho Chi Minh have found themselves on the streets of our capital, plotting and writing in tiny back rooms. For 300 hundred years, it has been famous for its political tolerance in a temperamental and oppressive world. And as I’ve discovered, London is once again a home to revolutionaries; to defectors from the planet’s most oppressive regime.

November

I am sitting in a small underground room lit by a dingy orange lamp. A small group of North Korean exiles sit around me. It is the first meeting of their new resistance group and at the head of the table is Kim Jooil, their leader. He is talking about how to overthrow the Communist regime in Pyongyang.