Faith, her two preschool-age children, and five other North Koreans hiked on a mud path through farm­land and jungle, following a Vietnamese man in silence, for speaking Korean would blow their cover to anyone they passed. At the end of the trail, a soldier appeared, guarding a bridge over a river, and their guide hailed him. Safety lay just beyond the soldier. She waited for him to respond. In this moment, she would discover if her bravery had won a better life for herself and her children – or if she had doomed them all.

Faith

Faith was born in the People’s Paradise of North Korea in the late 1970s. There her easy life was envied by the rest of the world – or at least that was what she was taught. At home, she and her mother were supposed to polish their household portrait of the smiling Great Leader each day, though they only cleaned it in advance of inspections, since they could be punished if it wasn’t shiny enough. A giant version of that portrait greeted her at every school, factory and railroad station. And after turning 16, like all adults, she pinned a button with the portrait over her heart each morning.

Of course, Faith’s actual life was nothing like what the dictatorship’s propaganda depicted. In the mid-1990s, as a teenager, she survived a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people and reduced the population to scav­eng­ing pine bark, insects and frogs. But if the ever-present secret police caught anyone complaining, the whiners could find themselves in the gulags, so Faith sang patriotic songs and echoed the slogan that North Koreans had “nothing to envy” about the lives of foreigners.

But, because Faith lived just a few kilometres from the heavily guarded Chinese border, sometimes people from her hometown would cross the river, snaking through the mountains to search for food, and by the mid-2000s, she had become exposed to goods smuggled in from outside – especially DVDs of South Korean soap operas.

North Koreans are taught that South Koreans are an impoverished people ground beneath the heels of American “imperialist wolves”, so images of South Korea’s futuristic megalopolises amazed her, especially when she compared them with the dreary Soviet-style farming town where she grew up. But what really kept her watching through the night, while keeping an ear out for police, were the love stories. In North Korean cinema, heroines fall for the Great Leader and the Party, so she was amazed by glimpses of a world in which romance came first.

Such a life, however, was beyond her grasp. She married and had a child. By 2012, she was relatively well-off, illegally trading mountain herbs. But though North Koreans were no longer starving in the streets, life remained bleak. (A 2018 United Nations report found that 43.4 per cent of North Koreans are undernourished.)

Still she was sick of “voluntary” communal-labour assignments, such as shovelling gravel to build roads, and the lies that under­girded North Korea’s “rotten” society. She was also having problems with her husband. So when cross-border smugglers told her they could get her a job in China, from which she could earn money to ultimately buy passage to South Korea, she decided to leave her husband and child behind, and risk the gulags trying to sneak out of the country.

Once she had saved up enough in China, she told herself, she would pay the smugglers to bring her child over the border to a better life. When Faith arrived in China, however, the smugglers turned out to be merch­ants in North Korean women, exploiting the gender im­balance created by China’s one-child policy – which uninten­tionally encouraged patriarchal parents to abort female fetuses, creating a surplus of 30 million Chinese men, thousands of whom are so desperate for partners that they buy North Korean wives.

“I didn’t know anyone and I couldn’t speak the language,” Faith would later say, “so what could I do?” Several bids were made before she was ulti­mately auctioned off for about US$800 to a poor Chinese farmer.

Faith’s days became an endless blur of farm and household labour. During the first two years, before she learned Mandarin, she com­municated through hand gestures. She considered herself lucky, as “my husband had a kind heart”, meaning that he didn’t beat or berate her like many other husbands she had heard about. “Still, it was like prison,” as her in-laws watched her like wardens to keep her from running away. After she had two more children with her second husband, she constantly worried that the three of them would be sent back to North Korea.

Four years into her captivity in China, she had become even more depressed than she had been in her previous life. Despite Faith’s new in-laws’ efforts to isolate her from the six other North Korean brides in the village, the women eventually found ways to scheme together about how to flee to South Korea. There were shadowy brokers, they had learned, who, for several thousand dollars, could smuggle you to a South Korean embassy in Southeast Asia.

Faith had been betrayed by smugglers once. But in 2016, two of the North Korean women from her village took the leap and paid for the high-risk passage. When they ulti­mately arrived safely in Seoul, the women connected their broker to Faith. On a mobile phone call, Faith had to admit to the businessman that she lacked the money – but rather than cutting her off, as she had feared, he explained that there might be someone who could help. Eventually she was told that she had been earmarked by the North Korean Underground Railroad.

Normally it would be the responsibility of the United Nations to assist the thousands of North Koreans hiding in China. Instead, because China labels North Koreans “economic migrants” rather than refugees at the behest of its ally, North Korea, “it is up to the heroic civilians of the Underground Railroad to risk their lives to do what the international community is prevented from doing by China”, says Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a United States non-profit that promotes human rights abroad.

Over two decades, activists have built up a network of secret routes and safe houses to transport refugees across Asia and, in doing so, have managed to succeed where some of the world’s most powerful institutions have failed.

Faith wanted to flee as soon as possible, but she refused to abandon her children born in China, which meant the escape had to wait until late 2017, when her Chinese husband departed for an extended trip. She left no note before ushering the two youngsters into a prearranged car. She didn’t want to hurt her husband, but what choice did she have? The car drove her to a safe house in a major northern Chinese city, and she received a call.

“Are you OK?” a soft masculine voice asked. “I’ve been praying for your safety.” The mysterious man explained that he was a leader of the Underground Railroad and that from there on out, all she had to do was follow the directions of his agents, whom he would be carefully managing from afar. The man on the phone was “Stephen Kim”.

“Kim is one of the key activists who still has the con­tacts, knowledge and tenaciousness to get North Korean defectors out,” says Phil Robertson, the deputy director for the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. “Getting people out has become infinitely harder, and while others have dropped out, he has doubled down.”

The Mission

Stephen Kim’s life is shrouded in legend. For leading the rescue of more than 700 North Koreans, he has been called “the Oskar Schindler of North Korea”. Associates refer to him by the code name Superman.

In the autumn of 2018, at a private location in Seoul, I was struck by his constant wry smile – the kind that suggests someone who knows something they aren’t telling you. After months of unsuccessfully attempting to arrange our first interview through an intermediary, Kim had suddenly agreed to meet. “People need to know that the Underground Railroad is under attack by Kim Jong-un and China,” he explained. “And they need to do something about this and help the North Koreans.”

For safety, Kim doesn’t want too much known about his past, but there are two facts that he feels are important in order to understand him. First, his father grew up in what became North Korea before he moved to modern-day South Korea to run a wholesale vegetable business. Sometime after that, the Korean peninsula was split into two nations and the Korean war broke out. Thus, while Kim grew up in the South, he thought of North Koreans as long-lost family. Second, Kim’s father was Christian, and though he and his family eventually stopped attending church, Kim never forgot Jesus.

But in the mid-1990s, it was profit and not religion that was on Kim’s mind as he sourced cheap textiles from the Chinese provinces lining the North Korean border. Striding the streets, a besuited high roller, he tells of passing skeletal North Korean children pleading for food, and how if he had time, he would buy them bowls of dog soup, renowned for its high calorie count. Listening to their horror stories of the famine just across the river, Kim was deeply moved – but he had an international business to run. That is, until around 1997, when he went bankrupt.

His family was forced to move into a tiny apartment with a shared bathroom in the Chinese port city of Dalian. He contemplated committing suicide. But then, in what felt like divine inspiration, he remembered the impover­ished North Korean street kids who still had the will to live. He swore to rededicate his life to them and to Jesus. Using the last of his savings, and eventually money he earned export­ing beans and North Korean antiques, Kim rented several cheap apartments and began inviting dozens of North Korean refugees – “wandering swallows”, as the homeless young people were called – to live in them.

Kim remembered that one refugee in his mid-teens, Kang Won-cheol, was so malnourished when Kim met him that his hair had yellowed. Kim’s offer might have seemed strange at first, for after a lifetime spent in a society where citizens are encouraged to inform on one another, many North Koreans are suspicious of unconditional help. But Kim and his wife kept the rice cooker going constantly and spent their days teaching the wandering swallows basic scholastic lessons and the Bible, which Kang distinguish­­ed himself in learning. Kang soon realised that Kim’s generosity was genuine: “He opened my heart,” Kang says, “and changed my life.” Kang became so dear to him that Kim called him “son”.

Kim was not alone in his work. South Korea is the bastion of Christianity in East Asia, and by the late 1990s many South Korean missionaries were sneaking into China to assist North Koreans. Most missionaries, however, had more zeal than discretion – one recalled with horror his colleagues openly discussing their work in hotel lobbies – and soon their work began to attract the attention of the Chinese government, which strictly controls religious expression. Before long, Chinese police were arresting missionaries and parishioners alike. Kim was more cautious than most, ordering that the doors to his safe houses be opened only to a special knock and keeping ropes by the back windows, in case inhabitants needed to rappel out. After a few years, however, his luck ran out.

The Escape

Kang had been captured in a police raid on his safe house, and locked in a conference room on the seventh floor of police headquarters. It was better than jail, but Kang was terrified he would be repatriated to the gulags. He discovered one of the conference-room windows was unlocked and just within reach was a gutter spout. In the early hours of the morning, Kang grasped hold of the pipe and shimmied down. His hands slipped. He began to skid – but at the last moment, he clamped back on. When he reached the ground, he says, he felt it was a “miracle”, and ran to tell Kim.

It was clear the city was no longer safe. Kim and Kang sneaked across the border into Mongolia, along with two Chinese-Korean guides and four other wandering swallows, divided into two teams. For much of the two-day trip, Kang slept, nestled up against Kim in taxis, trains and buses.

On arrival, the group checked into two cheap inns, one for the adults and the other for the teenagers. Then, in the last daylight, they scouted the route the children would take across the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert, divided only by a high metal fence. The next morning, one of the guides was sent out to check the escape route again, accompanied by a refugee. Before long, the guide telephoned Kim. He and the refugee had been picked up by the Chinese police, and he was calling on the police’s orders to tell Kim to surrender.

Kim frantically telephoned the wandering swallows at their inn and told them to hide until night and then cross the border on their own. The police burst into Kim’s room as he flushed the shreds of the group’s maps and documents down the toilet. They handcuffed him. During questioning, the beatings began.

After dark, Kang and the others dug with their hands through the frigid sand under the border fence. It took them six hours, he says. When they finally reached the other side, they hoped Mongolian soldiers would arrest them – and eventually turn them over to the South Korean embassy. But they instead found themselves in a wasteland. Kang led the others toward a glow on the horizon until eventually they reached a town. There, Kang says, “I was happy to be caught by the police for once.”

After a couple of weeks’ processing in the South Korean embassy of Mongolia, Kang was finally flown to Seoul. Eighteen years later, I met him there in a cafe. His short stature marked him as a survivor of the North Korean famine, but his stylish streetwear camouflaged him among the surrounding South Korean hipsters.

On arriving in his new home, he had completed the government’s months-long crash course on adjusting to South Korea, studying everything from how to use subways to what capitalism means. Over the years since, he has worked on a factory line, eventually graduated from university, and most recently got a job at the South Korean agency that resettles North Korean refugees.

Several months after his escape, when Kang finally saw Kim, the newly freed man had trouble recognising his saviour because Kim had lost so much weight and had his head shaved in prison. Kim’s wife, funded by family and a non-governmental organisation, had paid a huge bribe for his freedom. Lingering pain from fistfights with other prisoners and the police beatings stiffened Kim’s move­ments. When Kim explained that he had been tortured in prison, Kang wept.

“Stephen sacrifices a lot for people like me,” Kang said. “I will never forget that.”

Faith Flees

In late 2017, Faith, her children, and five other North Koreans were given stylish clothes so they would not stand out among the better-dressed Chinese, and were matched with Chinese ID cards from a stash used by each group of defectors, a recent necessity for slipping through China’s “smart city” surveillance systems.

For the first week, Faith mostly just saw the insides of sleeper buses, with occasional glimpses of slumbering cities and moonlit countryside. As much as possible, she and the other North Koreans pretended to be asleep, with hoodies pulled over their faces, to avoid talking to ticket conductors or other officials. An agent handled all interactions with authorities. Each morning, when the defectors arrived in a new city, a fresh agent hurried them to a prearranged safe house, then, come evening, they were rushed onward to the next destination.

On long bus rides, Faith struggled to keep her two children, who had to squeeze with her onto a single level of a bunk bed, from tantrums that might expose the group. Her single comfort came when Kim called to ask how she was doing. He explained that he was directing the agents who were leading her. Just talking to him reassured her; the kindness he was displaying would have been unimaginable in North Korea, and she hoped everyone in the South was like this.

The Underground Railroad

After two months in the Chinese jail, “I didn’t want to do the work any more,” Kim says. “I was broken.” But he felt God intervened. “Until then, I wasn’t the kind of Christian who directly experienced many miracles,” but he had visions inspiring him to con­tinue the mission. By mid-2002, Kim was again living in northern China, and with funds from the NGO the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), he was personal­ly guiding a small number of refugees to South Korean embassies in Southeast Asia.

“No one has a perfect bird’s-eye view of the history of the Underground Railroad,” says Tim Peters, the founder and director of Helping Hands Korea, a prominent rescue NGO that has saved more than 1,000 people, “as all rescue organisations silo their information,” given the sensitive nature of the work.

That said, after talking to 13 people involved in the Under­­­ground Railroad, the following seems clear: the indivi­dual efforts of several dozen South Korean, American, Japanese and Chinese activists in the late 1990s had coalesced into several formal organisations by the early 2000s. Some helped refugees reach South Korean and other sympathetic embassies in China until security became too tight. Others favoured the Mongolian route, before China sealed it in the mid-2000s. This meant the primary way out was to cross all of China and much of Southeast Asia.

Although North and South Korea are divided only by the impenetrably fortified 4km-wide demilitarised zone, the journey between the nations had become one of 10,000km.

As the Underground Railroad grew, so did the number of North Koreans arriving in Seoul. In 2001, Kang was one of just over 1,000 arrivals. By 2007, that number had risen to more than 2,500. This success, however, prompted China to crack down. The missionaries had little experience running clandestine networks, and many were jailed or disappeared.

Kim retained his cover as a business­man but increasingly found himself harassed by Chinese police. By 2005, for fear of attracting attention to his family, he was staying away from their apartment for months at a time. Kim’s two sons were still in junior school, and he explained his absences by telling them he was doing a “good thing for God”.

“It was hard having a father who could never stay with us more than a week or two,” says Kim’s son David, “and struggling financially […] Now, though, I understand that my father is just wonderful.”

At the end of each too-short visit, Kim remembers, “My children would always say, ‘Don’t leave us!’” But, Kim explains, “I chose to help the North Koreans because my family could at least survive without the help. I feel like I’ve given my lovely family too much suffering.”

Eventually, in 2006, Kim was told by contacts within the Chinese police to get out of the country. By then he also feared a North Korean assassination attempt. He arranged for his family to move to the US. Kim had hoped to accom­pany them “because I just wanted to hide for a few years and live with them”. But immigration issues likely related to his arrests prevented him from entering the US.

Kim hadn’t explained the length of the impending separa­tion, but at the airport, even though “he was saying, ‘Have fun over there’ and throwing around jokes,” David recalls, “I could tell my dad was sad.” David started crying. Kim lifted his son off the ground in a hug and told him, “I love you.” That was goodbye. A decade later, they still had not seen each other in person again.

Around 2008, China tightened security ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and Pyongyang pressured governments in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to increase their arrests of refugees, whom they would repatriate. “It still really hurts,” Kim says. “Many of my friends were lost.”

No one was prepared when North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died in 2011, and power passed to his 20-something son, Kim Jong-un, who made it his priority to destroy the Underground Railroad. One of his first orders was for guards to shoot anyone caught defecting over the border. He boosted the number of border guards and installed tens of thousands of surveillance cameras. He also persuaded China to further crack down on the Under­ground Railroad within its borders. The year before Jong-un took power, 2,706 refugees made it to freedom. The next year, 2012, only 1,502 succeeded.

Kim and NKHR had gone their separate ways after working together in the early 2000s, but he returned to the NGO in 2010. Soon he had nearly doubled the number of refugees NKHR brought out annually. An NKHR spokes­person confirmed that from 2010 to 2018, Kim rescued about 700 refugees for the organisation. (Kim also receives funds from other organisations and spends his own money to rescue refugees.)

Kim was finally forced to relocate to Seoul, because, he says, “the police would follow me even to the bathroom” in China. From there, he has become a remote overseer, using his contacts from his time in China to handle things on the ground. In the autumn of 2018, Kim told me that he relied on seven brokers working for him full-time, each with their own team of part-timers, such as taxi drivers and safe-house workers. This was the network that Kim activated to rescue Faith in 2017.

Arrival

As Faith journeyed across Asia, Kim kept close tabs on her group and steered them via encrypted com­munications with his agents, doling out payments via wire transfers. (An escape costs about US$2,000 to US$2,500 per person.) During Faith’s escape attempt, security was tight in the Laos-China region, where today’s standard route has refugees hike through jungles into Laos and cross the Mekong River on fishing boats into Thailand. So instead, Kim piloted Faith’s group on a relatively new and risky route, towards Vietnam, planning to extract them through the South Korean embassy in Cambodia.

By then, in 2017, the situation was so critical, with wide­spread arrests and only 1,127 refugees making it to freedom, that some activists worried for the future of the Under­ground Railroad. “My fear is that we will continue to see a decline in escapees,” says Sokeel Park, a director for the NGO Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), which has rescued more than 1,000 refugees, “with escapees possibly dimini­sh­ing to a few hundred annually in the future.” Other activists worried that if the Thailand route closed, there would be no viable alternative to handle large numbers of refugees.

By the end of 2018, the seven public rescue organisa­tions had saved at least 5,000 North Koreans, according to numbers provided by them. (Experts caution that it is impossible to check such figures.) “The charitable groups are there through thick and thin,” says Peters. “People who do it for money, once conditions get tough, they disappear.”

Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of a book on the subject, says that without the Underground Railroad, the world would lose its best source of information about what goes on inside the secretive regime – escapees. And, she explains, the smuggled mobile phones, flash drives, radios and DVDs that flow back up the Underground Railroad into North Korea are a subversive force, “helping to sow discord and nurture dissent” – which makes it, perhaps, the greatest threat to the regime.

And so it was, in 2017, that Faith fearfully watched her guide hail the Vietnamese soldier barring the group’s path, at the same border where many refugees have been detain­ed. But her fear eased when the guard reacted with the easy body language of a man accepting a bribe. A few steps later, she had left China behind.

From there, they rode buses south through Vietnam, and slipped into Cambodia at night on motorbikes without incident. In Phnom Penh, a priest led Faith past intimidating guards, and the moment she set foot in the South Korean embassy, she was recog­nised as a citizen. After two months of paper­work, she boarded a plane to Seoul. It was her first flight.

Like many defectors, Faith struggled to adapt to South Korea. When I met her at her subsidised flat in the autumn of 2018, she still had the haggard air of someone learning to navigate welfare programmes and raise two children by herself in an alien country. Watching South Koreans throw away lightly used sweatshirts and shoes, she said she dreamed of giving them to the family she’d left behind in North Korea.

She had joined the modest church that Kim pastors and one Sunday, I joined Faith and Kim there. To open the service, Kim instructed his parishion­ers to pass the peace. Worshippers stretched out their hands and sang a greeting to one another, and Faith and her children reach­ed back, glowing with joy. Kim closed his sermon by announ­cing that with the church’s help, eight North Koreans had been rescued that week. After the service, Kim led me to his office, where he showed me a map of North Korea on which were pinned eight crosses – memorials for missionaries who had been caught crossing back into North Korea.

The End of the Line

Doubts have been raised about many North Korean escape stories, not only because they can be impos­sible to fact-check, but also because sources often have an agenda. As journalist Suki Kim wrote about the Underground Railroad in Harper’s magazine, “the story was everything in [this] business”, since rescue organisa­tions need to raise money and activ­ists seek to highlight North Korea’s human-rights abuses.

Over the next few months, as I cross-checked Stephen Kim’s stories, I found his version of events was sometimes more sensational than what others remember­ed. For example, he described Kang as being so malnour­ished when he found him that his hair had turned yellow. Kang himself denied this. His numbers often seemed inflated – as with his claim that he has rescued 3,500 refugees. NKHR confirmed that he had rescued about 700, and he has certainly saved more by himself, but experts suggested to me it is improbable that he has brought so many North Koreans into South Korea.

“Sometimes I felt that Stephen Kim exaggerated to gain credit in the past,” says Young-ja Kim, his long-time associ­ate at NKHR, “but he has gotten better about that since we started working together with him again after 2010,” after NKHR had severed its relationship with Kim in the early 2000s.

Then I learned that Faith was questioning the trust she placed in him. She was working with Nehemiah Global Initiative (NGI), another NGO that financially supports Kim’s rescues, when she realised the refugees NGI assisted weren’t supposed to be paying for their escapes. Faith says she was asked to pay US$1,000, with Kim and NKHR subsidising the remainder. At the time, Faith considered herself lucky, as she had never expected such generosity. But now she wondered if something inappropriate had taken place.

When she informed NGI, the organisation checked with more than 50 refugees whom it had paid Kim to rescue, who told NGI they had been charged similar fees, even though NGI had believed they were paying all the expenses. Kenneth Bae, NGI’s director, says, “We realised that the amount of money Stephen paid brokers for rescues was less than the amount of money we had given him.”

When I met Kim in Seoul early this year, he vehemently denied misappropriating the money. “I am really heart­broken,” he said, “and I feel this situation is unfair,” that the conflict resulted from a misunderstanding: NKHR only pays for rescues starting from a specific northern Chinese city and refugees are responsible for the costs incurred while getting there – which often means being charged for a private car to bring them from outlying villages.

He said he had paid Faith’s US$1,000 fee; Faith denies this. Kim did acknowledge not all of NGI’s money was spent directly on rescuing North Koreans; some was used for operational expenses such as international calls and bribing Chinese police. Kim insisted that NGI’s blaming him showed the organisation “doesn’t know anything realis­tic about rescue operations”.

The last time I met Stephen Kim in Seoul, his exhausted face showed the toll the scandal had taken on him. The mythic aura, the mysterious smile, had vanished. There was much I would never know about him, but he seemed freshly human: a man both heroic and flawed. But, he insisted, “I have God on my side.”

In early 2019, Faith took a bus to the demilitarised zone, the heavily guarded no-man’s-land that divides the two Koreas, just 55km north of Seoul. As foreigners and South Koreans gawked and snapped photos from a tourist over­look, she stared at the low mountains of North Korea. She could not help thinking of the family she had left behind there. She had little chance of ever seeing them again. Unless they, too, took the Underground Railroad. ■

A previous version of this story appeared in GQ and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.