North Korea's personal shopper has tales to tell

Kim Jong Ryul emerges from years of lying low in Austria as he launches a book about his former work procuring luxury items for the ruling Kims as their people suffered. He fears for his life.

By Julia Damianova
LA Times
April 4, 2010

Reporting from Vienna - Kim Jong Ryul is a slightly built and lively 75-year-old with large glasses and a gray suit that seems several sizes too big. But Kim wears it anyway. It is virtually his only connection to his past.

"This is the suit I had on," the North Korean native explains, "when I escaped."

About 15 years ago, Kim says, he exchanged his upper-echelon North Korean government job for a lonely underground existence in Austria, where he remains in constant fear of assassination.

Kim is one of thousands who in recent years have run from the North Korean government's grip. But his personal history, the subject of a new book, offers a rare taste of a higher-level North Korean's contempt for his country's totalitarian rulers, an anger that gave him the will to turn his back on his life and his loved ones.

(Continued here.)