The Wily Spy Who Risked His Life to Meet North Korea’s Secretive Leader

When the South Korean spy met with Kim Jong-il, he declined the late North Korean leader’s offer of a toast, citing a promise to his mother that he would never drink.

But the undercover agent, masquerading as a businessman, vowed to break his abstinence when the two Koreas reunified, until recently an overriding policy goal of the leaders of both countries.

Park Chae-so, the spy, amused Mr. Kim when the North Korean dictator gave him a bottle of blueberry wine as a parting gift. He asked for another.

“Mr. Chairman, don’t we Koreans say one is one too few?” he said.

Mr. Park’s 1997 meeting with Mr. Kim, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, lasted only 35 minutes. But it was a​ coup for South Korea’s intelligence community: He was its only known undercover agent to penetrate the security cloaking the world’s most secretive regime and finagle an audience with its enigmatic leader.

Until then, Mr. Kim was so reclusive that even his own people had heard his voice only once, in 1992, when he shouted one sentence into the microphone while inspecting a military parade: “Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People’s Army.”