In a country where even movement between towns can require permission, where neighbours monitor each other, and where criticising the regime or questioning the Supreme Leader can have consequences for three generations, a family dared to imagine an escape, and they really did. Not by tunnel, not across the mined frontier towards South Korea, and not through China’s dragnet. The eight of the Kim family escaped North Korea by the sea. It took just two hours, but the high-risk escape needed planning for 10 years.
It began with a father who looked at inland North Korea and concluded that nothing inside it could be repaired. There was no future to inherit.
People seek to escape North Korea, an authoritarian state with heavily restricted freedoms and tight state control on every aspect of life. In contrast, South Korea is a liberal, capitalist democracy. The two Koreas fought the Korean War, which ended in an armistice in 1953, meaning they are technically still at war, with a heavily militarised border that strictly restricts movement across it.
The man told his sons that there is a larger world, and if they were ever to reach it, the ocean would be their only way out.
The idea sounded absurd. They were not fishermen. They did not live on the coast. They knew nothing of tides, engines, patrol routes, or maritime borders. But in authoritarian states, absurdity is often the only available logic. The obvious routes were death traps towards China in the North, or towards the saner part of Korea in the South. So they chose the improbable one, the sea.
Their story was documented in an in-depth CNN report. The younger son, Kim Yi-hyeok, was sent to the coast to begin a life from scratch. For years, he learnt how to fish, how to repair a boat, how weather moved across the Yellow Sea in North Korea’s west, how suspicion moved through villages, and how to look ordinary under surveillance.
He built the kind of trust one must cultivate in police states before taking a radical move. Loyalists of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), security personnel, all had to see him as routine, according to the CNN report.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family waited inland.
But history in a state like North Korea is written by those who decide to escape it. Most of them go to South Korea, before moving to a third country.
Fewer than 35,000 North Koreans have successfully resettled in South Korea since detailed records began in the late 1990s, with the cumulative total reaching around 34,538 by the end of 2025, according to The Korea Times.
Annual arrivals have plummeted in recent years due to tightened controls, peaking at nearly 3,000 in 2009 but dropping to just 63 in 2021 and hovering around 200-236 in 2023-2025, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Unification.
Most defectors are women, and many spend years in third countries before reaching the South.
FISHING BECAME BOTH LIVELIHOOD AND PREPARATION TO ESCAPE NORTH KOREA
Against that backdrop, the Kim family’s method stood out.
Fishing became both livelihood and preparation. According to Kim Il-hyeok, they used their work at sea to study patrol patterns and identify gaps in surveillance near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the disputed maritime boundary between North and South Korea, according to the CNN report.
“We calculated how soon the patrol can detect us while crossing the NLL,” Kim Il-hyeok was quoted as saying by CNN.
He told CNN that they observed a pattern, that patrol responses were quicker during the day and slower at night. Over time, repeated encounters with maritime authorities became part of their preparation. On several occasions, they were stopped, questioned, and treated as serious offenders. Each time, however, they bribed guards who allowed them to continue fishing near restricted waters. Because they always returned, suspicion gradually eased.
The family’s relative stability also helped conceal their intentions.
Kim Il-hyeok said their father had traded antiques and gold and sold coal transported by train, giving them a degree of financial security uncommon in much of the country. At home, they owned a large state-approved television, but also a smaller set smuggled from China. That second TV opened a fragile window into South Korea.
Through it, they watched broadcasts from Seoul, said the CNN report. They saw glimpses of a different daily life, consumer comfort, and social freedom that contrasted sharply with their own reality. Over time, those images reshaped what they believed was possible.
AN URGENCY OVERTOOK THE PLAN TO ESCAPE
By May 2023, an urgency overtook their planning to escape. Kim Il-hyeok’s wife was pregnant, and the family decided they could not wait for another season.
The night of the escape came during heavy rain along the coast, when poor weather reduced radar visibility. Under those conditions, they bribed a guard and obtained permission to go fishing in the Yellow Sea, said the CNN report.
But fishing was only the cover.
The women in the family were moved secretly to a designated point along the shoreline. Kim Il-hyeok’s pregnant wife, his mother, his sister-in-law, and Kim Yi-hyeok’s mother-in-law all boarded the vessel. The brothers were joined by their brother-in-law, the CNN report said.
Kim Yi-hyeok’s two young children, aged four and six, were hidden inside burlap sacks so they would remain silent during the journey.
The boat then moved away from the coast.
“The sound of my own heartbeat was louder than the engine,” Kim Il-hyeok later said, describing the journey to CNN.
For roughly two hours, they navigated open water, moving through darkness toward the maritime boundary. The risk was that if detected by North Korean patrols, they would be either put in prison forever, or killed.
But luck was in their favour and they crossed the Northern Limit Line.
They first saw Yeonpyeong Island ahead. Kim Il-hyeok turned on a searchlight, signalling their presence.
Soon after, a South Korean naval vessel approached. Through a loudspeaker, the crew asked for their intentions. The family responded that they had defected from North Korea.
South Korean authorities confirmed their arrival and processed their defection, according to the CNN report.
What’s extraordinary about the Kim family’s story is not the escape itself but the decade of preparation behind it. In a system designed to eliminate exits, they built one by learning how to disappear in plain sight.
– Ends
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