Earlier this month, a 63-year-old man was arrested in Seoul by the South Korean authorities. They accused him of spying for North Korea -- and it soon turned out, oddly enough, that it wasn't the first time. The man, known only by his last name, "Han," had first arrived in the South back in 1969 as a commando sent by Pyongyang to infiltrate the territory of the capitalist archenemy. Captured by the South's security forces, he spent a term in jail and ultimately decided to defect. After attaining his freedom, he went on to become a successful businessman and an apparently contented member of South Korean society. There was just one problem: He missed his mother, who never left the North.
That all-too-human weakness would prove his undoing. Desperate to see her, he ended up making a deal with the North Korean secret police in 1996. They were happy to oblige, and allowed him to meet with his mother in China in exchange for a renewed vow of loyalty to the North Korean regime. It was only this year, apparently, that South Korean counterintelligence uncovered his double game. Han turned out to be involved in an elaborate plot to assassinate another defector by the name of Hwang Jang Yop: a once high-ranking Northern official who had transferred his loyalties to Seoul decades ago and thus earned himself the No. 1 spot on a North Korean hit list.
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All this should go to show that the scandalous case of Shahram Amiri -- the Iranian scientist who earlier this week announced his decision to return home after apparently defecting to the United States over a year ago -- might not be as unusual as some in the media would have us believe. There is, in fact, a long history of prominent defectors having second thoughts -- and their examples vividly illustrate the complex ways in which the psychology of loyalty and treason can play out on the level of statecraft. One remarkable post-Cold War collection of CIA case studies, Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955-1992, includes a chapter titled "Psychology of Treason," which dwells in some detail on the tricky subject of defectors. The chapter's author, Wilhelm Marbes, observes that "Defection, at least on the part of people who are willing and/or driven to commit treason, is an act of strong feelings. Often it is an act of desperation."
In fact, Marbes writes, politics seems to be one of the least important criteria influencing a defector's decision to switch loyalties: "Contrary to what you might believe, ideology would rank very low on the list of motivations. The reasons are much more likely to be personal, the stuff of soap operas." Most defectors, he notes, are less motivated by lofty political beliefs than by emotional turmoil, romantic entanglements, professional resentments, or family issues. (His "triad of three frequently recurring traits in defectors" includes "immaturity/impulsivity," "sociopathy," and "narcissism.") As Marbes tells it, some early Cold War experiences induced the United States to begin subjecting defectors to medical exams and thorough psychological testing, including polygraphs. Amiri presumably passed a similar battery of tests.
Of course, not even the most sophisticated tests will capture the ebb and flow of a mutable psyche -- as became apparent in the case of Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin, who defected to the United States in 1967 and then opted to return to the Soviet Union in 1984, only to come back to America two years later. Alliyueva, whose mother committed suicide in 1932 (possibly because of ill treatment by Stalin), and who herself had many fleeting marriages, isn't exactly an advertisement for the stability of the defector mindset. And of course there's Lee Harvey Oswald, who renounced his U.S. citizenship in Moscow in 1959 and then changed his mind in 1962, when he and his wife Marina returned to the United States. For Marbes, Oswald was a classic example of the narcissist defector, the product of a doting mother who expects great things from her child. (It should be said, with historical hindsight, that the Marbes diagnosis isn't entirely watertight. Some of the Cold War's most notable defectors, like Kim Philby or Oleg Gordievsky, were spies who clearly had some ideological motivation.)
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