Book Review: Passcode to the Third Floor
Book review of Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider's Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite, by Thae Yong-ho (2024)
Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider’s Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite, by Thae Yong-ho (2024). New York: Columbia University Press.
Despite decades of calls for anthropologists to “study up” (Nader 1973), fieldwork among elite political actors remains difficult, and nowhere more so than in absolutist regimes such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), where extreme secrecy and risk of prosecution obstruct ethnographic access. In this context, Passcode to the Third Floor—a memoir by Thae Yong-ho, former deputy ambassador of the DPRK to the United Kingdom—offers a rare and valuable window into the internal architecture of North Korean bureaucracy, diplomacy, and ideology.
Written in 2018 and newly translated into English in 2024 by Robert Lauler, the memoir is loosely organized as a reverse chronology. It begins with Thae’s defection in 2016 and moves backward through nearly three decades of his diplomatic service to the regime, providing both personal narrative and institutional critique. It is this dual orientation—intimate autobiography on one hand, and critical reflection on North Korea’s state structure on the other—that makes this memoir particularly relevant for anthropologists of work.
Part one, “At the Heart of Pyongyang’s Leadership,” focuses on Thae’s career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here, he discusses the organizational structure of the Kim regime and the historical and ideological bases of its nuclear capacity. Part two, “Emancipation,” shifts to a more personal register, recounting Thae’s upbringing in Pyongyang, his formative experiences while studying abroad in China, and the early awakenings of his disillusionment with the system.
Throughout the book, Thae argues forcefully that Kim Jong-un will never abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons and that peaceful denuclearization is impossible without regime change (xvii). This memoir weaves together vignettes of elite diplomacy with institutional analysis, offering ethnographically rich accounts of bureaucratic rituals and surveillance mechanisms within the ruling Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK) that construct and police ideological conformity, which in turn sustains the regime’s obsession with nuclear weapons.
A core insight of the memoir is Thae’s description of the North Korean government as an example of extreme isolation. Each government department reports vertically to the Supreme Leader, bypassing horizontal coordination entirely. Lines of accountability are always vertical: “Everything is set up in a way that they are reported directly to Kim. For example, if there is a topic that the Foreign Ministry and the WPK’s International Department’s research bureau needed to discuss, they would write up their reports separately to Kim” (182).
No single department possesses comprehensive information about an administrative decision; instead, knowledge and authority are concentrated within the “Third Floor Secretariat”—a behindthe-scenes department supporting Kim Jong-il and later Kim Jong-un. This fragmentation preserves the illusion of Kim’s omniscience, attributing further to Kim’s apotheosis, while preventing departments from forming collaborative alliances that could challenge central authority. Thae shows that this reporting mechanism is not merely an organizational feature but is instead a central technique of power (183).
While the supreme leader monopolizes knowledge and trust, the party ensures compliance through mechanisms such as mutual surveillance, purges, and self-criticism sessions (111–112). As Thae notes, self-criticism is not just a rhetorical gesture but is rather constitutive of one’s survival and moral standing within the WPK. These insights underscore how bureaucratic fragmentation intersects with ideological labor and coercion, a nexus of concern for anthropologists of governance and labor.
One of the most striking stories in the memoir involves Thae’s unintended but crucial role in ending the compulsory children’s mass games—state-orchestrated performances to celebrate Kim Jong-il’s birthday annually in mid-February. In a conversation with the head of the British Foreign Ministry’s North Korea affairs department, Thae was asked whether he would allow his own children to participate in these grueling rehearsals held outdoors during harsh Pyongyang winters. Attempting to defend the regime, Thae replied affirmatively, provoking visible anger in his British counterpart.
Upon Thae’s reporting of the conversation to Pyongyang, two unexpected outcomes ensued: the British ambassador to North Korea was removed, and the DPRK suspended the winter mass games for children. Thae reflects: “I dare say that it was my own meritorious action that made it so North Korean children no longer had to conduct mass games training in the winter. Indeed, the proudest thing I accomplished while working in the UK was putting a halt to these practices in Pyongyang to celebrate Kim Jong-il’s birthday on Feb. 16th” (194). This incident reveals the unpredictable moral consequences of diplomatic labor under authoritarianism. Even minor moments of interpersonal diplomacy—inflected by emotion, ideology, and pride—can reverberate across transnational circuits of policy and affect vulnerable populations.
While Thae is not an anthropologist, his memoir might be useful to anthropologists of work for several reasons. First, the book sheds unprecedented light on elite organizational culture under authoritarianism—a context in which ethnographic fieldwork is often infeasible. Second, Thae’s narrative models a reflexivity that resonates with ethnographic traditions: he expresses shame, moral reckoning, and critical distance from his own past complicities. Third, Passcode to the Third Floor expands how we understand bureaucratic labor—not merely as rule-following, but as an affective and ethical practice. For example, Thae discusses the necessity of feeling the intention of one’s superior as an essential job skill (126), underscoring the affective competencies required to navigate a system built on opacity, hierarchy, and fear.
His experience also raises questions about the precarity of elite labor. As a high-ranking diplomat, Thae lived with privileges unimaginable to ordinary North Koreans—international travel, access to foreign education, proximity to the Kim family—but his status also made him vulnerable to purges, surveillance, and irreversible punishment (207). His life and labor were shaped by the paradox of being both “close to the Sun”—a phrase with a state-sanctioned metaphor that refers to Kim—and constantly at risk of burning.
In conclusion, Thae’s memoir provides extensive material for comparative ethnographic analysis. The state ideology of juche, which emphasizes self-reliance and resistance to foreign influence, functions as both a political doctrine and a workplace ethic (207). Its effects are visible in how officials falsify international reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency (24), how they internalize moral expectations, and how they interpret the labor of loyalty.
Passcode to the Third Floor, read from an ethnographer’s perspective, is a memoir of rare narrative depth, offering insights into bureaucratic life, elite labor, and political morality in one of the opaquest regimes in the world. For anthropologists of work, it provides not only a source of empirical data but is also an invitation to think critically about memoirs as method: as situated, subjective, and invaluable accounts of institutional life. Thae’s testimony challenges anthropologists of work to triangulate across genres and grapple with questions of translation, risk, and positionality—both our interlocutors’ and our own.
Reference
Nader, Laura. 1974. “Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Vintage Books.
