He chose poorly.

This story is about someone who made a decision that cost him his family, because he believed a lie.  The lie?  Socialism works.  And it's working in North Korea.

Why did he go there?  It's a story that has been repeated endlessly.

In 1985, North Korean agents approached Oh Kil-nam and suggested he defect.The agents offered him an important job working as an economist for the North Korean government and promised to provide free treatment for his wife's hepatitis.Oh took the offer seriously. He had just completed his PhD in Germany on a Marxist economist. Back at home in South Korea, he had been active in left-wing groups opposed to the country's authoritarian regime.

So a middle aged Korean, a left-winger, believes that North Korea could not be as bad as people said. And why did he believe it?   Because that's what he had been taught.

Richard Fernandez:

Because that’s what they taught him in school. That’s what they taught him in the sophisticated cafes. That was the received wisdom. And none of it was true.

Even now Oh Kil-nam might wander, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, from meeting to meeting, to tell his doleful tale. But who would believe him?  At the schools, sophisticated cafes, at all the in-places they would turn away and listen in preference to those celebrity academics who taught Oh his Marxist brand of economics, or to those millionaire actors who claim that North Korea is the Worker’s Paradise even if — or perchance because — they will never go there.

What's the difference between our homegrown leftists and Oh?  

Oh took 3 innocents to their doom. But the intellectuals who led Oh are piping along a whole civilization. And Oh, for all his foolishness, is the better man than they. For what is the moral difference between Oh Kil-nam and a Bill Ayers except that Oh Kil-nam had the courage to live out his convictions where Ayers did not?  The advantage Ayers has over Oh is not that Ayers is braver, but he secretly knows better. “Guilty as hell but free as a bird.” That’s tellin’ ‘em Bill.

Oh put his faith in what he professed.  Ayers never did.  His family wealth insulated him from the consequences of his acts and he was able to give his acolyte, Barack Obama, a boost in his quest to destroy the country they both despise.