Unravelling the North Korea Enigma - part one

Rachel Minyoung Lee is a Senior Fellow for the Stimson Center’s Korea Program and 38 North, where she focuses on North Korea’s domestic developments and foreign policy. She is also co-chair of the Steering Committee for the North Korea Economic Forum at the George Washington Institute for Korean Studies. Lee was a North Korean propaganda analyst with Open Source Enterprise in the US government from 2000 to 2019. During that time, she wrote on a broad range of North Korean issues, from leadership, domestic politics and economy, and foreign policy, to social and cultural developments. As Analysis Team Lead, Lee headed a team of collection officers and analysts to collect on, research, and analyse North and South Korean issues with implications for Pyongyang’s regime stability and regional security.

Martyn Williams is a Senior Fellow for the Stimson Center’s Korea Program and 38 North. He works on satellite imagery analysis and researches North Korea’s technology, infrastructure, broadcasting, and propaganda. He launched the North Korea Tech website in 2010 and most recently authored reports on the country's digital surveillance infrastructure and smartphone sector.

Jenny Town is a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, Director of Stimson’s Korea Program and the Co-founder and Director of 38 North. Her research areas include North Korea, US-DPRK relations, US-ROK alliance and Northeast Asia regional security. She is also a Visiting Scholar in the Department of East Asia Studies in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at John Hopkins University, an Associate Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a Nonresident Fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies, a Member of the National Committee on North Korea, and an Associate Member of the Council of Korean Americans. She serves on the Editorial Board for Inkstick, an online foreign policy journal for emerging scholars. From 2008-2018, she served as the Assistant Director of the US-Korea Institute at SAIS, and as an expert reviewer for Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index from 2010-2022. Ms. Town holds a BA in East Asian Studies and International Relations from Westmar University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She was named one of Worth Magazine’s “Groundbreakers 2020: 50 Women Changing the World” and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2019.