FOREWORD SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA Early in 2015, Shin Dong-hyuk changed his story. He told me by telephone that his life in the North Korean gulag differed from what he had been telling government leaders, human rights activists, and journalists like me. As his biographer, it was a stomach-wrenching revelation. It was also news. In the nearly three years since Escape from Camp 14 was published, Shin had become the single most famous witness to North Korea''s cruelty to its own people. He posed for photographs with the American secretary of state, received human rights awards, and traveled the world to appear on television news programs like 60 Minutes . His story helped launch an unprecedented United Nations inquiry that accused North Korea''s leaders of crimes against humanity. When I got off the phone with Shin, I contacted the Washington Post (for which I had first written about him) and released all I then knew about his revised story.

Then I flew to Seoul, where Shin lives, to find out more. This foreword explains what I learned. In two weeks of conversations, Shin was less secretive and more talkative than he had ever been during long rounds of interviews with me dating back to 2008. He seemed relieved to be correcting a story he felt had become a kind of prison. Shin told me that when he defected to South Korea in 2006, he made a panicky, shame-driven decision to conceal and reorder pivotal episodes of his life in the gulag. He hid his role in the execution of his mother and brother. He omitted a singularly painful session of torture that shattered his faith in himself. He did not mention that he lived most of his youth in a political prison that was not Camp 14.

He told this version of his life to interrogators from South Korean intelligence and the U.S. Army. He then repeated the narrative for nearly nine years, rarely changing a single detail. Shin told me he is now determined to tell the truth. Regrettably, he has told me this before. It seems prudent to expect more revisions. Other survivors of the camps are angry at Shin, accusing him of undermining their truthfulness and weakening the international campaign to pressure North Korea to shut down the gulag.

In assessing Shin''s credibility and the changes in his story, it is important to know that he has multiple scars consistent with extreme torture.1 Trauma victims like him tend to struggle with the truth, especially in the linear narrative form that journalists, judges, and policy makers are best able to understand. The memories of trauma victims are often fragmented and out of sequence,2 and the stories they tell can be shields behind which they try to hide. "The most genuine narratives of going through political violence are never completely coherent or finalized," said Dr. Stevan M. Weine, a specialist on the impact of political violence and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has treated trauma and studied trauma victims from Bosnia, Kosovo, Central Asia, and Africa. Between conversations with Shin in Seoul, I telephoned Weine and told him about Shin''s evolving story.

"When someone goes through profound trauma and I don''t hear a disjointed story, I am suspicious," he told me. "Shin appears to have been exposed to prolonged and repeated torture. We can expect that this would have a major impact on every aspect of who he is, on his memory, his emotional regulation, his ability to relate to others, his willingness to trust, his sense of place in the world, and the way he gives his testimony." In Escape from Camp 14 , I wrote that there was no way to fact-check many parts of Shin''s story because North Korea is largely closed to the outside world and it denies that political labor camps exist. But other gulag survivors had told me Shin knew things only an insider could know. Human rights investigators who had talked with scores of camp survivors found his testimony credible and precise. When this book appeared, Shin had already become a key primary source for major reports on the North Korean gulag. Still, as I emphasized in the book, I worried about his capacity for truthfulness.

I wrote that he had repeatedly lied to me. Two chapters in Escape from Camp 14 present him as an unreliable narrator of his own life. In retrospect, I should have done more to examine the psychological dimensions of his relation to truth. It would have prepared me for what Shin disclosed in 2015, more than six years after we met and started working on the manuscript. -- The story Shin now tells is considerably more complex--and in some ways more disturbing--than the one he told upon his arrival in South Korea in 2006. In the new version, he escaped twice to China, not once. He lived in two bordering political prison camps, not just Camp 14. In his revised story, Shin said he was born in Camp 14, a "total control zone," but when he was six or seven the border of that camp shifted.

His home village, he said, was then incorporated into Camp 18, the slightly less brutal prison next door. North Korean government records seem to support his new version but do not conclusively prove it, as I will explain below. In any case, all the available evidence suggests that he was born and raised in a political prison. In Escape from Camp 14 , Shin said that when he was a small boy in the camp, he lived among children and adults who were destined to be worked to death as slaves without any possibility of release. As such, they were not allowed to see photographs of Great Leader Kim Il Sung or Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. But when his village became part of Camp 18, Shin said his status improved marginally. The food was no better; indeed, he said there was less of it. Another Camp 18 survivor confirms this irony, saying that because Camp 14 had better farms, it always had slightly more food.

In Camp 18, Shin did see photos of the Kims. He was also issued, for the first time, the uniform of a North Korean school pupil. While public executions for attempted escape were common in Camp 18, Shin said that as he grew up, prisoners were paid with food coupons for their work and, over time, some were released and allowed to become ordinary residents of North Korea. These revisions in his story, while significant, do not alter the evidence of torture on Shin''s body. Indeed, he now says he was tortured more extensively by prison guards than he had previously been willing to admit. In addition to being burned over a fire and hung by shackles from his ankles, which he had earlier described, he said guards used pliers to rip out his fingernails. Scars on his hands and the partial amputation of one finger support the claim. "Shin''s body shows more scars from torture than any camp survivor I know who has come to South Korea, and I have met almost all of them," said Ahn Myeong Chul, a former North Korean prison guard who for seven years worked for the National Security Agency, known as the Bowibu, the feared political police force that runs the country''s most notorious prisons, including Camp 14.

Ahn is now executive director of NK Watch, a human rights group in Seoul, and knows Shin well. "The scars prove to me that Shin was tortured at a Bowibu detention center," said Ahn, who sees Shin''s scars as signature work of his previous employer. Shin buried his memory of fingernail torture--and kept it from the world for nearly a decade--because he said it had been unbearable, physically and psychologically. "I couldn''t handle it," he said. "I tried to scrunch my fingers up so they couldn''t pull out more fingernails." Shin said this infuriated the guards, who forcibly straightened out the middle finger on his right hand and smashed the end of it with some kind of club. The blow effectively amputated the finger up to the first knuckle. Previously, Shin had said that guards cut off that part of his finger with a knife, as punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp uniform factory.

But he now says he made up that story because he was ashamed of how he had been "broken" by torture. In 2010, Shin admitted to me that when he first arrived in South Korea, he concealed how his mother and brother got caught--and were later executed--for planning an escape from prison camp. They were caught, he told me, because he betrayed their plans to a guard. An extended account of that betrayal appears in Escape from Camp 14 . In our new round of interviews, Shin changed the story again, saying his role in the executions was more shameful than he could bear to admit. "I was jealous of my brother because my mother liked him more than me," he said. "My mother never liked me much. She beat me much more than my brother.

She never paid attention to my birthday." Shin said that in 1996, after he snitched to a guard about the escape plans of his mother and brother, he put his thumbprint on a police statement he knew to be false. It stated that he had seen his mother and brother commit a murder. Shin said the document, which a guard asked him to sign, was important evidence for the execution. Shin was fifteen at the time, according to a North Korean government listing of his birthdate, which says he was born on November 19, 1980. (Shin now says he is not sure what year he was born but that his father told him it was 1982.) Shin has also acknowledged that there were some fictive elements in his former narrative. He did not live in a student dormitory in Camp 14 when he was a teenager; he lived with his father in Camp 18.

During his second journey to the Chinese border, he was not "shocked" to see North Koreans shopping in street markets. He had seen them shop before, during his first flight to China. He said he altered dates and location.