The incredible true story of a college activist's high-stakes quest to destabilise North Korea and alter the world. Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken Yale freshman looking for his place in the world in the early 2000s. He realised he had found a cause so important that he was willing to commit his life to it after reading a terrible account of life within North Korea. What started out as a walk along the safe and well-trodden path of organisation quickly turned into something more perilous. Hong travelled to China, outwitting Chinese security forces as he assisted in ferrying North Korean escapees to freedom. Meanwhile, Hong's clandestine organisation, Cheollima Civil Defense (later renamed Free Joseon), began spying on the North Korean regime and its unpredictable third-generation dictator, Kim Jong Un. While planning a government-in-exile, Free Joseon sought North Korean diplomats who could be persuaded to defect. After the assassination of Kim Jong Nam in broad daylight in 2017, the dictator's older brother, Hong, and Marine veteran Christopher Ahn assisted in ferrying Nam's family to safety. Then Hong pushed the group even further. He launched a series of high-stakes direct actions, culminating in an armed raid on the North Korean embassy in Madrid?an act that landed Ahn in jail and made Hong one of the world's most unusual fugitives. The Rebel and the Kingdom is a thrilling narrative of a guy who rejects the established quo in order to live bravely by his ideals, in the vein of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Bradley Hope, the acclaimed journalist and bestselling author who broke numerous details of Hong's operations in The Wall Street Journal, now reveals the full contours of this extraordinary story of idealism and insanity, hubris and heroism, all set within the secret battle for the future of the world's most mysterious and unsettling country.