(♂, 36 years old) Head of the ANSP Anti-Communist Investigation Bureau’s Team 1
He’s a man who’s walked only one path in life: catching reds. His father, a police inspector, was shot and killed by a spy he was pursuing. Wanting to make his father, who had died trying to catch a spy, proud, Gang-mu joined the ANSP. However, he was disillusioned when he saw that the ANSP didn’t catch spies but rather ‘made’ them and volunteered for for an overseas department in charge of operations against North Korea.
After being deployed to Berlin, the boundary city where North and South Korean operatives clash most fiercely, a shatterbelt region everyone avoids, he’s spent years pursuing ‘Daedong-gang 1.’ Obtaining intel that the bastard had entered Seoul under the radar, Gang-mu returns to ANSP headquarters with the resolve to catch him at all costs and is blindsided. What are the chances that one of the team members tasked with accomplishing this mission happened to be Jang Han-na (32), the first love he had walked out on? The woman who had joined the ANSP solely to learn why Gang-mu had left her so abruptly. He still finds her obstinacy lovable and has to cold-heartedly immerse himself in work while hiding the way his heart is shaken when he’s with her...
A few notes on the above:
- The ANSP (안기부), or Agency for National Security Planning (1981-1999), was a precursor to the modern South Korean National Intelligence Service, and the enforcer arm of the authoritarian regime that held power at the time. On paper, they were Korea’s preeminent intelligence organisation, charged with ‘the collection, compilation, and distribution of foreign and domestic information regarding public safety against communists and plots to overthrow the government.’ They would regularly arrest student protestors and political dissenters, frame them as North Korean spies or communist sympathisers, torture, and even kill them.
- Communists are called ‘reds’ (빨갱이) in Korean as well (빨개 = red), though for some reason the Disney+ subs eschewed the term. I found this odd, given that ‘communist’ is eight letters versus ‘red’ which is only three, making the more accurate translation a lot more economic in terms of subtitling.
- The word used for ‘spy’ here is ‘kancheop’ (간첩) as opposed to ‘gongjakwon’ (공작원), i.e. ‘operative.’ In the drama, the word ‘gocheop’ (고첩) — short for ‘gojeong kancheop’ (고정 간첩), i.e. ‘fixed spy’ or ‘sleeper agent’ — also gets used. The way the use of these terms is divided (i.e. who uses which terms) is informative. For instance, the word ‘kanchop’ is favored by the South Korean characters, but never used by any of the Northerners, who tend to use the word ‘operative.’ However, both Gang-mu and Soo-ho will sometimes use the word ‘gocheop.’ The Disney+ subs don’t appear to differentiate between the three.
- Berlin was, of course, a ‘boundary city’ since the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Germany stood from 1961-1989, a physical manifestation of the “Iron Curtain” that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War (not unlike the DMZ which divides North and South Korea).
- ‘Daedong-gang 1’ (Taedong River 1 in the Disney+ subs) is Soo-ho’s code name. The Daedong-gang, or Taedong River (大同江), is the second largest river in North Korea and runs through the heart of Pyongyang. The river is iconic: its name features in the titles of several old trot songs that express longing for places in the North. In Korean, it’s 대동강 1호 (Daedong-gang Il-ho), which just sounds so badass I had to keep it.
- Though not mentioned in his profile, Gang-mu’s call sign is ‘Black Tiger’ (블랙타이거). His call sign is in English (the Korean would be 흑호・黑虎), possibly because he operated abroad.
You can find the original Korean on JTBC’s official website here.
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