Jaehoon Ahn

Who is Jaehoon Ahn?

Jaehoon Ahn was a North Korean-born American journalist and researcher. Ahn worked as a researcher for the Washington Post for more than twenty-five years, until 1996. He was also the founding director of Radio Free Asia's Korean language service in 1997 and a board member of U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

Ahn was born on May 13, 1941, in Pyongyang, Japanese-occupied Korea, present-day North Korea. He fled with his family from their home in Pyongyang, where his family had lived for generations, to South Korea during the night when he was five years old to escape Communism. In 1960, he obtained a bachelor's degree from Seoul National University.

Ahn took a position as a reporter for JoongAng Ilbo, where he covered the Six-Day War as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. He moved to the United States during the late 1960s and settled in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. He joined the staff of the Washington Post in 1969 as an assistant librarian for the newspaper's research department.

Ahn retired from the research department of the Washington Post in 1996.