The United States and North Korea have been in a de facto state of war for nearly seventy years.
Supreme Threat is set in the first few months of 2021. The world has been grappling with COVID-19 for a year during an uncertain period when an outgoing U.S. president courted the North Koreans while the incoming president admonished them.
For years North Korea has dispatched illegal agents to the United States via third countries where they have been busy establishing fifth columns capable of inflicting damage from close quarters, should the need arise. While North Korea's leaders taunt the U.S. with intercontinental missiles capable of reaching U.S. shores, the North Korean Intelligence Service is putting saboteurs into U.S. communities where they establish themselves in unassuming positions in the private sector, academia and even government, awaiting the day they are called to action. Maybe they'll be called upon to disrupt a critical supply chain, sabotage a critical piece of infrastructure such as the water supply, the national electric grid, or food supply.
The North Korean Intelligence Service (NKIS) has long targeted America's National Labs and through perseverance and a little bit of luck, they have succeeded in penetrating Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jason Lee who first met Kim Jong-Un in Pyongyang shortly after graduating from high school, goes on to earn a P.h.D in physics from the University of Toronto in Canada. Jason's father, Roe Min-Wu, defected to North Korea from the South, before Jason was even born. In the interim he has been working for the NKIS and has been living under cover in Pyongyang as a trade official.
Now Roe is about to be assigned to Mexico City to open up a new trade office at the North Korean embassy. During a diplomatic mission to Mexico City he makes a side trip undercover to New Mexico in an effort to convince Jason to enter into a clandestine relationship with the North Korean Intelligence Service. Jason, who hasn't seen his father in nearly a decade, doesn't share his parent's fervor for North Korea and its leadership, but ever chary of falling into disfavor with the man he never knew while growing up, he allows himself to be drawn into a murky world of intrigue and international espionage. This is not a role he ever seriously envisioned, and he feels poorly equipped to deal with increasing pressure from his father's superiors in Bureau 35, who view him as their secret weapon in their war against the