The defector was a senior colonel with the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau, which is in charge of espionage operations against South Korea, according to South Korean

Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun and Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee.

Speaking in separate news conferences Monday, the ministry spokesmen confirmed that reports on the defection by South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap News Agency were accurate but said they could give no further details.

Yonhap reported that the senior colonel was the highest-level North Korean military official known to have defected, although CNN was not able to confirm this independently.

North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau is a powerful body, responsible for clandestine operations, including espionage against foreign countries and cyberwarfare operations.

All North Korean defectors are interviewed by South Korean intelligence services for information about life across the border.

It is expected the latest defector could prove a rich trove of knowledge about the workings of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s secretive regime.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans have fled poverty and repression in the isolated North in recent decades, but defections of senior officials are less common.

Last year, a high-level defector told CNN that Kim was taking an increasingly brutal approach to the elite, executing them when they fell out of favor.

The hard line on aides and officials was eroding Kim’s fragile support base, the defector said, in comments CNN was unable to confirm independently due to the challenges of verifying information inside North Korea, one of the world’s most closed societies.

Last week, 13 North Korean nationals who had been working at a Pyongyang-owned restaurant in an unnamed Asian nation defected to South Korea, officials in Seoul announced.

Few North Koreans are ever permitted to leave the country, but a small number work abroad in a state-owned restaurant chain and other government-run businesses.

The restaurant workers, 12 women and a man, said they had defected after “feeling pressure from North Korean authorities” to send foreign currency back to their homeland, South Korean officials said.

Tensions have ratcheted up on the divided Korean Peninsula this year as Pyongyang has made a series of assertions about developments in its military capability.

Last week Pyongyang’s state-run news agency KCNA said North Korea had successfully tested a new engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, and last week said it had succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear warheads to fit on medium-range ballistic missiles — which officials in

Seoul said they believed was true.