Double Defectors - a common or rare phenomenon?

by DermottBanana

How common were/are double defectors - people who defect to the other side, then return to their original nation?

Question was inspired by watching the episode of The Americans where Reagan was shot, and the FBI were trying to pin Hinckley as connected to the KGB. And I thought that since JFK was killed by a gunman who was a double-defector, surely the Americans would have suspected Soviet involvement.

schueaj

Stalin's daughter defected to the US and then later moved back to the USSR only to yet again move to the US. I think driven by fights with her family in Russia.

There was a Cuban pilot who defected to the US in 1969 only to hijack a plane and fly back to Cuba ten years later. I couldn't find more detail about him except this NYTimes article

The last time a Cuban official flew himself to the United States appears to have been in 1969 when Lieut. Eduardo Guerra Jimenez defected to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida aboard a MIG-17 fighter aircraft. Ten years later, Lieutenant Guerra hijacked a commercial jetliner that took off from New York and forced it to fly to Havana.

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/29/world/a-ranking-cuban-defects-to-the-us.html?scp=2&sq=Cuban+MiG-17&st=nyt

mdhs

I apologize for the lack of sources (currently on portable device - I'll try to find some on my computer if requested) but double defections happen fairly regularly nowadays between North and South Korea.

Indeed, North Korean defectors (men, generally) will come to the South only to return to Norh Korea a while later. Indeed, despite the South's help, they generally have difficulties assimilating into the South Korean society. Also, a recent survey showed that overwhelmingly South Korean women did not want to marry a North Korean man - whereas South Men were more willing to marry North Korean women.