Friends and Comrades: North Korea’s Foreign Relations

When you’re a foreigner living in North Korea, you never know when you’re going to be summoned to attend an event with Kim Jong-un. The invitations come at the last minute, the destinations kept secret. On one such day, we dutifully gathered at Kim Il-sung Square as government minders lined up our cars in neat rows and hustled us onto shuttle buses. We queued for security checks and were ushered to our seats. Whether ambassadors or journalists, as I was, we’re all subject to the same secrecy, and as we settled in to wait for the leader’s arrival, we said our hellos with the shared camaraderie of being foreigners in Pyongyang. There were military attaches from Syria and Iran. A diplomat from Laos and a journalist from China. Ambassadors from Cuba and Russia.

I was an American in North Korea sitting with the Axis of Evil, surrounded by my country’s current and former foes. Well, Toto, I thought: We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Dark Web of Foreign Relations

In Washington, discussion about North Korea’s foreign policy tends to focus on Pyongyang’s relations with the superpowers in the region: the United States, China, Japan, and Russia.

But working in North Korea, where I served as chief of the AP Pyongyang bureau, I discovered daily that the regime has cultivated intriguing relationships with a host of smaller nations, from Africa to Asia, that serve as threads in the web of the regime’s murky activities abroad. We ate crackers from Vietnam and ramen noodles from Malaysia, and drank champagne from Russia. And in 2010, while covering the North Korean soccer team at the World Cup in South Africa, I ran into a group of sun-beaten North Korean construction workers who had been bused in from Namibia to serve as the cheering squad for their countrymen.

The motivations for some of these relationships are above board: sports training, education.

But other relationships hint of nefarious intent. Walking through the museum at the Kumsusan mausoleum, where the bodies of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il lie in state, is like touring a modern-day rogues’ gallery. The walls are lined with portraits of the Kims shaking hands with some of the world’s most notorious dictators, including Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

With Washington leading a campaign to isolate Pyongyang diplomatically and economically as a strategy for containment as well as punishment for the country’s continued nuclear provocations, many of these relationships are coming to light as sanctions orders become more detailed and as nations renounce trade or diplomatic relations with North Korea in line with UN sanctions. Much of the focus is on China, which provides some 90 percent of the Pyongyang regime’s trade. But the campaign also has drawn out smaller, hidden relationships, particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and even Central America, that for decades have quietly flourished, away from international scrutiny, and might help us understand how North Korea has survived while remaining defiant of international norms.

Emergence of the Hermit Kingdom 

Westerners dubbed Korea the “Hermit Kingdom” more than a century ago due to the Koreans’ reluctance to open up to the outside world. The Koreans had reason to be wary of foreigners: A tiny nation sandwiched between China and Japan, the country fought off repeated attempts to use the peninsula as a stepping stone for colonial expansion. From 1910 until its World War II defeat in 1945, Japan occupied Korea and, with well-documented brutality, systematically sought to stamp out Korean language, culture, identity, and sovereignty. That period, along with the 1950-53 Korean War, shaped modern North Korea’s foreign policy into one focused on protecting the country from outside aggression and influence, and formed the basis for Kim Il-sung’s “juche” ideology of self-reliance.

Propaganda aside, however, no nation can survive on its own, not even North Korea. In reality, North Korea has relied on outside intervention and involvement to survive, from the Allied defeat of Japan that precipitated Korea’s liberation in 1945 to China’s military support during the Korean War. Media reports often characterize North Korea as the most isolated country in the world; however, by recent count, Pyongyang had diplomatic relations with 162 countries.

In the early years, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s diplomatic relations were limited to communist countries. And in the broken years after the signing of a ceasefire to bring the Korean War fighting to an end in 1953, the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc provided North Korea with a much-needed safety net. East Germans helped rebuild Hamhung, North Korea’s second-largest city and once a key industrial hub. Young teachers in Poland took in North Korean orphans, fattening them up on bread and butter, and teaching them to become ardent soccer fans, an interlude I am currently researching for the Wilson Center.

But as North Korea emerged from the rubble, Pyongyang began vying with Seoul for diplomatic recognition in the developing world, aligning itself with fellow postcolonial leaders and revolutionary movements, according to Daniel Wertz, associate director at the National Committee on North Korea, which has partnered with the East-West Center to create an interactive website called North Korea in the World that tracks the country’s external relations.

One intriguing account of North Korean-African friendship comes from Monica Macias, whose father, Francisco Macias Nguema, was the first president of postcolonial Equatorial Guinea and an admirer of Kim Il-sung. Under pressure from his opponents, Macias Nguema in 1978 sent Monica, her sister, and a brother to be educated in the care of his good friend, Kim Il-sung. When Macias Nguema was deposed in a coup just months later, and eventually executed, Kim followed through on his promise to care for the children. Monica Macias graduated from university in 1992 and lived in North Korea until 1994; her childhood diaries, published in Korean in 2012, provide a fascinating look at life as an African “daughter” of Kim Il-sung.

Many of these relationships were built on the shared military interests, with North Korea drawing on its credentials as a nation led by a former anti-colonial guerrilla fighter.

Take Zimbabwe. Not long after Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 and established diplomatic relations with North Korea, Pyongyang sent some 100 military advisers to back the Zimbabwean military’s notorious Fifth Brigade, which was accused of violent crackdowns on civilians and dissidents in the mid-1980s.

And then there is Egypt. North Korea helped train Egypt’s military in the 1970s and reportedly sent fighter jets and pilots to help Egypt during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Egypt later sold Scud missiles to North Korea, which is said to have provided the foundation for North Korea’s ballistic missile program, according to North Korea in the World. Their military relationship came into relief again in August 2016 when Egyptian authorities, acting on a tip from U.S. intelligence, detained a North Korean freighter loaded with $23 million in rocket-propelled grenades. The intended buyer: the Egyptian military, suggesting there are rogue elements still reaching out to the North Koreans for banned arms and technology, even from countries with governments claiming, or attempting, to adhere to UN sanctions.

North Korea, in turn, began selling Scud missiles to Iran in the late 1980s; Iran's medium-range Shahab-3 missile is based on Pyongyang’s Rodong missile. That exchange has continued to today, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, which cites their collaboration on development of an 80-ton rocket booster. In Syria, North Koreans helped build the al-Kibra nuclear reactor before it was destroyed by Israeli rockets in 2007, and Pyongyang is suspected of supplying military advisers to the government in the current Syrian civil war.

It’s not just arms and military expertise that North Korea is selling to Africa and the Middle East. North Korea befriended Namibia by providing arms and training to rebels fighting South African occupation, and then later parlayed that relationship into lucrative contracts to build monuments, museums, ministry buildings, and munitions factories. The North Korean construction workers I met in 2010 were dispatched to Africa for these projects, now banned under UN sanctions.

Workers and Embassies Abroad 

That encounter in Johannesburg opened my eyes to North Korea’s export of its workforce. In later years, I became familiar with the North Korean waitresses working in restaurants in Beijing and elsewhere that brought in cash. An estimated 100,000 North Koreans were working abroad until recently — across Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, China, Mongolia, Russia, and Europe — and were earning the regime half a billion U.S. dollars each year, with very little of it going to the workers themselves, according to the U.S. State Department. North Korea’s exports include doctors to Tanzania, lumberjacks to Russia, and construction workers to Kuwait, Radio Free Asia reported in an investigative project called “Human Capital: North Korean Workers Abroad Earn Hard Currency for Regime.”

With new UN sanctions explicitly banning new or renewed contracts with North Korean workers, those numbers are expected to drop, if enforced. Angola announced in late November that it sent home some 150 North Koreans working in construction.

That has no doubt put pressure on North Korea’s foreign embassies to bring in hard currency — in whatever way possible, often illegally. North Korea has embassies in 47 countries, as well as UN missions in New York, Paris, and Rome, according to North Korea in the World. In a bid to crack down on the flow of money back to Pyongyang through illicit means, the UN Security Council last year urged member nations to take action. In response, North Korean ambassadors and diplomatic staff have been expelled from Germany, Italy, Spain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Peru, and Mexico.

Trade and Joint Ventures

UN sanctions also aim to choke trade and joint ventures between North Korea and member states. While North Korea has not published economic data in decades, forcing us to make educated guesses about the state of its economy, trade figures provided by its partners help researchers to cobble together a pastiche of North Korea’s business relationships.

Japan, which does not have formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, was the country’s second-largest trade partner for much of the 1990s until Tokyo imposed sanctions in the 2000s.

Meanwhile, economic cooperation with rival South Korea flourished during the Sunshine Era of warming inter-Korea relations in the 2000s, culminating in cross-border tourism and the opening of a joint factory park in the North Korean city of Kaesong, where South Korean managers oversaw North Korean workers in producing everything from shoes to watches. The shooting death of a South Korean tourist in 2008 by a North Korean soldier precipitated an end to that era of good will. Seoul suspended tours in late 2008, and then-President Park Geun-hye shut down the factory park in 2016, casting suspicion on whether the cash that South Korean businesses pumped into the North Korean economy was going to the nuclear program. Until the factory park’s closure, South Korea was the North’s number two trade partner, behind China.

Since then, other trading partners have included Russia, India, Thailand, Ukraine, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Hong Kong, according to North Korea in the World.

Relations Cooling off

Yet, as North Korea pushes ahead with its nuclear program, including a sixth nuclear test in September and the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile on November 29, relations are cooling with many of its diplomatic and economic partners. Uganda and Sudan, which bought $6.4 million in air-to-ground missiles from North Korea in 2013, pledged to end or suspend military cooperation with North Korea. Singapore, the Philippines, and India have announced suspensions of economic relationships with the North.

Malaysia, too, is reviewing its ties with North Korea in the wake of the brazen assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother in Kim Jong-un, at busy Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February 2017. Suspected North Korean agents succeeded in orchestrating the fatal poisoning of Kim’s brother using a banned chemical weapon, revealing the sinister role North Korea’s diplomats, chemists, and airline employees may play overseas.

Sports Diplomacy: Last Avenue for Engagement?

As the doors close on North Korea for its provocations and defiance, there is one arena that still holds potential for diplomacy: sports.

In 1966, a scrappy group of men from a little-known country called North Korea staged an unlikely upset at soccer’s biggest event, the World Cup, held that year in Britain: They beat Italy to advance to the quarterfinals. Footage in the 2002 documentary The Game of Their Lives shows the underdog North Koreans feted as the darlings of the 1966 World Cup, decades before nuclear provocations turned Pyongyang into a pariah.

The World Cup success sparked a North Korean passion for soccer that continues today, as well as a recognition in Pyongyang of the power of sports as both a propaganda tool to rally its people and a route to diplomacy. In 1991, the two Koreas fielded their first joint sports team — a table tennis duo — whose partnership was immortalized in films in both North and South. And in 2000, I was in the crowd at the Sydney Olympics when athletes from both Koreas walked into the stadium together under a light blue “unified Korea” flag to a standing ovation. The moment sent chills up my spine.

Six years ago, when South Korea bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, Gunilla Lindberg, then-chair of the Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission, said she raised security concerns with Seoul. Still, Lindberg asserted then that the Olympics could serve as a “force for the good.”

That was another era. Kim Jong-il was still alive, and it had been two years since a nuclear test. The following year, in 2012, his young son, newly thrust into power and with a lot to prove, tested a long-range rocket, unraveling progress on improved relations with the United States. As Gangwon, a province that borders the DMZ, forged ahead in preparing for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics in South Korea, North Korea has continued to hold the region, and the world, in thrall with the threat of nuclear war.

Some in Seoul hope North Korea’s participation might serve as “insurance” against a provocation during the Olympics. Two athletes, a pairs figure skating duo, have qualified but missed the deadline to confirm their spots. By participating, North Korea could also signal to the world its willingness to rejoin the international community, at least in sports.

But yet again, Pyongyang is keeping the region in suspense. Ever enigmatic, North Korea has not confirmed its participation.