The post never mentions a date, but this must have been around 2000-2004, since that is when the UK embassy was established. [1]
Some things have probably changed since then.
A fascinating read regardless.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_Kingdom,...
Years ago, I was lucky enough to listen to a talk from an American who got to be a tourist in North Korea. Ever since then I've been fascinated with stories like this.
North Korea is on my bucket list, but hopefully after the state loosens up.
North Korea can take you with whatever justification they feel like and return you as a vegetable.
I know the mass games look cool and people like to go to weird places, please avoid North Korea
North Korea can take you with whatever justification they feel like and return you as a vegetable.
That’s most/all countries (or their embassies) you visit, no?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khash...
A big political enemy of the saudi family that been a pain in their ass (rightly so since they are an evil dictatorship) vs random student that just took a poster as a souvernir.
Not the same thing. Anyone can be killed in North Korea. 99,99999999999% of people are not on the saudi familys enemy list.
random student that just took a poster as a souvernir.
Let's not mince words here, he stole government property in a country with some of the harshest laws on earth.
Did he deserve to die for it? No, but it was an incredibly stupid thing to do.
His fellow travelers say this was impossible, the “recording” was fake, and the timestamps are at a time when he wasn’t even in the hotel. Why would you assume n. Korea is being honest here?
I would not say that I would assume that North Korea is being honest but what makes you think that his fellow travelers are being honest either?
His fellow travelers were from many different countries
One might even argue that the stupidity began when he decided to visit NK.
I don't think it really makes sense to talk about "laws" for places like North Korea, as it's not a rule of law state.
Nice victim blaming.
yeah for sure, because otherwise NK has fantastic relations with USA!
Perhaps, but Saudi Arabia is pretty close to North Korea as far as my desire to ever visit the place. Both of them are extremely unappealing.
assassination by western trade partner VS assassination by isolated country
Not the same thing!!!
I’m sure some countries are more willing to treat guests to the vegetable treatment than others.
I feel a lot better about my chances in pretty much any other country than NK.
Other countries have a larger denominator to reduce the proportion of visits vs arbitrary detention and torture.
I am sorry but if you travel somewhere like Iran or North Korea you are doing so explicitly against the advice of most governments. Every single person visiting these places is told that they need to keep their shit together, otherwise the consequences could be dire for them or for those they come into contact with.
Iran doesn't chill my blood in the same way imagining being in North Korea does. I have no desire to go there. I wouldn't go if offered. It still strikes me as a more or less rational country that stridently disagrees with my own country's politics (and my own), not a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
Honestly I’d still like to visit both (particularly Iran) and I know people who have. But there is definitely advice you need to heed in both places (tbh in all places…)
I've been to both and can report a positive experience. The DPRK trip was fascinating. The thing I remember most about Iran is how friendly everyone was to us.
If you've been to South Korea (and I haven't, only have a bunch of friends who have), was there anything fascinating about North Korea that you couldn't have gotten from South Korea and that didn't hinge on how messed up North Korea is? Genuinely curious.
was there anything fascinating about North Korea that you couldn't have gotten from South Korea
yes, a different perspective.
EDIT/ADD:
Witness one of the world’s most secretive states, firsthand experience of a communist regime, dynastic leadership, and a pervasive cult of personality.
Iran is a bucket list country for me. The politics are a disaster, obviously, but it's an amazing, deep culture. The government of Iran is a disaster, but it's a real, functioning country, in ways North Korea isn't.
Ironically, Iran is probably much more dangerous than North Korea is (not least because you apparently basically can't do anything in North Korea), at least for an American. But like, if you want Korean culture, fly to Seoul and rent a car. I don't know how you get Iran's culture without actually going there.
I met plenty of Americans in both Iran and North Korea. American tourists often receive extra interest and admiration from the locals, who express a genuine warmth and fascination towards them.
Oh, 100% my understanding as well! Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that ordinary people in like Tehran were hostile to Americans, but I can see how it came across that way.
Add Afghanistan to that list. Some Austrian far-right dumbass went there to make a YouTube video to claim Afghanistan were safe (obviously to justify deporting refugees there) - and lo behold, he got arrested by the Taliban on espionage charges and ultimately released after 9 extensive months of negotiations [1].
[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/ausland/oesterreich-r...
Or, you can visit South Korea today, and if you want to go off the beaten path, leave Seoul. The east coast is a beautiful and fascinating place. Go to Gangwon, ride a cable car up Seoraksan, eat the best seafood of your life.
Or you could visit the world’s largest thermometer, float on the LSU lazy river. Go to Kerala and drink some delicious chai, watch the Rockies play a game in the Mile High Stadium. There is a whole world of things that are entirely unlike North Korea
It's seeing aspects of a fundamentally different form of government that's the appeal. If it was just seeing "Korean" culture, I'd have gone to South Korea years ago.
(BTW, a good friend of mine told me he's been skiing in view of the DMZ, and they just laugh at the NK guards watching them ski with binoculars.)
Same. I want to also visit Iran in the next few years. I fully expect that 90% of what I think I know about these countries is CIA propaganda.
I’m not sure that’s true based on Persians I know that live in the USA and are extremely angry about what happened to the country. I love looking at their old photos of Iran before it was consumed by a theocracy. They look like this.
Yes, I’m aware. But that can’t be what most of the population in Iran thinks, since some of the Persians I know in the US support a full scale war and regime change in Iran, while acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of their country people would die as a result and chance of success is near zero. More disturbingly they also seem to suggest that people outside Tehran and other large cities should have no say in how Iran is run, and when I say there’s no way they’ll allow that, there’s a blank stare. Also BBC is not a reliable source for information about either country. It’s quite literally government affiliated media.
Na. To hell with North Korea completely.
Ah yes, we should hate a totalitarian state not for the oppression they subject their people to but instead because that oppression was turned on a young American who was quite possibly trying to steal something.
Michael Malice?
I'll preface this by saying that I can't support this with a source, so take it with a grain of salt. An acquaintance of mine knew someone who worked in that German embassy. Apparently, the extreme isolation of North Korea also made it extremely difficult to have any kind of opsec inside the embassy. Since anything could only be brought in through diplomatic pouches it created an attack vector of one.
A few days after said person had a meeting in the German equivalent of a scif, there was a meeting with North Korean officials. One official let something slip, which meant a bug had somehow gotten into the scif. He didn't say anything about what the consequences were, just that one should not underestimate the North Koreans.
Even in the US, nothing is technically stopping you from walking into a SCIF with a phone most of the time. We used the honor system.
I would almost automatically assume that any SCIF in a foreign country was compromised to some degree.
Which would completely invalidate the entire purpose of the SCIF, no? Unless it exists to feed fake info to the locals?
It's government. Security Theater/"Look, we're trying" is usually more important than reality.
It's weird. On the one hand governments are devious and brutal oppressors of freedom, on the other hand governments are calculating masters of subterfuge faking moon-landings and implanting microtransmitters by vaccination, on a third hand governments are money-wasting incompetent douches who can't even tie their shoes, and on a fourth hand governments are morally bankrupt and do everything to get re-elected. A strange beast, with four hands, no less!
"Enemy is strong and weak" seems like a universal trait for any propaganda, I really have no idea why some want to say that it's a special fascism trait.
It is the exact line the US is taking on Russia. “Ukraine need help now or soon Russia will be in SOME_NATO_COUNTRY” and “Russia is loosing hard” at the same time, often in the same “according to government officials…” speak.
You frame this as a contradiction but a moment of reflection reveals that it's not.
If the US continues to aid Ukraine, then it's likely that Ukraine will be able to beat Russia eventually, due to the West's superior military equipment and tactics.
If the US stops aiding Ukraine, it will be much more difficult for Ukraine to beat Russia. If Russia achieves its goals and gains control of Ukraine, then yes, other NATO countries will be in danger.
Some of the "russia is loosing hard" news is propaganda of course, to raise the morale of people fighting for their homeland. I find it hard to get too mad about that.
Most people's "knowledge of government" is more like "knowledge of stereotypes & tropes about government".
Also, it can be more about the emotions of the humans doing the attributing than about the real governments. Just look at all the bizarre, contradictory, and fridge-test-flunking attributes which humans have attributed to gods and related mythical beings.
It’s probably not an all or nothing prospect. Raise the costs enough/mitigate the threat in atleast some of them etc
Which would completely invalidate the entire purpose of the SCIF, no?
Yes. But if you belong in there, nobody is going to second guess you.
nothing is technically stopping you from walking into a SCIF with a phone most of the time
That is ridiculous.
I've been to multiple embassies as a nobody and no electronics were allowed and this was strictly enforced.
I agree it's ridiculous (though not in the way you meant), but he is telling the truth. I don't doubt that there are facilities which are watched as closely as you describe, but not all are. I have worked in a SCIF where the only thing stopping me from bringing in a phone was the fact that I said I wouldn't, and I keep my word.
I've been to tiny embassies and I was thoroughly searched and anything remotely looking like an electronic device was temporarily confiscated.
They usually make a big deal out of it.
This in embassies between friendly nations!
Again, I don't doubt that some facilities do have that level of scrutiny. I'm simply saying that not all do.
I added “most of the time” to match my experience. If the entire building is a SCIF, I’ve usually left my phone in the car. If it’s just a room in a building, they usually have lockers outside and use the honor system.
There's a kajillion ways to extract info via analog hole from a well-known room. Unless this room has counter-measures (that are unlikely to be accepted by an authoritarian government) this ain't surprising really.
SCIF construction procedure is made explicitly to counter analog (and digital) intelligence collection.
I highly suspect that if the government of a host country didn’t let a guest country follow standard construction procedures like the use of high density construction materials, then the guest country would either not continue construction of the diplomatic outpost or at the very least they would not proceed with using their (now) vulnerable storage closet as a scif.
You must be very naive as to the general Conops of the NK government.
Can you elaborate?
You think the NK government doesn’t have every possible room in every possibly interesting room in their country bugged?
I wonder if a trusted laptop with VR goggles and a VPN would be sufficient to transmit and read most information. For added security, use an external modified keyboard that is not vulnerable to being tapped.
Sorry I really want to understand this comment. Can you help?
Since anything could only be brought in through diplomatic pouches it created an attack vector of one.
Are you presenting that as a good or bad thing? If there is only one attack vector, that makes it easier to defend against, right?
One official let something slip, which meant a bug had somehow gotten into the scif.
You mean the North Korean or German official?
The NK official probably mentioned something that was only said in the SCIF
And I'm guessing the diplomatic pouches aren't fully in the custody of the german gov at all times there? idk
Correct
I'm not sure what you mean about the NK situation making the diplomatic pouch an attack vector? Can you elaborate?
Fun fact, those "pouches" don't have to be a pouch or even a bag. They can be boxes or even crates and have been used for smuggling in the past, including drugs, weapons, gold and even - allegedly - people.
TA mentions that they shipped in construction materials via diplomatic containers.
Which do you think is more likely, the scif was compromised, or one of the people in the scif was?
He didn't specify whether the scif itself was bugged or they planted a bug on someone, just that it wasn't a leak.
In a french documentary about the DGSE (French foreign intelligence service), some former DGSE officials explained that when France took delivery of their new embassy in Poland during the cold war, they found it riddled with bugs. The cabling was hidden inside the concrete. They had to dig a several meters deep trench all around the embassy and severe all cables to isolate it before they could test each cable one by one. I don't know how they ever got comfortable they found every one of them.
"I don't know how they ever got comfortable they found every one of them"
If you take opsec serious, you should never be too comfortable.
And as far as I know with embassies and alike, there is the compromise of at least one room, that is very surveillance proof and checked regulary.
scif = sensitive compartmented information facility
A room that is supposed to be highly secure with secure communication channels where it is safe to handle or transmit secret information.
A real life "cone of silence"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence_%28Get_Smart%2...
maybe not underestimate, but no one can really know if the truly culpride got caught
This was fascinating! If I could do it all over again, I'd have gone into the US Foreign Service. Maybe not to places like North Korea (which we don't have a presence in anyways), but I'd have loved to travel the world. Maybe in the next life...
Sure, if you could get in.
I tried for 5 years in a row to get into my country's service. It failed. Pivoted to information security, hey at least I am a millionaire now.
may I ask if you have any career advice?
Unless you have broken software and hardware since the 1990s or 1980s, and then gotten a degree in management or engineering, my path is hard to replicate.
But I certainly can offer some advice:
1. Be hardcore and really interested in security. Read everything. Deep diving into networks, software, vulnerability, risk management.
2. Get a CISSP certifiaction, then maybe an ISO 27001 cert and then also something juicy from SANS (I have none of these).
3. Get an AWS or a public cloud of your choice certification
Also
* Cia triad
* Mitre attack framework
* Cis controls
* Nist framework
* Ise 62443
* Zero trust framework from NIST
Get work experience, projects, situations, grow and evolve
If you're interested in someone else's take on this: don't get a CISSP, and ISO 27001 is generally something a company gets, not a person.
True, it would be more toward security leadership in things like CISO roles or equivalent.
Yet if one takes them, they will certainly help.
Again, just in case you're interested in a second take on this, no.
Why no? CISSP is often requested on job postings for cybersecurity.
They're disproportionately requirements for the worst, lowest-status jobs in cybersecurity, and many of the best known and "highest placed" practitioners in the industry (not just in vuln research and xdev but also in management) don't have one.
What does "xdev" mean, please?
Exploit development
I am intersted in your version of my answer. I don't think picking at elements from my list and just saying "no" is fruitful.
I disagree, and am deliberately not trying to start a protracted debate here. I'm just offering a data point, nothing more.
Try 5 years to get into foreign service, then pivot to IS?
Correct
Yes. Or more general: work hard to get something. Even if you will never reach it, you might still improve enough in general, to be ready to do and get something else instead.
What currency
Maybe in the next life...
I told myself this about an important decision. I thought about it more and decided I didn't really believe in that (proof: what do you remember from your last life), so just did it in this one. No regrets!
you'll eventually forget this life too, so i'm not sure about your proof ;)
A consistent, but perhaps incomplete, model.
Just do IT!
On one of my flights out of... I forget if it was SJC or SFO - but it was one of them... I sat next to someone in uniform and we got to talking. He was a former dentist who joined the military and was studying in Monterey his fifth foreign language https://www.dliflc.edu
Maybe not to places like North Korea (which we don't have a presence in anyways)
Sure they don't ;)
I'm mostly surprised about the free admission of bribery:
However, I soon found that a bottle of Johnie Walker Black Label handed out at particularly frustrating moments made things miraculously happen a lot quicker. Oh how the North Koreans loved their whiskey.
That's just diplomacy.
Long history of it, too.
The US made special clear coke in nondescript bottles for Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov so he could look like he was drinking vodka instead of the illegal Western drink.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-secret-clear-coca-cola-fo...
So thats where crystal Pepsi came from!
Bloody Commie soda!
Damn the downvotes, this is a good joke!
Suddenly taste much better!
so he could look like he was drinking vodka
Ah, yes, the famous Russian carbonated vodka.
Plus I guess it inspires respect to finish a bottle of what people assume is vodka, bottom up. An empty bottle of vodka makes a great water container to walk around the office with and drink from the bottle between meetings.
How cultural sensitivity and creative diplomacy have been used throughout history.
Re-gifting would have likely occurred. Like: obtain bottle, pass to your superior, cement next-level promotion.
Sounds like they loved their whisky
If you’re going to be anal, explain why:
“Whisky (no e) refers to Scottish, Canadian, or Japanese grain spirits. Whiskey (with an e) refers to grain spirits distilled in Ireland and the United States.”
Johnnie Walker Black Label is Scottish, hence no ‘e’.
I'm not sure if that is the whole story. It is as much a case of where the person writing is from. According to Wikipedia both are used. I, as a non-USAnian, would definitely not spell it Whiskey, but Whisky, unless I'm talking about a brand name, no matter if it is from the US or not. It would be like me writing Color instead of Colour when writing in English. One is English, one is not.
In Canada we're amazing, we have both British and American conventions mixed together in a seemingly random way:
E.g. "Colourize" is Canadian English (vs American "colorize" or UK "colourise")
Oof turning that around a bit - when you are gonna be snarky, try to be correct. Outside of Scotland and Ireland it's not that black & white. There are also Canadian whiskeys (Benjamin Chapman, Masterton's) and there are US whiskys (like Makers Mark).
I was trying to be light-hearted and playful - most people know Scotch is "whisky". If I was being anal I'd have corrected their misspelling of "Johnnie"
When I went there (2005-6), we were told to bring foreign cigarettes. And this is how I ended up importing Israeli into North Korea. Hopefully they liked them!
I went in 2014. I was told Marlboro cigs. For a country that hates the US officially everyone loves those Marlboros.
In any unstable situation (war, sanctions, blockade, siege, whatever), cigarettes quickly turn into a currency. They're light as a feather, they don't spoil, and there's an ever-increasing demand for them. Two packs will get you more than a gold necklace in any such situation, worldwide.
I understand cigarettes in the context. They just wanted Marlboros more than other brands. Some of the others in the group has Camels and some other famous British brand, but they were not as popular as American Marlboros.
I'm surprised you're surprised. I guess people from countries with fully functional monetary systems don't have an intuitive view how things work where money are essentially worthless. Most communist countries were like this during the centralized and hence highly disfunctional economy. You were paid a wage but essentially could shove it up your ass coze there was little to nothing to buy with it. Which made barter the only viable alternative. And you know what works best for barter? Non-fungible goods: alcohol, cigarettes and coffee. You can store them for years and still be good.
Those bottles of whiskey/whisky were NEVER drank, I bet you. They effectively circulate as currency, the only one that actually buys you things in a disfunctional economy: a visit to the doctor, exams, favors or just goods that theoretically can be bought with money but are not in stock. Suddenly found in stock for a bottle of whiskey.
Non-fungible goods: alcohol, cigarettes and coffee.
Aren’t all of these fungible?
It's in the understanding that a lot of the difficulties that require this are fabricated and supposed to show the foreigners who is in charge.
The last paragraph talks about being cut-off and isolated. He didn't mention Internet or phones for private use, so I wonder if they didn't have that. I can imagine smartphones being disallowed, and even if allowed, limited to home WiFi...
They did not have internet. From the article:
You were in a country that really was sealed off from the rest of the world. No internet or social media. All press and TV (one channel) dedicated not for news but solely for the glorification of the Leader. That is the Kim dynasty and the regime.
Obviously the average citizen don't have Internet, but an embassy without Internet (most probably through satellite) is unthinkable, they need to be able to talk to their home government.
But if we go back 20 years (others have said this is written in the early 2000's), satellite communication was probably worse than 28.8k modems and really expensive, so yeah, it could've been there but only for official and not personal use.
20 years ago Americans had no smartphones. Only some tech savy Europeans had Symbian phones.
I am sorry but this is not true, the Danger Hiptop also known as T-Mobile Sidekick series was incredibly popular in the US starting with the color version in 2003. By any definition it was a smartphone. (Also, Android is direct successor to it as Andy Rubin left Danger to start Android.)
They have Iphone 11s in NK and plenty of smartphones. They have some internet, and they'd have more if they West allowed some investment and wasn't punishing a civilian population because of who their leaders are.
I wonder how NK blocking their own internet from the outside world is the west punishing the NK civilian population.
But if we go back 20 years (others have said this is written in the early 2000's), satellite communication was probably worse than 28.8k modems
I take it you are under 30 years old.
You've got all your timings wrong.
Later on they talk about installing a satellite dish for diplomatic communication, so the embassy might have had some sort of internet connection over that.
I lived more than 40 years without a smartphone, believe me life was not a problem... The couple of years I used Internet before eternal September it was superior to what we have now.
I can see your 40+ years of experience hasn't prevented you from offering out of context comments.
The context being of the author's experience, who back then came from life in the West with (most likely) a "dumb" phone and a home/work Internet for browsing/email/instant messaging, and was then brought to a regime where mobile phones were most likely not allowed, and Internet might not be available, and social contact changed from being able to go out and see friends to having only a few people in the diplomatic compound, and contact with locals being severely limited to the people sent by the regime to watch over you...
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have internet but I know little of North Korea. They definitely didn't have smartphones as this was the early 2000s.
One interesting thing about NK is that they have their own walled garden intranet, only accessible from NK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)
Kwangmyong has been around since the latter half of the 90s, and is famously 'home grown' as a deliberate security feature.
NK also has some access to the regular internet, but it's very limited and tightly controlled. Meaning it is a luxury reserved for a few members of the upper echelons of NK society, or certain entrusted to people who need it for work (intelligence agencies and whatnot).
I might have given them the option to use their own OS (Red Star OS) at an approved location but I highly doubt they would have been able to do any actual work on it, especially nothing official.
The original title of the article ("How To Survive 3 Years In North Korea As A Foreigner") sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic to me considering that the author led a relatively comfortable life (having a swimming pool, being able to play tennis and golf) with only minor inconveniences, while some North Koreans were actually starving at the time...
A 2014 UN inquiry found evidence for "systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations" and stated that "the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world"
I don't think having access to luxuries detracts from the danger he was in of being in a country where public executions take place for things as minor as 'fortune telling' or watching South Korean movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_North_Ko...
Allegedly, supposedly... About 60 years ago, Hunter Thompson called out these words as propaganda devices that let you say anything about anyone you don't like without taking any responsibility for it. Nothing has changed in the journalistic standards since then.
I don't agree those words let you say anything you like about something.
However, given the overwhelming consistency and volume of testimonies, supported by satellite imagery, investigations by international bodies and leaked internal documents, it's clear these types of acts do occur.
Also, escapees
what are those words?
Overly sensationalist comment.
Everything is perspective; If you're use to certain standards, and the readers are use to certain standards, expressing the travel to a country where such standards are known not to exist, then you might view the situation as something to overcome —survive (to carry on despite hardships).
Living as a Foreigner in North Korea: A Contrasting Experience
It's British humour, don't worry too much about it, sometimes also called sarcasm.
I think the 'foreigner' bit makes it reasonably clear that the article will describe something quite different to life as a starving North Korean.
There were a handful of shops that catered for foreigners. All transactions had to be in Euros as possession of local currency by foreigners was forbidden
This stood out to me in the article, as most countries incentivize foreign visitors to use local currencies to boost its strength. However, NK seems to have long ago come to terms it's currency will never hold value, so perhaps they instill this rule to boost their counterfeit money operations, or reserves of foreign currency.
Another aspect of it could be that this retards foreigners' capacity to sneak into shops they're not supposed to be in and buy things they're not supposed to buy. Not sure though, as apparently many shops are run pseudo-privately and I imagine any shopkeeper would be happy to accept some foreign currency.
Unless, of course, it's illegal for normal citizens to own foreign currency.
If foreigners can only own foreign currency, and normal citizens can only own local currency, then it makes it a lot harder to bribe the locals!
It's all about getting their hands on foreign currency. Similar systems were ubiquitous across Eastern Europe, with the DDR's Intershop probably the best known: you could even take the subway across to Friedrichstraße in East Berlin and shop at the platform without needing to go through passport control.
Why Euro? And not USD? LOL
Or simply they have very little local physical currency and it was printed decades ago and it might pose as an embarrassment, so they don’t want it seen by foreigners.
Which is one of the main reasons why NKs nation state hackers go after crypto currency via hacks. It's the main way they can bypass a lot of financial sanctions against them and use that $$$ for their nuclear programs and other things.
They have stolen $3B+ over the past several years alone.
https://therecord.media/north-korea-cryptocurrency-hacks-un-...
It is to get their hands on foreign currency.
Plus, many products in the shops for local are probably heavily subsidized and have vastly lower prices.
https://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/
Artemy Lebedev, a known Russian web designer, visited North Korea and posted his notes with pictures (in Russian, should not be an obstacle these days).
There are three more sections with the selector below.
in Russian, should not be an obstacle these days
It blows my mind a tiny bit every time I translate something with GPT-4. It’s flawless!
Fascinating article, it explained a few things I didn’t get before. E.g.: the locals collect grass in bags to feed to rabbits.
As far as this particular article goes, there's also a language selector at the top right corner. Quite a few articles exist in both languages, likely translated by Artemy himself (who I gather is bilingual).
My favourite NK blog is the trip in 2008 from Austria to North Korea via the unexpected route from Russia
https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/10/vienna-pyongya...
To this day I direct people to read this whenever the topic of NK comes up. It’s so fascinating and feels like a bit of Internet lore to boot with how much it’s been passed around.
I find the interview with a North Korea specialist Lankov fascinating too (has English subs) https://youtu.be/C84bzu9wXC0?si=AsBKTh0gRyGsISms
Weird, I tried to click on "Kimchi Harvest" to see a larger version. Instead, the link was to https://mydiplomaticlife.com/how-to-survive-3-years-in-north..., which just took me to the top of the article.
Oddly enough, Soviet Union had a thing similar to "Kimchi Harvest". I remember workers in my town having to go work at a collective farm for a week harvesting things.
They also had something called "subotnik", aka voluntary Saturday labor. This was a practice where citizens, including workers and students, participated in unpaid labor on Saturdays. These activities included various tasks like cleaning up the city (that's what I remember doing as a kid). There was nothing "voluntary" about it.
I really appreciate anecdotes like that. As I've gotten older, I've wanted to understand a lot of the details about what makes life in Communist countries ... frustrating.
IE, in school we only had a superficial explanation of what communism is; it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I understood the whole "cult of personality" thing.
It was still the norm in Uzbekistan until just a few years ago, but with cotton instead of potatoes. Not anymore AFAIK.
Gimjang week is pretty common in SK as well, especially among the elders
All the photos seem to have broken links, but for some of them you can get their direct link and remove the "-scaled" part to get a higher resolution. Not for the Kimchi one though.
There was another diplomat that has videos on YouTube. I can't remember his name but he was able to move freely and use his DSLR around Pyongyang.
Jaka Parker.
Strange. It looks like some movie set in the DDR, but with the wrong manufacturing date on the car props and Korean extras in modern cloths. I guess the sparse city planning is the reason? Like, a lot of space.
Probably 15-20 years later then.
I posted my story a few times about picking up a North Korean shortwave broadcast on my car radio while driving to work at Adobe in San Jose around 2022. Rather than re-tell it again, here it is:
For anyone wondering, the Voice of Korea broadcasts daily on shortwave Worldwide and can be received even inside a house, given your WiFi and Led lights do not produce excessive interference.
For frequencies https://shortwavedb.org/cgi-bin/shortwave.cgi? and search for Country North Korea
There are also streams available on Internet such as https://radio.garden/visit/yanbian-korean-autonomous-prefect...
I do not know how they relate to what is broadcasted on AM/FM for the general population, though.
Hearing about the lone Swede reminds me of the weird history/role of that, https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/04/547390622/...
Photo relevant to this article (showing the "mixed" embassy's entrance): https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/09/27/ambassaden1-976c...
After reading how they use human waste as fertilizer, I'm not sure not having access to local produce is so bad
I mean...... I'd need to look up sources to tell you the exact dates, but I know this still happened even in some European countries in the 90s, maybe it continued even later than that. And of course manure is still used to this day, nothing strange about it.
As a korean (south), the article is amazingly interesting and the fact there is british embassy is quite shoking to me. How the best ally of USA 's embassy exists there.
Also feels very sad for north korean people under the worst dictator..
why shocking? If you dont want to directly admit existence of some entity, you can use one of your allies to do the talking for you
Having a channel of communication is important even if indirect.
I wish to know more about this time-capsule country.
Currently the country seems to experience an extraordinary construction boom (modern apartment buildings).
All we have are 20 years old pictures.
The concentration/prison camps are not often mentioned. I think there was a post about them on HN previously.
Video from inside:
https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/vice-guide-to-north-korea...
This Vice series is amazing. The poignant encounter with the tea shop girl who never gets any visitors has always stuck with me.
Really annoying and distracting that each instance of “North Korea” is hyperlinked to the same article.
I worked around it by opening up my browser's inspector and add "color:black" and "text-decoration:none" to all the "a" styles, which made them less distracting.
An easier way would be to copy&paste all the text to some other place, but there are some inline images that I thought might be worth seeing.
For someone who wants to read more in-depth stories about this topic I highly recommend the book "Only beautiful, please" by John Everard.
He was another British Diplomat (I think he was ambassador even) and he often would go on unscheduled biking trips freaking out his security escort. Though this was in less tense times, I doubt this would be possible in the days of Kim Yung-Un. Anyway, highly recommended, really.
This is fascinating, I'm wondering how many people have been allowed to do this
I saw a 504 when I loaded the site but then a reload fixed it. Could have been a great meta joke
Pyongyang [0] by Guy Delisle is an amazing graphic novel depicting a foreigner animator living in North Korea. Never get tired of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang:_A_Journey_in_Nort...
North Korea has been undergoing more frequent changes in the past two years, and I am more curious about what has happened during this period.
This gave us the opportunity to overnight in Dandong, sightsee and food shop before picking up our serviced vehicle the next day and heading back into North Korea
I wonder what spy devices were installed inside the car...
fields to harvest kimchi (cabbages), a vital staple in all North Korean diets. They would then take the kimchi home and pickle it in vast quantities and store it there.
This kimchi supply would then hopefully get them and their families through the long, bitter winter months.
This reminds me that my parents (they live in the South-Eastern Romanian countryside) make excellent pickled cabbage, in fact eating pickled cabbage is one of my fondest food-related memories from the dreaded 1990s (when there wasn't that much food to go around on account of lack of money, and we had close to no money because of the infamous Shock Therapy).
Very interesting to see how pickled cabbage has been helping people go through rough times at the two opposing sides of Eurasia (on the Korean peninsula and on the European peninsula).
Laibach also got away with it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oD0W6SSBUA
Laughed out loud at the unexpected "90/100" rating at the end. Very interesting read. Thought this was interesting in particular:
When serving in Iraq or Iran, my biggest fear in those places was always the threat of physical harm, be it ambushes on our person or vehicles, being kidnapped, rocket or mortar attacks on our embassy or accommodation. There were close shaves and the threat and the fear never left you in all of these places. > But as far as life in North Korea was concerned, there were none of these fears. Serving in North Korea gave you this strange feeling of being cut off, isolated and very insular and perversely at the same time “safe.”
I wonder how this compares to living in e.g. Libya under Gaddafi vs. after?
It is slavery... pure slavery the way it works.
Sounds like half the embassy hates each other and every one hates the British
fyi there are touristic flights from russia to nk. It involves guided excursions, ski, food. Ppl usually pay in $ ironically. There are some ru vloggers that went there (like elivosk)
what an amazing read!
slightly unrelated to the post: does anyone know any similar blog posts as such about people writing about their life? especially in areas of the world that is less known of?
another one that i really like is https://brr.fyi/ where he posts life working at the antarctica
Actual title: How to Survive Three Years in North Korea as a Foreigner
Curious if anyone knows of any more recent descriptions about what life is like in North Korea, like in the last 5-10 years. Most things I've read including this article are decades old.
How much have things changed there in terms of technology, food security etc?
https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E?si=WK1Gp62Hbx0624Wx
Documentary about getting s haircut in North Korea
You mean a shameless North Korean propaganda video with a ridiculously twisted version of history and reality?
Worth keeping in mind that NK has one of the most active / visible cyber teams on the planet, presumably including astro-turfing and propaganda.
Which means any conversation on the internet about NK is likely to be polluted with propaganda, even if none of the participants themselves are operatives - all it takes is someone unwittingly ingesting a bad fact once for that bad fact to get circulated.
Would you care to elaborate with any source for this claim? Otherwise I have to crown this the dumbest thing that I've read on the internet this week. I see the HN moderation is doing a great job at keeping the triple digit IQs away.
It's so well known it would be easier for you to source your claim. Or you know, you could source the claim yourself. Obviously you didn't bother before posting.
When I say dragons fly over the rainbows, I need to source the claim. When I say that the sky is blue, it's you who needs to look it up if you doubt it so much.
deleted
Wasn't talking to you. Was talking to the person I replied to
My bad!
My point stands then :)
Are you suggesting that boyboy, an Australian youtube channel that posts about everything, is a North Korean propagandist? Or is it me?
Anything said about north Korea that is not absolutely bonkers is propaganda?
boyboy doesn't have to be propagandist to regurgitate some factoids that were put out deliberately elsewhere as agi-prop.
that's the point, you poison the well once and everyone keeps drinking from it, forever.
which facts are wrong? genuinely want to correct my worldview
this is a group from Brazil (so portuguese - you can use yt's autotranslate) who supports and studies NK - they have visited and on this live they show the pictures/videos and talk about life there, food, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQNQWwXA6_0
I clicked that and skipped through it and now YouTube's algorithm thinks I want to watch a whole bunch of Brazillian neo-hyper-Stalinist-cult tankie videos.
sounds like one to watch from my work account
The pandemic has probably changed a lot. Virtually no foreigners have been there after 2019, so I guess the best we know is that we don't know.
This book was published 2009, https://archive.org/details/nothing-to-envy-ordinary-lives-i..., and I can highly recommend it for anyone wanting to know a little about how life might have looked like growing up in North-Korea.
After the famine in 90s both the party and the people realized that the state can't really guarantee any food security so it's mostly taken care of by free market as anywhere else in the world now. Trading goods may not be entirely legal, but is widely accepted.
Check "North Korea Confidential" by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson from 2015.
Heres some propaganda: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit... https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46164212.pdf https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-09-14/north-...
Check out the 2023 documentary Beyond Utopia for a glimpse. It’s currently on Hulu.
There's hours and hours of NK footage if you search for North Korea Travel / Vlog in simplified chinese. They tend to have much laxer guides/minders, fluent in mandarin vs western travellers with minders with shit English (and I presume more suspicious / cautious). Very few of Chinese vlogs have auto subtitles which can be translated to english unfortunately. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZgzAquCs-o&list=PLk70D7sV6Q...
There was a few playlist from central asian travellers and with Chinese business man exploring with more casual minders a few years back but I can't find them. I know a few PRC nationals who made the trip for business, TLDR is NK cities and towns feels like PRC in the 90s with energy of PRC in the 80s. Some of the villages/hamlets seem like PRC from the 70s (which I guess is what most ppl think of NK). Other era reference points probably not helpful for ppl without context of growing up in PRC. So it's worth scrubbing through some of the videos, a lot of it is city and keep in mind NK is 60% urbanized.
Honest and unpaid North Korea influencers (apparently trying to influence South Korea) can tell a bit :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzFoNe5rNMo
This is from 2019:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpdYcy8JtiisXTMb4zug_oCIB...
Remember those marching formations, where a normal AK looked like a giant toy wielded by kids.
I wonder who works in those embassies. Are there some British dudes just living there that go to the embassy every day for work? Where do they buy food? What do their residences look like? Do have spouses and children? Where do they work and go to school? Do they enjoy life there?
Why would anyone in their right mind accept a job like this? It's a lot like taking a job that requires you to live in a prison for several years.
In most cases it’s accepting orders
Orders? Diplomatic service (in the UK and other democratic nations) isn't part of the military; it's a civilian job. The guards might be soldiers, but the rest of the jobs aren't to my knowledge.
If someone is offered a particular posting but chooses not to accept it without good reason then I expect they won’t be offered anything better (more important, prestigious or more enjoyable).
(Saying that, I remember reading once that high-flying UK diplomats might be offered something less desirable as a ‘test of nerve’ - to see whether they had enough confidence and self belief to hold out for something better. It’s a never-ending test of character and ability to know which way the wind is blowing, I suppose)
Sounds like a good way of keeping young people from being interested in a career in that field.
If you read the article, they were allowed to travel freely.
Personally I would have loved the job. Seems like they had lots of free time. Very secure country without much crime. Really not much to worry about, just a bit isolating. Plus some cool stories to tell when you are back home.
Sure, not the type of job for people with family.
What good is that in North Korea? The whole country is basically a prison, and after what happened to Otto, anyone with any sense of self-preservation should want to avoid the place.
In my grade school years I moved with my parents to Saudi Arabia for a couple years. It was voluntary on their part, my father had the opportunity to move their for his work (for a US company).
Saudi Arabia isn't North Korea, but it's still a lot less free than most developed countries, especially for females like my mother, who were not allowed to drive or work, could not go out alone, and legally forced to wear a stupid black thing in insanely hot weather while all the males of the country wore comfy white clothing.
I don't know the full story of their financials, but all I know is we got free housing, 1 free trip to the US every year, and 3 free vacations per year anywhere in the world, flights, lodging, and all expenses covered. We did lots of things that I believe they wouldn't have been able to do on their own money at the time. They also rented out their house in the US for extra income.
I wouldn't be surprised if diplomats who voluntarily take posts in North Korea also get a shitton of compensation benefits like that.
They likely go to specialized shops for foreigners where you may only pay with US$-backed coupons, and can purchase most of stuff you can commonly buy in Japan.
Lankov has described the coupon system in some detail. I believe Cuba has a similar system with CUC or had it until recently. I'm not sure at which point NK ditched coupons for Euros.
Here's a video of what one of those shops looks like by an Indonesian diplomat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYJ9u0sEE4
You’d wonder less if you had read the article.
Some of your questions are answered in the actual article... no mention of spouses or kids, so most probably they don't come along.
Intelligence officers. Even your average friendly embassy is full of them. In this case it was probably more to handle secure channels of high level communication rather that recruiting agents. He even mentioned at the beginning that this was the official purpose for the mission.
If you want to arrange something quickly between nations you go through their respective three letter agencies.
Meanwhile instead of some fancy building, their embassy over here is... Well, a little more domestic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_North_Korea,_London
The impression I got, from attending a school with a lot of diplomat kids, is that a lot of countries have embassies as a sort of foreign holiday for their ruling classes. Now NK being a bit antagonistic and paranoid might be an exception, but I distinctly got the impression that there were a lot of countries that didn't really do a lot of diplomatic work with the host countries, but the embassy meant they could send some families to go live in the west and have their school paid for by the state.
Those kinds of embassies don't need to be in the fancy embassy district.
Also most of the work is done by the CIA and NSA.
The NSA stays at home. There are some diplomatic normal folks to do the consularic work (visa, lost passports), the rest is secret service (recruiting agents, influencing the press, police, "diplomatic" ie secret communication, contacts to other embassies and the host).
And if it's a cross border offensive it's more likely to be Air Force Space Command (since, you know, cyberspace is right above regular space which is just a little higher than airspace :p)
(its just that electronic warfare is a natural extension of long range, lets call it, interference)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Operation...
The embassies are not my ballgame but I get the impression they are not there because a lot of diplomacy needs to be done all the time - but to already exist when the need for diplomacy arises.
Open channels of communication and all that.
An alternate explanation to your point is that countries would like to have the appearance of being as shadowy and influential as what the CIA has going on. I'll quote (AFKA) mos def [0] and also link to the 99% invisible episode in number stations [1]. Some countries broadcast codes nonstop A in case they ever need to, no one can tell they just started and B to have the appearance they have covert agents behind enemy lines, just to be spooky.
[0] https://genius.com/Yasiin-bey-the-embassy-lyrics[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-stations/
The social and cultural dynamics you mention are indeed present in some cases.
Amazing! Still a bloody expensive property, even 20 years ago.
Is that a flagpole in the front garden?
Just outside the embassy is another pole, but with lots of cameras and radio gear looking into the embassy.
Clearly the days of spycraft aren't over.
£1.3m. You’d struggle to get a 3 bed semi for that nowadays.
It's like the mom and pop shop around the corner.
Except it's a house of horrors.
Kind of reminds me of some of the embassies of smaller countries in Ottawa when I lived there.
There are quite a few in houses like this along Somerset Street if I'm remembering correctly.
It's also normal for embassies of big countries in smaller countries.
In Dublin there are a few big embassy compounds (US, Russia, UK, Germany are the only ones I can think of). Everyone else, even big dogs like China and India, has a converted house or a floor in an office block. Lots of pictures on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missions_in...
I went in once. They had an open-day demonstrating the skills of north Korean artists. The artwork was decent, and the experience a good one overall.
Every room had a picture of Kim, obviously.
A clue about the time might be
But I can't find him here or elsewhere:
https://www.wfp.org/previous-executive-directors
That must be a misspelling of Richard Ragan. He headed the North Korean World Food Programme from 2003 to 2005 according to Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ragan
Sounds like this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ragan
The German Wikipedia article (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Botschaft_Pj%C3%B6ngj...) has some more details. Most interesting: unified Germany initially wasn't interested in diplomatic relations with North Korea, so between 1991 and 2001, the only country actually using the building as an embassy was Sweden (although Germany had a "Schutzmachtvertretung" during this time - not sure what that means, but at least the lonely Swede had some company).
In case someone cares, the term 'Schutzmachtvertretung' contains three words, Schutz = protection, Macht = Power/Might and Vertretung = Representation.
Yeah, apparently this refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_power - Sweden is currently (or rather, I guess, was before the Covid pandemic) the protecting power for no less than 10 Western states (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, USA) in North Korea. And between 1991 and 2001 they were apparently also the protecting power for Germany.