When Jihyun Park, a North Korean defector who had settled in the United Kingdom as a refugee in 2008, walked into an unremarkable London newsstand, she did not anticipate being confronted by a copy of Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
Still, there one was. The headlines spoke of celebrations marking the birthday of the late founding leader and “eternal president,” Kim Il Sung, which had included a military parade featuring missiles and goose-stepping soldiers, all inspected and saluted by Kim Il Sung’s grandson Kim Jong Un. “We were all surprised as to why they were selling it,” said Park, who is now a senior fellow with the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. “But,” she says, “no one was interested in [buying] a North Korean newspaper.”
Park suspected it was the work of the North Korean Embassy, which is situated in a red-brick family house in the London suburb of Ealing. She had heard rumors that the embassy was having serious financial issues. Its staff had been seen buying secondhand items at flea markets that they could repair and resell. The newspaper seemed their latest desperate attempt to raise funds.
North Korea’s embassies and consulates remain tightly controlled by Pyongyang, yet they are expected to finance their own operations and send additional funds home, through both legitimate and illegal activities. The North Korean Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, owns an events space hung with chandeliers and paintings of ballerinas that is often booked for weddings. Until recently its counterpart in Berlin operated a youth hostel from the embassy compound. A court ordered its closure in 2020 for breaching United Nations–backed sanctions, but Tripadvisor reviews from its time in business remain. They range from compliments about friendly staff and cheap beer to complaints about moldy showers and metal bunks. “The jails in Berlin must be more comfortable than this,” reads one.
Records of North Korean diplomatic missions funding themselves through illicit means date back to at least October 1976, when Norwegian police discovered an operation that used diplomatic bags to smuggle alcohol and cigarettes into Oslo that were then sold on the black market.
Similar efforts were soon uncovered in other Nordic countries, including Denmark, where police seized 4.5 million cigarettes along with 324 pounds of hashish from members of the North Korean diplomatic corps. Many were expelled at the time, but bootlegging from embassies appears to have continued. In 2017, burglars discovered more than a thousand bottles of Johnnie Walker and 200 cases of wine at a North Korean diplomatic residence in alcohol-prohibited Pakistan and stole the lot. Local police, who later recovered the stash, concluded that the North Koreans were selling the booze illegally and estimated its value at $150,000.
The prime motivator for North Korean diplomats seems to be simple survival. A 1999 Washington Post report described North Korean diplomats in African countries having to resort to fishing in order to feed themselves. At North Korea’s embassy in India, diplomats were said to have slaughtered cows in the building’s basement, in contravention of local Hindu laws, and then to have sold the meat.
In 2017, more than a thousand bottles of Johnnie Walker and 200 cases of wine were found at a North Korean diplomatic residence in alcohol-prohibited Pakistan.
Operations have diversified but have not grown more sophisticated. In 2015, a North Korean diplomat was arrested in Mozambique with 10 pounds of rhino horn and almost $100,000 in his car, and there have been similar cases of illegal wildlife trading across the southern African countries, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
In Germany, Russia, and Egypt, North Korean diplomats have, in recent years, been caught with large quantities of illegal drugs, while in 2013 the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that some North Korean diplomats had been supplied with state-made methamphetamine to sell on the streets of the cities they were dispatched to. It was a plan, noted The Washington Post, that was “strikingly similar to the plot of Half Baked, a 1998 Dave Chappelle comedy in which he must rapidly sell $1 million in marijuana to bail out his friend.”
But North Korea is not alone. Diplomatic missions from failed, authoritarian, or sanctioned states often find themselves in various degrees of estrangement from their homelands. An embassy might be loyal to only one side of a civil war, or cut off by a coup or revolution, becoming an isolated emissary of a government that no longer exists. When that happens, staff are left to fend for themselves.
In 2014, the two factions battling for control of Libya established rival governments, one in Tripoli and the other far to the east, in Tobruk. The loyalties of Libyan embassies were similarly split and visas issued accordingly: if a visitor wished to visit east Libya, they might have to apply for a visa in Cairo, but for the west of the country they would have to visit the embassy in Istanbul. Rival Libyan embassies in Malta each supported a different government and denied the validity of visas issued by the other.
“From my memory of that time, it wasn’t just the most absurd symptom of the division, but it was like a bureaucratic version of Game of Thrones,” says Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute research center, in Tripoli. Depending on the balance of power at home, a Libyan diplomatic outpost might change allegiance suddenly, while the staff of another embassy might attempt to maintain a degree of neutrality in order to hold on to their jobs whatever the outcome of hostilities. The consequences have in some cases been severe. When 5,000 people were killed after two dams near the city of Derna collapsed last year, aid groups and press were severely hindered in gaining access to the area by the visa uncertainty.
At least in Libya there is talk of unifying the rival administrations. Naseer Faiq, the chargé d’affaires of Afghanistan’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York, knows the country he represents is gone. He was appointed by the Republic of Afghanistan, which has not existed since the Taliban seized back power in August 2021. The Taliban’s regime is not officially recognized by the U.N., but while some countries—including Pakistan and Turkey—have allowed them to send emissaries to fill senior diplomatic roles abroad, many missions and embassies are still headed by Republic-era diplomats such as Faiq.
Faiq sees his role as upholding the values of the Republic, highlighting Taliban abuses and speaking on behalf of his countrymen and women. “Our commitment, and mine personally,” he says, “is to continue my work and my service for my people.”
However, the Taliban does not acknowledge him, nor any of the Republic-era missions, and Faiq says he is now facing “severe financial problems and challenges.” His mission operates from an office on the 27th floor of a high-rise on Manhattan’s East Side. While the Republic of Afghanistan owns the office, it still has to pay common charges, and because it does not provide consular services, it generates no revenue. The office has now fallen into arrears. No matter, says Faiq—of all the problems he faces, this is not a life-threatening one.
John Beck is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized: China’s Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities
