Diplomats are allowed to roam Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, more or less as they wish. Photo / Supplied
Before North Korea closed its borders during the pandemic, Western visitors to the hermit kingdom were mostly forced to explore the country in highly regimented tour groups.
Always under the watchful eye of their Korean minders, opportunities for genuine interaction with locals were scarce.
But one group of foreigners is allowed to roam Pyongyang, the capital, more or less as they wish: the diplomats.
Speaking to the Telegraph, they described how it was to live a life of relative freedom in one of the strangest and most repressive corners of the world.
Firstly, the fact that North Korea is under heavy sanctions poses serious logistical challenges.
For one, it is impossible to withdraw or send money to the country, which means embassy staff have to fly to China and bring back bags stuffed with cash to fund their missions.
“Every month, I or one of my staff would take the plane to Beijing, pick up 30 or 40,000 euros in cash, and bring it back,” said Mike Gifford, who served as the British ambassador to North Korea from 2012 to 2015.
“It was slightly surreal – you’ll be at the airport and you’ll see the German third secretary and he’s got a trolley case with a little tag saying German government, but this is what we all did because there was no other way.”
Finding staple products on the shopping run was also not a simple undertaking.
“We spent a lot of our spare time shopping, not because there is a vibrant shopping scene, but because you had to,” said Gifford.
There were only a few supermarkets that catered to foreigners, but “the range of goods was not fantastic”, he said.
“They would occasionally have whole chiller cabinets full of Perrier water and that’s great, but I don’t always want Perrier water,” Gifford added.
Pyongyang has a decent amount of bars, cafés and restaurants – including an Italian pizza place and a Viennese coffee shop – but making friends with locals was not easy.
Lindsey Miller, who spent two years in Pyongyang as the spouse of a British diplomat, said they would always be seated away from Koreans at the bars.
She managed to strike up a friendship with a young woman who ran a bar not far from the embassy compound, but it wasn’t easy.
“It’s something I wrestled with the whole time I was there. How can you really get to know people? How can you really get to know what they think when you can’t really ask them?” asked Miller.
The woman she befriended had spent time outside the country and could speak English, but the extent to which she could share details about her life was limited.
Keeping in touch with friends back home in Britain and Europe was also challenging.
While the Munsu-dong diplomatic compound in the east of the capital – where most of them were based – was one of the few places in the entire country to have WiFi, it was very slow.
“You could answer emails and you could send Facebook messages to people, but you’d have to wait for a video to load for ages on YouTube,” Miller said.
She used to spend her days walking around the city, taking Taekwondo lessons and going to a traditional Korean spa.
She would also explore what was behind the doors of Pyongyang’s nondescript shopfronts.
“You’ll go into a building that will have a shop that sells lawn mowers and cheese. Then, across from that will be a little cafe that’s tucked away that you would never know was in there. Then you walk through the back and there’s a gym and it’s an amazingly equipped gym,” Miller said.
“They’re in these faceless buildings so you have to go in to see what’s inside.”
Regular trips to China to stock up on supplies became part of the diplomats’ routine.
“When we crossed the bridge from North Korea to China, it sounds ridiculous, but we felt like finally we were in a country of freedom,” said Thomas Schaefer, who served two non-consecutive terms as Germany’s ambassador to North Korea.
“It’s funny but that is how you feel when you come out of North Korea.”
Gifford said his China excursions would usually be train rides to Dandong, a city right on the North Korean border, or flights to Beijing.
“We would come back with boxes full of stuff, which in the UK would be staples, like cheese, butter, and bacon,” he said.
Healthcare was also a reason to head over the border. While there was a doctor who worked out of the United Nations offices in Pyongyang who could treat diplomats for minor ailments, for anything more serious, foreigners were advised to go to China.
Alastair Morgan, who served as the British ambassador to North Korea from 2015 to 2018, remembered that a diplomatic spouse fell ill and was taken to Pyongyang General Hospital.
However, the treatment he was administered only made his condition worse and it was eventually decided that he needed to be treated outside of North Korea.
“He was driven up to the Chinese border and the first hospital in China that looked at him wouldn’t take him, then the second took him and ended up treating him for acute appendicitis,” Morgan said.
The lack of safety is one of the reasons that some missions have yet to reopen their embassies after the Covid-19 pandemic forced them all out, several of the former diplomats told the Telegraph.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which laid the groundwork for a new and stronger partnership between Moscow and Pyongyang, also contributed to the reluctance to reopen the missions.
North Korea allowed foreign missions to return late last year and some, including the Swedish and Polish embassies, have reopened. However, others, including the UK and Germany, have held off.
Schaefer said that Pyongyang had invited Germany to reopen its embassy but the government was still considering the logistical concerns.
Despite the clash of values and the numerous challenges of hosting Westerners, the former diplomats believed that there were – and are – benefits to having a presence inside the country.
“We could give messages into the regime that we could not be confident would be fed in by their diplomats overseas,” explained Morgan.
He also added that having a presence on the ground allowed for diplomats to collect information about life in North Korea that could be sent back to headquarters in Europe.
The North Korean side also saw benefits to having the diplomats there.
Having Western envoys inside the country gave North Korea a certain degree of recognition as well as access to alternative views, Gifford explained.
“They wanted to be able to put their case across to as many people as they could,” he said.
The Western embassies would also run humanitarian operations and language programmes for local communities, which were welcomed by the regime.
However, while helpful, these were relatively small programmes bogged down by lots of bureaucracy and red tape and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the country needed a bigger partner that could offer support without asking any questions.
“Coming out of a three-and-a-half-year Covid lockdown, they needed a lot of help. They had no food, they had no medicine, they had no energy, they had nothing,” said Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the United States-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“They had this opportunity with Russia to get food, fuel, and hard currency, and so they made that choice, and the sacrifice would be their relations with European countries.”
North Korea’s relationship with other Western countries, namely the US, had also taken a turn for the worse.
During Donald Trump’s first term as president, engagement with North Korea and Kim Jong Un was a priority for the administration.
The two men met three times at summits in Singapore, Hanoi and in the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas.
However, the meetings were largely unsuccessful and ended up damaging relations between the two countries even more, said Cha.
“The North Koreans and the leader specifically suffered the biggest embarrassment ever in the history of the leadership of the country when they engaged in these summits with Donald Trump and then Donald Trump walked out of the summit in Hanoi,” he said.
“He walked out saying there’s no deal here and he literally left Kim Jong Un within the first day, before lunchtime.”
Since Trump was sworn in for his second term earlier this year, he has not made the same grand statements about meeting Kim, although he reportedly tried to pass a letter to the regime’s representative at the United Nations in New York.
These efforts have reportedly been shunned – a clear sign of how much has changed in the last 10 years.
“Whatever Kim does, he won’t go through the cycle that he went through before, which finished with the failure in Hanoi,” Morgan said.
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