This is what you get when one of your major diplomatic channels is a barbecue restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey.
No, seriously, that''s how two of the world's nuclear powers talk to each other.
OUR MAN IN PYONGYANG (OCTOBER 8, 2007)Egan, who has run Cubby’s for twenty-five years, is well known in Hackensack, though not solely for the quality of his ribs. For nearly fifteen years, he has served as a kind of unofficial ambassador—a go-between and a gofer—for the government of North Korea. He is, as he puts it, “Kim Jong Il’s guy in New Jersey.” Dozens of photographs on his restaurant walls offer testimony to Egan’s improbable involvement in international diplomacy. Among the pictures of friendly Giants and Yankees are several images of besuited, slightly ill-at-ease-looking Asian men posing at Cubby’s. “That’s Minister Han, before he became Ambassador here,” Egan said to me, pointing to a youthful, bespectacled man in a blue suit. (Han Song Ryol, who joined North Korea’s U.N. delegation in 1993, ended his tenure as Ambassador last year and returned to Pyongyang.) “And that’s Ambassador Ho Jong.” (Ho left his post in 1994.) In another photograph, a gentleman with the same black hair and grin as Egan stands with a beaming young female athlete, Kye Sun Hui. “That’s my dad at the Atlanta Olympics, in ’96,” Egan said. “She won the judo title when she was just sixteen. She’s a hero in North Korea. She still asks about me.”
In one corner of the restaurant is a photograph showing a dreary skyline, shot from what looks like a viewing platform. “That’s Pyongyang,” Egan said. “That’s when they gave me my pin.” The pin to which he refers bears an image of Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s Stalinist state, who died in 1994, and whose son is Kim Jong Il, its current leader. North Koreans wear similar pins as a sign of respect for their head of state. Egan keeps his pin in a small, cluttered back office at Cubby’s. “I’m told there are only two Westerners that have pins—me and some guy from Romania,” Egan said. “I got the pin at the end of my first trip. They inducted me into their family. They said, ‘You are part of us.’ I thought, When in Rome, I’m Roman.”
Above a corner booth at Cubby’s is a clipping from the front page of the Times, dated November 3, 2002, with the headline “north korea says nuclear program can be negotiated.” (At the time, North Korea—formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or D.P.R.K.—was still three years away from announcing that it had detonated a nuclear device.) Ambassador Han is quoted as saying that his country was willing to dismantle its secret uranium-enrichment facilities, in spite of having been branded by President George W. Bush, in that year’s State of the Union address, as a member of “an Axis of Evil.” The Ambassador, the article recounts, had asked to be interviewed by the paper: “The North Korean Mission contacted the Times through a New Jersey restaurateur, Robert Egan, who is the chairman of a trade group that has worked to improve ties between the United States and North Korea.” Egan, explaining his identification in the newspaper of record, said, “You have to have a reason to move around in a country like that, so the North Koreans made me the president of the U.S.A.-D.P.R.K. Trade Council, or some president of some trade council.”