For-Profit Embassies Bolster North Korea
embassies — North Korea doesn’t fund them. Instead, they are expected to support themselves and send home any surplus.
Despite the sanctions, North Korea did $6.5 billion in trade last year. Analysts estimate that embassy revenues represent a small sum compared with the country’s other low-profile foreign ventures.
Those included cadres of bodyguards leased to dictators, laborers dispatched to work sites around the world who must remit their wages and state- owned companies that export ballistic missiles and other arms to countries like Syria.
In some cases, diplomats get in- volved with weapons deals. The third private secretary of the North Korean embassy in Beijing doubled as an employee of the Haegeumgang Trading Company. The company, according to a United Nations report, supplied surface-to-air missiles and radar systems to Mozambique.
North Korean diplomats have been ad hoc entrepreneurs since at least 1976. That year, Norway’s police found through surveillance that every member of the North Korean embassy in Oslo was involved in the import and sale of as many as 10,000 bottles of spirits and 100,000 cigarettes.
Today, sanctions have forced many embassies to curb their ambitions, with some intent on keeping a low profile.
The North Korean embassy in London sits unobtrusively in Ealing, a suburb-like section of London. The way that it sustains itself is a mystery. One theory comes from Kim Joo-il, a former member of the North Korean military who defected and moved to London in 2007. He said he often saw embassy employees at a type of Sunday flea market called a car-boot sale.
“They are always there buying secondhand electronics, toys, dolls, kitchen goods,” Mr. Kim said. “Some of these things they are cleaning up and fixing to resell, others they are sending home to North Korea.”
North Korean embassies in the former Eastern Bloc, where the missions were long ago granted generous real estate, have a more lucrative stratagem.
In Poland, 40 businesses are listed at the address of the North Korean embassy in Warsaw, including a pharmaceutical company, several advertising agencies and a yacht club. How many of these businesses are staffed there is unclear.
In Sofia, the embassy owns a number of buildings on two separate properties. One is a complex that includes the embassy itself.
The event space, known as Terra Residence, is a 15-minute walk east. It’s the former home of the North Korean ambassador, built in the 1980s with dazzle in mind. Photos on Terra’s website show an interior that is essentially a communist take on Versailles: a series of huge and austere halls with chandeliers and gold curtains.
Terra rents out the space for magazine photo sessions, music videos and television ads, including one for the Bulgarian version of “Celebrity Apprentice.” Its main business is weddings, proms and corporate events.
Surprisingly, neighbors didn’t seem vexed about living near an enterprise that has put money into the world’s most repressive regime. But that may say more about Bulgaria’s government than North Korea.
“When you live in a place where it’s so difficult to get even trivial stuff done,” said Ms. Nikolova, “it’s hard to worry about World War III.”