N. Korea’s Ri Yong Ho is fire-breathing spokesman
Los Angeles Times
NEW YORK» During the recent United Nations General Assembly meeting, he emerged as the fire-breathing mouthpiece of North Korea’s inflammatory government.
Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho mocked Donald Trump as “President Evil” and offered up sound bites about detonating nuclear bombs over the Pacific and shooting down U.S. planes.
But here’s a little secret about Ri: Beneath the bluster, he has a reputation as a soft-spoken, self-deprecating diplomat whom U.S. officials have for years deemed one of the most accessible representatives of his government.
Ri was promoted to foreign minister in May 2016 for his adeptness at negotiating with Americans, not for hurling invective.
“He was put in that job for the purpose of being the negotiator. His specialty is negotiating with Americans,” said Gary Samore, a former U.S. diplomat and nonproliferation specialist now at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who has known Ri for two decades.
“He is not one of these guys who acts like a caricature of a Communist apparatchik. He has a great sense of humor. He is very creative in coming up with wording acceptable to both sides,” Samore said.
Samore first met Ri in 1994 when they were hammering out the details of the Clinton administration’s nuclear freeze deal known as the Agreed Framework. A decade later, Ri was a key negotiator in six-nation talks hosted by China. Since then, he has been a frequent attendee at back-channel talks hosted by influential Americans looking for another approach to North Korea.
Appearing in public before scrums of television reporters, Ri delivered screeds against the U.S. government in pompous, formal Korean, but Samore describes Ri’s English as “excellent, superb, idiomatic.”
In his bespoke suits and silk ties, Ri could probably pass as a senior South Korean executive if not for the obligatory red badge pinned to his lapel, depicting the late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. As with other North Korean officials, his age is unclear, but the website North Korean Leadership Watch gives his date of birth as 1954. (He is not related to another official of the same name, former Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho, who was purged in 2012.)
Ri was born into an elite family, making him a “princeling” in the parlance of Communist politics. His father, Ri Jong Je, was an aide to Kim Jong Il, managing his personal residences and property, and an editor at the Korean Central News Agency, the state propaganda machine, which perhaps accounts for the younger Ri’s aptitude for hurling insults at the United States.
Ri studied English at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. He served in North Korean embassies in Zimbabwe and Sweden and later as ambassador to Britain.
American diplomats who dealt with Ri said that he was exceptionally persuasive in articulating the North Korean point of view.
Evans Revere, a former diplomat who also headed the New York-based Korea Society, said Ri is an excellent salesman, “even if the product he is selling is highly defective.”