North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Death of a North Korean official, and the mystery around Pyongyang Papers

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

This week, NK News founder Chad O’Carroll joins the podcast to discuss the life of Kim Yong Nam, the longtime No. 2 in North Korea’s leadership who died this month at 97.  He also unravels the mystery behind Pyongyang Papers, the website that anonymously published information on North Korea’s sanctions-evading network before disappearing without warning […]

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Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko Zwedsook, and today it is Monday, the 10th of November 2025, and I'm here in the NKnew studio joined by Chaddor Carroll. Chad, welcome back on the show. Hey, Jack, how good to be here. Some big and interesting stories to talk about that have happened in the last week. The big change in North Korea, the end of an era, the death of Kim Jong-Num, once the technically the head of state of North Korea, right?

He was, what was his title? The president of the joint, presidium of the Joint Supreme People's Assembly, gosh, it was such a long title. Yeah, yeah. And it meant so little, because he had no power, did he? Right, right. Well, except for receiving ambassadors and senior diplomats when they provided their credentials.

I believe that current UK ambassador to South Korea, Colin Crooks, presented his credentials to Kim Jong-Nam in North. Korea, as did the recent former Hungarian ambassador, Moses Choma, and that was important because it was Kim Jong-Nam who received the bad news that Hungary was going to be the first member of the East Block to recognize South Korea as a nation back in, I want to say, 1988 or something like that, and Kim Jong-Num exploded and got very angry, and then years later, decades later, had to welcome a new ambassador back to North Korea. Anyway, but yeah, so he was the last of that generation.

He was in, what, 97? He was with Kim Il-Song in the early days. He was really one of that first generation, and there probably aren't any left at all, at least in positions of influence. And he'd been retired for a couple of years. Yeah, and he'd also led various delegations around the world. He'd been to Africa.

Been to South Korea. Yes, he went to South Korea in 2018. Right. Yeah, with Kim Jong, I remember. To the Pyongchung Olympics opening ceremony. Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading.

And I've not been able to get the time to look this up. But I remember reading an account of the air, the air choreo, I believe it was an air coro plane that flew into Kimpo Airport with Kimo Jong and him. And when he got off the plane, before he'd go on the bus, he insisted on having a cigarette, which I think was against the rules. But he just did it anyway, which is impressive given his age. Now, I remember reading somewhere that he was reluctant to sit down before Kim Yo-Jong, if I'm not mistaken, right?

He was sort of showing deference to a member of the Kim family. And that that might be one reason to explain why, out of all of the top officials of North Korea, as far as we know, he'd never been purged. He'd never been sent to a re-education camp or a salt mine or a cooperative farm out in Hamgong, Bukto. He stayed in the top leadership, the top echelons of North Korean leadership until the end, until he retired. Yeah, very loyal public servant and stayed in his lane. and yeah I mean I think he you know to have lived and served so many three North Korean leaders and stay in place in a key relatively important role it's a big deal so yeah we knew this was

coming he was getting older and older but yeah I think it was an important one for many because of just his sheer level of connection both inside and outside of the government into foreign countries as well. Knew so many people and yeah. And one other interesting theory that I've heard for why he had such longevity was that he had a weak spot which meant that he could never get his own circle of powerful people around him, he could never be his own, you know, powerful figure. And that was that apparently, and this is quite rare in North Korea, and North Korea frowns upon

this, he was a man who preferred the company of other men. That's one rumor that has circulated in recent days. I am unable to corroborate it. It's only hearsay, but we heard this from people who heard it from those who met him over the years. Particularly Eastern European diplomats, apparently. So, from the, you know, before the Cold War ended. Yeah, I would also point listeners to, I think there was an article called Being Gay in the DPRK, which my former colleague wrote probably a decade or so ago,

which is really interesting because it talks about just the difficulty if that is your, preference it's very difficult to live in North Korea and a lot of people don't really know that they are gay as a result of the system that they're surrounded by so yeah it's just denied it's rejected yeah yeah and South Korea was a little bit that way too I remember when I first lived in the 1990s it was you know there are no gays here yeah or if they are they've been you know tainted by foreigners or something like that yeah yeah and I guess without like cultural references on the TV or radio or popular media if you are gay. I mean, you wouldn't have any external references perhaps to know what's going on.

And so I'm sure just like in South Korea, there are many people who are married and family people who are actually not really into that. Now, it should point out that we don't have any concrete proof that this is the case for the late Kim Jong-Num, but just that it's a little bit of scuttlebutt. I mean, this is a podcast after all, not a new story with two anonymous sources,

but anyway. We've gone news of the world here. A little bit, yeah. Okay. Now, you wrote a piece that was a long time coming about the Pyongyang Papers, and it's a website that's existed for a few years, and now it's no longer there.

It doesn't exist anymore. So what were the Pyongyang Papers? Well, interestingly, he dates back to earlier, 2018 when those summits were taking place but we just referenced and for me that's interesting because it came must have stemmed out of the fire and fury maximum pressure campaign that Donald Trump led in late 2017 which was a lot of sanctions pressure and focus anyway in a nutshell the website presented itself as a volunteer run operation that was seeking to cast light on sanctions violations in North Korea, and it posted quite unique content every few weeks, every month

or so. Documents often, right? Or information, documents, data? And often the pros, yeah, often the pros would be quite, you know, very focused on, like, kind of bringing down the regime type rhetoric and what, you know, how much hypocrisy there is in the upper echelons of North Korean leadership. But buried in all this, like, quite heated rhetoric was, were key data points, key information facts.

Like, for example, Pyongyang Papers has learned that ship X will be carrying 200,000 tons of coal on this date, which was very interesting. And very specific. Very, very specific. And the more we saw them doing this, the more we got curious about what was going on exactly. And maybe, well, we can talk about that.

But that was the gist of the website. And it continued until this year. It was deleted in the last two to three months. And the social media accounts were also deleted. Wow. So a very unusual, sharp end to the website. Yeah. Now, I remember a couple of times over the years

reaching out to them and requesting an interview with them. and you remember this too because I shared this with you at the time that they were very reluctant. They were right back with either anonymously or just a single first name. They asked if they could do the interview in writing. I said, that's not really how a podcast works. And I said, well, how about we do it? But we type in the responses and then put that in through a computer generated voice or we do voice modulation. And we just couldn't go ahead with that.

That's not the way that we do things here at the NK News podcast. In the end, you know, the last time I wrote to them, I think there was in April of this year. I did get a reply back, but it was like, well, we're sorry, we're not going to be able to help you with that. And so no podcast ever happened and never really did find out the identities of the people behind it. But all that level, that granular level of detail, it's the kind of stuff that you would expect to see in a panel of experts report, which panel of experts no longer exist, the United Nations panel of experts on sanctions enforcement. And look, some of the people I spoke to told me that, and I spoke to people that were formally on the panel of the experts, I spoke to open source, very specialized sanctions

investigators from some of the big tank tanks or research groups you may know of. And there was a couple times people said that Pyongyang papers almost played a kind of hand of God role in, in act. So for example, when there was an active investigation going on into, for example, oil smuggling in the Taiwan Strait going to North Korea, or panel of experts' investigations into what's going on in Africa in country ABC, that sometimes the Pyongyang papers would dump highly relevant information just as people were working on those very issues. So relevant and timely.

Relevant and timely. And, you know, that got people wondering further who is behind. it because you know I've been doing this for 15 years and I've seen North Korea blogs websites personalities come and go we're a weird oddball collection but I don't really know of anyone that's shy of talking to the media because fundamentally people start websites because they want to share they have some degree of ego they want to be associated with the work they're doing and so this was very odd that they were so resistant to to talking

talking about their work. Yeah, because it was an outfit that had information that was impossible or very difficult to find elsewhere, and as you point out, very relevant and timely to investigations done by the panel of experts. Could it have been a release valve or controlled leaks by an intelligence organization somewhere in the world? I would say that's probably the most likely explanation. There was, because this is very privileged information, and it was being.

you know there was a campaign like aspect to it it was ongoing for i think almost seven years no one really you know sanctions is such a specific people have in the past run blogs to talk about north kore human rights or the humanitarian situation or finding ways to get information in and out of the country but sanctions is really frankly something that volunteers And people don't really have much skin in the game to research unless they want to bolster their credentials and CV, but see above this entity or person didn't want to do that. And also a lot of organizations that are trying to help North Koreans or do things related to North Korea, they need money to keep a website going. They need money to pay for costs of volunteers, even if the volunteers are not salaried. Did this organization, did Pyongyang Papers, did they request money?

Was there a donate website or something like that or go fund me? Yeah, but this was also suspicious because there was a QR code on the website that offered a way to send money to a Bitcoin account, but when you took your phone out to scan it, my device always said no data contained within this QR code. So it went to it, basically didn't lead to a wallet. Didn't go to any wallet. That's weird. Yeah. So you're asking for donations, you've made a QR code if there's a wallet. that is not related to the QR code.

So no one could donate to this thing. No one could donate, even if they wanted to. So that was also, and I went through the internet archive snapshots going back to 2018 to make sure it hadn't broken. And even back then, it didn't resolve. So that was another fishy indicator. Now, just the language was also strange because whilst on the website, we saw, you know, the guys in their emails to you said that they were from, there was one guy that signed

himself as Roberto yes and they said they're in South America yes and on the website it looked like it was littered with deliberate spelling mistakes to make it look like non-native English but in correspondence sent to you and I yeah to be honest there was a lot of British language best best wishes as a as a sign off is not something I know many Americans to say whilst Americans say while there was a lot of whoever was doing this, I think was, at the very least, educated in the UK or lives in the UK. Did you ever talk to anyone that said, look, I know about this?

No. Okay. And I spoke to many, many people in the sanctions field and everyone had the same question, who's behind this? Wow. If anyone out there listening today, if you've got the inside skinny on this, you know, send us an email at podcast at nknews.org or, you know, hit us up on the 24. Twitterverse or something.

Yeah. Chad, we must move on. We've got one more story to go to. It's actually a couple of story that are related. So the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete, Pete, is it Pete Hegset? Pete Hegset recently came to Korea. Shortly after Trump's visit here for APEC, Pete went to the DMZ or DMZ, if you will, the demilitarized zone.

North Korea said that was not good. It called it brazen and vowed an offensive response. And then North Korea launched a missile. Yeah, I mean, this comes in the context of Trump's failed outreach, is a failed attempt to meet with Kim Jong-un that was not responded to. And yeah, just on not just this visit, but other recent developments suggest that we're going backwards, not forwards when it comes to positive developments on the Korean Peninsula. We've had new State Department sanctions designations, the North Koreans responding,

saying this is evidence that it's not a right time to talk and that this is further proof of the U.S. hostile policy. Any of these Department of War or what used to be Department of Defense secretary is going to the DMZ to peer in, that's something I kind of associate with, frankly, the Obama and... Well, Clinton did it once too, and I think George Bush too. But I mean... I thought every visiting president had to go and visit, make a peer...

across the demilitarians but it's i associate with that era and i mean i guess pence did it as well under trump but it it's it's it's it's kind of an antiquated measure to take when it comes to north kore and it has no practical purpose vis-a-vis shifting north k i think it's really just for domestic facing uh like you know giving the troops in and and south korean partners a boost etc but yeah it it's not something i associate with um i found the timing odd like why have that so soon after trump was making all this outreach if it came you know months from now it might not seem that notable but the the sort of um a to b of the interest in summits followed by this was a bit odd for me yeah now speaking of that that failed chance to meet are people now

talking about another date in the future sort of saying well you know maybe they'll meet at this time? By they I mean Trump and Kim. Yeah, I've heard, you know, we've got the Congress coming up in early 2026. The North Korean Korean Workers Party Congress. Which one rumor I've heard that could include some release fails for increased international engagement or at least that will be on the agenda. So we should watch for that. But I think it's going to need to tango and the North Koreans have made it pretty clear that at least we're the US they're waiting for a demonstration that there is a fundamental change in approach and right now it's rather tepid from the US side and you know at the start this year January I remember

when we did our predictions event I said we'd see a meeting before the end of 2025 you did I think I'm probably wrong at this stage I think there's a good chance you are right we're 11 months in yeah gee uh wrong for the right reasons as and any pundits would say. All right, that's a fun way to end today's episode. Thank you very much, Chad, for coming on the NK News Podcast. You're welcome. Thank you so much, Jacko.

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