North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Epstein files, North Korean POWs and the looming Party Congress

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

In this episode, NK News Deputy Managing Editor David Choi and Senior Analytical Correspondent Colin Zwirko discuss newly released U.S. Justice Department files that show the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein explored possible business opportunities in North Korea. The conversation then shifts to the two North Korean prisoners of war currently held in Ukraine, including […]

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Each design is a conversation starter. Find yours at shop.nknews.org. Again, that's shop.nknews.org. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NKNews podcast. I'm your host, Jacko's Wedgsel. And today it is Tuesday, the 10th of February, 2006. And I'm here in the studio by David Choi for the first time. David, welcome.

Happy to be here. And Colin Twirko back for the manyth time. Welcome back, Colin. Good morning. Let's start today with a, with the story that I guess it's very in keeping with the Times. North Korea, linking North Korea and Jeffrey Epstein together, the late financier convicted sex offender and all sorts of other things.

Jeffrey Epstein was interested in doing business in North Korea, wasn't he, David? That's right. He was interested in a great many aspects about North Korea. What happened was the Justice Department over at the U.S. They released over 3.5 million pages of files as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And these emails show that, you know, while discussing the prospect with colleagues, he was somewhat interested in business ventures over at the DPRK. Right.

As far back as 2003, a Frenchman, a French diplomat wrote to him and asked him whether he was interested in North Korea and Epson wrote back very. Right. So that was actually in 2013 with a man by the name of Olivier Colom, a French diplomat and former aide to former President Nicholas Sarkozy. Olivier wrote if Epstein was interested in North Korea, Epstein responds with a one-word email, vary. And we don't quite know to what extent this supposed deal was and whether or not it happened likely didn't. But what we do know is that Olivier said something about a $10 billion investment regarding mining and infrastructure.

Ah, mining. Okay, that's a thing that's come up quite a few times. In other people who are interested in North Korea, I'll come back to that. later on, but then fast forward to 2018, and then there's an email exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and somebody named David Stern. Right. So right off the bat, I should probably say we have no evidence that this was linked to the former NBA commissioner, David Stern, who I believe passed away a few years after. But what we do know is that this individual, Mr. Stern, was working in the finance industry. And when you did write to Epstein in 2018,

he was asking about how he could get to North Korea and potentially buy real estate. Yeah, prime real estate. And he said, I have the money. Right, right. And Colin, I see you making a face there. And this reminds me of, I mean, there have over the years, of course, been many business people, not just from the United States, but also from South Korea and Egypt and China, who have lost money sinking investments into North Korea.

We've got the owner of the Sang Bangul South Korean clothing company and also, of course, those who invested in the Kaysong Industrial Complex. We've got the two Egyptian brothers, the Saweris, who ran Oroscom, and of course Hyundai Asan, who accumulatively may have lost between $1.3 and $1.4 billion. And those who have been listening to the podcast for a long time. I remember that years ago I interviewed Jim Rogers, who was very keen, he was also an American, very keen on investing in North Korea. So there have been names over the last 25 years of people,

and Jeffrey Epstein, just the latest one, I guess. right? Yeah, but there's no evidence that he actually did sink money into North Korea, right? No, we have no evidence of that yet, and I don't think, you know, due to the large nature of the emails, I don't think we'll have, you know, any other proof that this ever materialized in the future. But one thing to keep in mind is also is that, you know, people around Trump's orbit, South Korean officials, they all floated the idea of potentially doing business in North Korea, opening a McDonald's there or something, I believe, the former aid to President Moon Jae-in said that in 2018 or something like that.

Yeah, you're talking about Mun Jong-in, or Ms. Jong-in-moon, who had a podcast. Yeah, he said that North Korea wanted to become a normal country, and he was welcoming America. They were welcoming an American investment. Right. But the likely of that ever happening, especially in the near future, is probably very, very small due to sanctions and whatnot. I think maybe Colin might dive into that a little bit.

further. Colin? Well, yeah. I don't know if the prospects for McDonald's in North Korea were ever that high, but definitely not now, now that he has little interest in American culture, Americanization of anything happening in North Korea. By he, I mean Kim Jong. All right, so we leave that one behind then, investment in North Korea and the late Jeffrey Epstein. Let's talk then about the two North Korean prisoners of war currently held in Ukraine for the better part of year, I think, certainly many months now. Recently, NBC released a two-part documentary, which I watched about a week ago, in which these two prisoners were interviewed. It's very sad, very moving, their plight. I mean, first of all, what they were told when they were going to North Korea, what they

weren't told, how they were injured and how they, their biggest regret seems to be on the part of both of them, is not dying. Yeah, it is. And they've expressed interest in, you know, they don't want to go back to North Korea. And I think that's because they're aware that there's not a good fate in store for them, right? Right, and they've already, you know, their faces have appeared on TV. They've already indicated, or they've already revealed some unflattering conditions about their deployment. So if they do go back, they probably won't be receiving a warm welcome. Right, and somehow I can't help but see a parallel here to way back in the Korean War,

where the negotiations over the armistice took two years longer than they needed to, precisely because of this issue of where do we send prisoners back to? Do we send them back to where they came from unconditionally, or do we give them the right to choose where they'd like to be sent to? And in this case, these prisoners would like to not go back to the North Korea, but go back to South Korea. Do we have any idea what the hold-up is? I mean, they've been there quite a while now.

Right. So this is a tricky situation. We have two POWs, prisoners of war, who would like to defect to or be transferred over to South Korea. However, Seoul understands that because, you know, this involves another country aside from Russia and Ukraine. You know, we have North Korea in the picture, obviously. Seoul understands that they have to be, the decision lies with Ukraine, essentially.

And so we're not quite sure how this is going to develop, but Seoul has indicated that ultimately this is going to be Ukraine's decision. Right, and the sense that I got from the documentary of the NBC show was that I think Ukraine is hoping to somehow use them as, well, use maybe the wrong word, but somehow leverage the existence of two North Korean prisoners to get back more of the Ukrainian prisoners in some kind of a prisoner exchange with Russia? Right. You know, it's been floated, but we haven't seen any progress in that deal ever materializing.

Right. Just yet. Okay. Well, we'll see how that goes then. So, Colin, let's talk about that Congress, which I understand is now going to happen at the end of this month. First of all, we thought it might be around the beginning. Sorry, the middle of the month, perhaps to coincide with the last. late Kim Jong-Yil's birthday, but it's now going to be the end of February. Right. It seems to me that

they were preparing. I mean, they've been preparing for a military parade to round out the Congress. So this is going to be the night, sorry, just to go back, this is going to be the ninth party Congress. The last Congress occurred in January 2021. This is where Kim Jong-un and all the party members gather in Pyongyang to talk about the next five-year plan. That's military, economy, foreign policy. The last one lasted eight days. And then there was a military, parade two days after the final day. And so this time, what we're seeing in satellite imagery is preparations for a military parade starting back in November. And then we started seeing preparations that indicated it would happen soon. But now North Korea had finally announced through a

Politburo meeting over the weekend attended by Kim Jong-un that it would start in late February. And that refers to the final third of the month. Right. So specific date has not been announced, but late February. Yeah. And I get the sense that they've been prepared. for this for a while. The timeline is a bit different this time than the previous two times that there's only been two Congresses under Kim Jong-in. The previous one was back in the 80s. So there's not a whole lot of baselining material to go off of here, but the schedule seems a bit longer this time. The indications that we used by baseline in the last two haven't proved so useful this time, like the way that they do this process. They have meetings of a lower

level, then they have all the meetings of the provincial level. And then they finally just decide, okay, we're ready to hold the final Congress. It does indicate some interesting things. You know, we know that North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship. Kim Jong-Gun has the final say on everything that happens in the country, basically. But, you know, they have this political system. They have thousands of party members or hundreds, I don't know, like millions of party members. And they do all gather and try to get a sense of what the biggest issues are at every level before kicking them up to the highest level. So in that sense, there is, some political debating going on in a way. But, you know, Kim Jong-un's got a lot of stuff in mind.

He's already talked about on the military, on, you know, what he thinks about South Korea, what he wants to do about housing and all that kind of stuff, which is going to come through at the Congress regards of what these thousands of people, you know, say they want it or not. But, yeah, it's going to start soon. I'm, yeah, I'm certainly very keen to see what comes out of this Congress in terms of North Korea's relationship to South Korea, given that this is the first time that a Congress has been held since Kim Jong-in-Mady's statement in, what, December, 2003, he was no longer interested in peaceful unification with South Korea.

So that should be very interesting. Of course, there's lots of other things to economics and military, etc. But this one is the one that's really going to interest, I think, a lot of people in South Korea. Yeah, and so the way it worked last time, there were, you know, they finally, we don't know exactly when it's going to start, then it starts, and there's a short report that says, the Congress opens, and then at the end of the report,

it says, and it continues. And then we might get a little bit of, you know, they'll tell us what's on the agenda. So, you know, just for the readers out there, this is kind of what to expect. On the last Congress, on day four, was actually the biggest, most consequential day of material from what state media gave us. On day four, we had this big speech from Kim Jong-un that laid out everything. His entire, you know, it was like a 12-page-long speech in the Rurong Shimon. I think that's something compared to his grandfather's speeches, that's probably a short one, really, 12 pages.

Kim Il-Song, you know, he would give some that would go in for hours. Well, yes. But, you know, this is what we're doing now. And I think then the next few days, what they do is they go, they break out into their sectors. They debate it amongst themselves. And then they come back and they give unanimous support for everything. Anyway. And in the last Congress, the final day wasn't the biggest day. It came in the middle. But some weird stuff that's happened in the last couple of years, they've been more secretive about their party plenums. So maybe they don't give us as much information this time. Or maybe they leave it all to. to the end. We don't know yet what will happen, but we will have a lot of, very incremental, very niche analysis of everything that comes out of that Congress. Yeah, you'll find it all at NK News and NKPro. Now, our last story that I'm going to spring on both of you, this is a little weird story that came out a few days ago on February 6th. New developments on North Korea likely in the next few days, Seoul official says, and that was kind of a mystery. Did you read that one, David? I think so. I might have even edited it.

Is there any hint from this sole foreign ministry official about what this development might be? I mean, whatever it was, it seemed very upbeat. There will be some new developments regarding North Korea in the next few days, but no details given. So here we can just speculate wildly. I mean, will it be the opening of a McDonald's in Juan San Calmer? No. Check out Polly Market, I guess, for that one.

Right. I think the timing of this is interesting as it falls. either on or close to the ninth party Congress state. So, you know, maybe they might, Seoul wants to get ahead of it, perhaps have a few statements out before North Korea does. So I don't know. I'm just speculating here. Oh, well, that is where we're going to have to end it today. Thank you, gentlemen, for coming on the show, and we'll see you again next time.

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and to our post-recording producer Alana Hill, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you for listening and listen again next time.