North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Remco Breuker: How North Korea built illicit networks that outlasted sanctions

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

This week, historian Remco Breuker explores how Pyongyang has built illicit networks that operate far beyond its borders to oversee labor exports, arrange business deals and traffic arms. He reflects on the collapse of the U.N. Panel of Experts that once tracked sanctions violations, warning that the world has lost a vital mechanism for understanding […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O'Switzut, and today it is the 10th of October 2025, and I'm welcoming a first-time guest. It's hard to believe it's the first time, but I've known this man for a very long time. He's my former professor of Korean Studies at Leiden University, and that is, of course, Remko Broker. He's a historian of Korea and Northeast Asia who works on not only medieval Korean and Northeast Asian history,

but also on contemporary North Korean affairs. Since 2014, he's been working on making the voices of elite exiles from North Korea heard in academic debates. He's the author of a number of books about North Korea, all of them published in Dutch only, until now the most recent one came out just this summer called the world for home's north korea or the world according to north korea welcome on the nkai news podcast remko broker thank you leuccoe great to be here and today is the 80th anniversary of the founding of the korean workers party so it's a very auspicious date to have you on the podcast yes isn't it remko if you had to explain to a european of average intelligence why north korea suddenly matters so much

to Europe in recent years, what's the one story that you would tell first and why? The one story I would tell first to explain to the European of average intelligence why North Korea matters so much now. To Europe? I probably would, to Europe, yeah, no, right, yeah, no, yeah. I would probably tell the story of North Korea's dispatch of overseas workers, in particular to Europe, to show how North Korea relations between North Korea's dispatch. Korea and European states, perhaps not all of them, but a fair number of them, and

European business people has been around for really quite some time and has been having an influence on Europe and on North Korea. And I start from there, I think. Okay, and we're going to come back to North Korean workers dispatched to places like Europe a bit later on. You've written about North Korea before, books for popular audiences, as well as academic papers, and reports for governments and intergovernmental agencies. What made you write your most recent book?

Well, there was a very clear reason why I wanted to write this book. The emergence or the appearance of North Green soldiers at the side of Russia and the Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed to have taken Europe by surprise. It certainly took NATO by surprise. No real reaction was ever formulated. Well, except what? I'm not sure the Secretary General of NATO was in a number of press conferences in which he denounced the North Korean participation in the invasion, but that was about it.

What I wanted to do is explain understandably why we could have and should have seen this coming and why this is a pattern, North Korean participation in the armed conflicts of its allies, why this is a pattern that has been around for a long time and also to a certain extent make clear that this isn't going to go away that we need to formulate a realistic policy towards North Korea which as far as I'm concerned the Netherlands certainly doesn't have

perhaps we never had it and I'm not entirely sure whether the EU has one at the moment given North Korea's importance in the Russian efforts in Ukraine I thought this would be a good moment to explain North Koreans' press. Now, this book, this most recent one, The World According to North Korea, it feels a little bit like gonzo journalism, because you are, in a way, one of the supporting characters in this book. You are personally involved in investigating North Korean illegal weapons, sales, slave

labor, etc. And you don't really leave it up to the reader's imagination to guess how you feel about these things. It's quite clear from how you write your opinion about North Korea. Can you tell us a bit about how you situate yourself in this story vis-a-vis North Korea? Well, I don't think I situate myself much differently from other academics writing about what they do research on. It would be different if I were actually involved in illegal sales of weapons of North Korea or legal sales, depending on where and when and how. That would be different, and I think that would make it gone-so journalism.

But investigating it from a distance, I don't see how that really makes me different from an academic writing about, I don't know, the British-Irish conflict from London or from Dublin or from anywhere. I have tried, and I'm sorry to hear that I failed. Well, I expected to fail, to be honest, or at least. I have tried to keep my own opinions out of the book as much as possible, because ideally I would like the book to be used for its facts, and not for my, to a certain extent, also for my analysis. but not for my political opinion on what should be done, what could be done, if anything can be done,

with regard to North Korea's participation in the Russian war against Ukraine. Yeah, so I agree with half of what you say there, I think. Okay. In your book, you float the idea that North Korea's decades-long reliance on decentralized overseas networks has produced an operating style of tactical, profit-driven, one-off operations rather than a sustained strategy. If we look at cyber activity and the Ukraine war, do you see a coherent North Korean strategy at all, or is it mostly opportunistic tactics executed by semi-autonomous networks? And what does that decentralization mean for how we should read escalation risks and deter Pyongyang?

The honest answer here is, I don't know. I don't have enough data, enough information to really form an opinion on this. I think with regard, well, maybe I should unpack this, the way I answer this. Let's start with the thing I know least about cyber and how it's actually organized. I'm not entirely sure to what extent the cyber hacker groups are actually North Korean. I mean, it's quite well known that they're mixed. To what extent do they take orders from Pyongyang? I've no idea, too.

And I've never met anybody who can actually, except for the odd anecdote, tell me how this really works. There's a difference, I think, with the hackers based in North Korea itself, at least. Yeah, well, even if they don't work from North Korea, they would be based in North Korea. And then there's the groups that are not in North Korea. North Korea, at least some of the people are, this is, I think, something we, and I haven't really treated this in my book, but it's something that has kept me wondering, to what extent this actually helps North Korea. I know what's happening, Lazarus, for example, or Kim Suke, what those groups do is very disruptive.

I mean, you can't argue with that. So in that sense, you can see it as asymmetrical warfare or something of that kind. How much of the money makes it to North Korea? I have no idea. is the act i mean north korea is not no longer part of the international banking world you'd have to exchange all the money not just from cryptocurrency but to crypto currency that cannot be traced then exchange it for something else that can be useful to north korea census arts will stay abroad and will be used there which will weaken

Pyongyang's say over it so and that's there are too many unknowns for me there to be honest with regard to overall strategy with regard to ukraine and Russia. Yes, I do think that is definitely coordinated from Pyongyang. I don't see how it will be possible to fight a sustained war effort if it isn't properly coordinated. It's difficult enough, as I think the history of the North Korean involvement up until now has shown. Having said that, earning money abroad is a different story. At least those people I talk to, and what I can gather from research that other people or parties wrote, there doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correspondence

between what Pyongyang wants and tells you to do and what you actually do. Even if you talk to Somalia like Tayyong-ho, who, of course, is quite accessible in South Korea, he will confirm this. Pyongyang doesn't know everything is going on. It doesn't need to know, as long as it's, well, the money needs to be coming in, I guess,

but then there's probably also a question of reliability, trustworthiness, loyalty towards the party and everything, or at least the people in charge. Apart from that, I think, as far as I know, people are, or networks are left to their own devices to a pretty high degree. So it's, depending on what you look at, it will give you a different picture. The strategy in Ukraine, yes, that must be coordinated either in Pyongyang or with Pyongyang.

But he obviously is financial activities, unless there's something very specific. In general, I would guess that it isn't. In the last chapter of your most recent book, you sketch a number of big picture stories that are told about North Korea by various actors in the world, including by North Korea itself. Can you briefly mention a couple of these stories about North Korea? and what we can learn from them. Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today

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