North Korea News Podcast by NK News - The Pyongyang marathon’s new name, and the death of a North Korean commando

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

North Korean state media coverage of the first international marathon in Pyongyang since 2019 underscored ongoing inconsistencies in how state propaganda mythologizes Kim ll Sung, changing the name of the event to remove reference to the founding leader’s birthplace Mangyongdae. NK News founder and CEO Chad O’Carroll joins the podcast to discuss the ideological tensions […]

Explore the unofficial world of DPRK-inspired apparel at NK News Shop. Dive into a captivating collection of North Korea-themed t-shirts, hoodies and more at the NK News Shop. From the popular Daedonggang beer t-shirts to the adventurous air-cordior designs, each and the world. Hello listeners and welcome to the MK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O's Whetson, and this episode is recorded via StreamYard today, Tuesday, the 15th of April, 2025. And I'm joined on StreamYard by Chad O'Carroll. Chad, what is today's date? What does it mean 15th of April? It's my dad's birthday actually.

Ah okay well happy birthday to the Pater Familias of O'Carroll family. It's also the day the Titanic sunk and the very day the Titanic sunk a man called Kim Il-sung was born in 1912. That's right. So the 113th birthday of Kim Il-sung. And Daniel Pinkston was born on this day as well. Hi, Dan Pinkston, if you're out there listening.

North Korea, what's your insult? That's right. And also a repeat podcast guest. So that's a good time to talk about the marathon that was just held in Pyongyang last Sunday, which used to be called the Mankyongdae Memorial Marathon, I think, named after the birthplace of Kim Il-sung. Yeah, named after the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, Mankyongdae, the place with 10,000 views.

But they've changed that name now, haven't they? Yeah, they've removed the Mangyong day aspect from the name which has led to articles in the South Korean press and on our own website asking a question is this part of a bigger trend to slowly I guess distill away distil away references to Kim Il-sung on the Day of the Sun as it's also called. Right. Now, confusing signals from North Korea, aren't they? Because on the one hand, they've removed the name Mankyongdae from the name of the marathon, but it does look like in the North Korean state media, they are still using the Day of the Sun as the name for today. Yeah. So it's now been changed to Pyongyang International Marathon,

so no reference to Myeong-Yong day, but there are two basically schools of thought. One is that this is a deliberate effort to divert attention away from founding president Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-un, I guess, slowly but surely. What I think is more likely is it's not really a deliberate effort to do that, but perhaps to just modernize aspects of anniversaries and events that are taking place at this time

of year to make them less related to political propaganda basically. So for that, for example, this marathon, it's an international marathon. And yeah, you've got professional and semi professional participants coming in from all around the world, the North Korean ones as well. Perhaps they just don't want that to be linked with the founding leader. You know, I imagine if there was a marathon in Seoul that still had some relic of Pak Chung-hee involved in its name, it would just be a bit odd, even though there are museums still in Seoul dedicated to Pak Chung-hee's leadership. So my suspicion is it's more like that because they, this has been so inconsistently implemented

since stories start coming out a year or two, noticing things missing, calendars that didn't have April 15th marked as the day of sun, and then some calendars that did, it's just really all over the place. And we know for a fact that they're very capable of instituting big changes like when the Pyongyang time zone changed overnight. They did that nationwide and then they flip-flopped back. So they can do that if they want. I think the fact they're not suggests it's something else.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is also the first time that a large group of foreign visitors have been to Pyongyang in six years. I was at the last Mankyongdae International Marathon in April 2019. And just last week, there were about 200 or so international runners, mostly amateurs, for the newly renamed Pyongyang International Marathon. Although, interestingly, they're still counting it as an extension of the previous one. So it was the 31st Pyongyang International Marathon.

So yeah, the first time that we had a large number of people moving through the streets of Pyongyang, I think I got the number right, international marathon. So yeah, the first time that we had a large number of people moving through the streets of Pyongyang, many of them YouTubers and influencers with GoPro cameras. So if they're not up already, we can expect to see lots of film footage and pictures appearing on social media. And to come back to our earlier theme, at least some of those international runners

were taken after the marathon to Mungyongdae to visit the birthplace of Kim Il-sung and to receive the reverential speech that the guide gives there at those small humble houses that Kim Il-sung apparently once lived in. Yeah, although I did hear that there was a lot of stress that this wasn't a tour, it was a special delegation visit, specific to the marathon. So I don't think there was much sightseeing. Interesting that there was for some at least a visit to Mung Yong Day for inspecting, observing the facilities that Kim Il Sung allegedly grew up in.

Yes, you're right. It was stressed as a run trip, not a tour, although certain sites were visited. The Juche Tower with the option to take the elevator and go up to the top was one of the places visited. So they did go to some of the sites. And I heard from one contact that some of the YouTubers were behaving disgracefully, just really up in the face of some of the North Koreans, very disrespectful of people's, you know, right to privacy or not being bothered by people with GoPros. Someone, yeah, the person that told me that said some of the YouTubers were just doing

their best to try and capture viral moments, which we've talked about this before, but this is a big change in foreign visitors compared to five years ago. And I just don't, I don't see how North Korea can balance allowing foreigners in with the risk that you have very high profile YouTubers with massive audiences coming in and doing daft things from a North Korean propaganda perspective. You know, they institute a ban on foreigners, foreign journalists, as tourists. But these days, most of us foreign journalists have much smaller audiences than professional YouTubers. And we will at least follow within certain parameters and rules. Whereas YouTubers are normally out there to stoke extreme shock or other emotions during the videos and that can lead

to sensationalism and distortion. That's right. And I understand that at least some of those YouTubers, their cameras or their SD cards weren't even checked at the airport. I remember on the in past visits on the way out that the North Korean customs authorities at the airport would often look through your camera and see, make sure you hadn't been photographing military installations or things like that. And I think there's, there's so much filming going on now that they just don't even bother anymore, or at least didn't on this most recent trip. So it'll be interesting to see how that develops in the future.

Yeah. Well, just to add to that, I mean, we may have seen by did the story last week about how the tourist agencies were, they're not getting any, at least as of last week, not getting any indication of a resumption of tourism to North Korea anytime soon. So this seems to have been an outlier for some reason, the marathon. Right. Right. It might be a case of one and done until next year's marathon. Let's see how that goes. All right. Well, let's also let's talk about a man who died here in Seoul recently, I think just last week at Kim Shin-joo. He was a one of those North Korean assassins sent to cut off Park Jong-hee's head back in January 1968

in an event famously called the Blue House raid. Yeah, so he died and that Blue House raid was a remarkable story for those listeners who haven't heard. Basically, he was one of 30 or so North Koreans that came down infiltrated through the border. They met two South Koreans while they were in the process of getting closer to Seoul and the Blue House and for some reason decided to tell them who they were and the two South Koreans pretended to be pro-North Koreans and rather than kill the two South Koreans as they should have done according to the rules they'd been provided, they decided to let them go. And those two South Koreans ultimately told the police, which then created a manhunt for

these North Koreans. And it led to a bloody shootout. Yeah, with the bus where I think nearly all of the North Koreans dying, except for this one guy, Kim, and he kept a grenade to blow himself up in a kind of suicide move in case of being surrounded, but didn't ultimately do that and help the South Korean intelligence agencies subsequently to figure out exactly what had happened and then was given a kind of pass to rejoin civilian life and apparently worked in an explosives company initially. Korea explosives later on renamed Hanwha. Hanwha, I didn't know that. And then, well, Hanwha had a North Korean terrorist working for them at one point. That's right. Yeah, he only served about two years or less in a South Korean prison. So he's

had a remarkable life. And another one of those examples of where, you know, South Korea can be far more lenient on criminals than the North Korea can. Interesting as well, because the would be assassins of Hwang Jong-yup got 10 year sentences, I remember, in 2013. So he was out for trying to kill the president. He got out after you say just two years. That's right. Yeah, I think because of his maybe his value or his helpfulness, I'm not sure. But yeah, fascinating that our listeners should go on to the website to NK News and read the story by Fyodor Tertitskyi, who is on the podcast.

And is that you probably know the answer to this that when when one goes hiking in Pukhansan, just near north of Gugidong, there's a kind of area where there are these model figurines of two or three North Korean soldiers hiding out under some rocks on the mountain. And I'm guessing that's a depiction of these gentlemen. Yeah, now I haven't seen that. But that does sound about right, because there definitely is, on the walking path on Bugaksan behind the Blue House, there is a tree that's named the Kim Shin-joh tree that has bullet holes in it from where some of the shooting took place.

And that was the reason why for decades people were not allowed to go into the mountains until the early 2000s because of the risk of somebody approaching the Blue House from the undefended north. So it was, yeah, many, many things resulted from that assassination attempt. Kim Shin-joo became a Presbyterian minister and retired, lived a long life, died at 83. So things worked out okay for him, although I wonder what happened to the one assassin who apparently escaped and maybe made his way back north. And as a result of this, Park Jung-hee mobilized a group of men to train in Silmido next to Incheon Airport to do the same back to Kim Il Sung, right?

That's right. Yes. And so there's a dramatization of that in the thick 2003 or 2004 film Shilmi-do. Great movie. Definitely worth watching. Okay, so we've got time for the last story. Let's talk about Andrei Lankov, our good friend and frequent guest on the podcast, wrote a piece about the cuts, the American budget cuts to the broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and what that means for North Korea. Yeah, his basic argument is this is an own goal from the United States. And he is basically of the mind that VOA and RFA in particular were relatively non-political, you know, of course they were political, but relatively non-propagandistic in terms of what they were broadcasting for many, many years into North Korea.

And by his estimation, there would always be a cohort of listeners in North Korea that for whom these were really important sources of information and could have slowly helped parts of North Korean society adapt and evolve their understanding of the outside world, as well as better understand what's going on inside North Korea. But fundamentally, I mean, that's I think, Lanov's points are fair. This, this whole budget cut situation is as, as we talked about, I think on the podcast when I was in the U S it's really having quite a profound impact on the North Korea, what's your community? We've had Wilson center, US IP Institute of peace, RFA VOA, and now, you know, RFA, VOA, and now potentially UMG, a unification media group, which is daily NK, and they also broadcast into North Korea.

I understand they're heavily funded by these same channels of, well, similar channels of funding, NED, DRL from the State Department. And so basically, North Koreans may in a year or two from now have a lot less content coming from the outside world tailored specifically to their ears than they have done thus far. And I mean, it's never made a huge impact because it's always been relatively low, the amount that's been broadcast in. But it will, you know, I'm sure there'll be many people who will be missing this. And fundamentally, the more important thing for outsiders like ourselves and those trying to make sense of what's going on in North Korea is there are lots of skilled journalists that work at these institutions who could be without jobs and they have the connections to the sources, the main sources inside North Korea who can

still get information to the outside. So this could significantly thicken the fog that has grown around and inside North Korea since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. But Chad, I think it's also worth mentioning the story that you did late last year where grown around and inside North Korea since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. But Chad, I think it's also worth mentioning the story that you did late last year, where you went up to the border and listened to some of the Korean language stations being broadcast into North Korea, possibly by the South Korean National Intelligence Service. Yeah, well, yeah, we went up and listened to the radio stuff that's going in. And also, we brought Oh yeah, we went up and listened to the radio stuff that's going in. And also we brought these, uh, this portable European TV that allowed us to

tune into the North Korean, the North Koreans use a variant of European power based TV frequency to for TV broadcasting. So we were able to see what was going in and out of North Korea and what was really surprised. I think we found three or four stations that were broadcasting TV into North Korea that was extremely toxic by by North Korean standards. And it's the kind of thing that you just wonder why on earth has if Kim Yo Jong makes these angry statements about leaflets, why

is there nothing? Why is it just overlooked this whole TV thing? Because it's much, much more caustic than what's going in on the leaflets. And, you know, it's like kryptonite that is being broadcast through the air into people's homes. And the government has a lot less ability to stop that than leaflets, which they can pick up. And it's interesting that these are probably now with the disappearance of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, these are probably the only stations regularly broadcasting to North Korea now. Yes. And in addition to this, with the demise of the Unesokyo government and the probable election of Lee Jae-myeong, I would bet thousands of dollars that the contents on those TV broadcasts will either discontinue or change substantially.

Now you can judge if that's good or bad. But I don't believe the Minjoo-dang will support the kind of broadcasting that clearly UN Security Council government has been facilitating under the table. So yeah, the information ecosystem for those in North Korea could be significantly changing. However, I should point out that for those in North Korean borderland areas, there is the entire spectrum of radio from Northeast Asia to tune into. And I think people, I don't know, I get the sense that North Korean human rights activists always downplay this. But if you're sitting with a radio in North Korea, you have the whole bandwidth, FM and AM bandwidth to search through.

Now, a lot of it will be jammed, but later at night with the, with the right aerial, you'll hear stuff coming in from China from South Korea, and you know, it's not going to be tailored to North Korean listening cases, but it will still be outside information. And all of that could be strengthened with the right donor who wanted to fund potentially for that to be increased in power for ballcasting into North Korea. Good point. All right, well, that's where we're going to have to end today. Thank you very much, Chad, for coming on on this day of the sun. Happy birthday to your dad and to Dan Pinkston, and we'll see you again soon. Take care, everyone.

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