But those who try to keep up with events in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea, will be used to the fog of media cliché-mongering, fake news and dubious rumours from spy agencies presented as fact.
Dermot Hudson, chairman of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA) UK, spoke to Sputnik about NKNews, a "shadowy" website funded by the US, UK, Japanese and South Korean governments.
Sputnik: What is the Korean Friendship Association's mission?
Dermot Hudson: The Korean Friendship Association (KFA) was founded in November 2000 and it is a worldwide association. Our aims are to: show the reality of the DPR Korea to the world; defend the independence and socialist construction in the DPR of Korea; learn from the culture and history of the Korean People and work for the peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula.
We do what it says on the tin and defend People’s Korea with no ifs and buts.
Sputnik: The DPRK is demonised in the West. What's the reality of life there?
Dermot Hudson: Despite more than seven decades of sanctions and the stepping up of sanctions since 2016, the DPRK has free healthcare, free education and virtually free housing. It has full employment. The DPRK abolished taxation in 1974. Basic foods are supplied to citizens either free of charge or at very low cost. There is even a monthly free beer ration.
In 2021, it was decided to supply dairy products free of charge to nursery and kindergarten children.
There is low cost public transport in the DPRK. The Pyongyang Metro is not only one of the deepest in the world but probably the cheapest mass public transport system in the world where a single journey is about the equivalent of 3 pence (4 US cents) and an annual travel card costs around £1 ($1.23).
The DPRK is carrying out massive housing construction. This April, 10,000 new flats were completed in Pyongyang and handed over to people free of charge. Another 10,000 flats are under construction.
Visiting the DPRK 18 times since 1992, I have never seen any vandalism or graffiti, no one begging on the streets and no one taking drugs. Prostitution is unknown in the DPRK.
Sputnik: What is NKNews and who founded it?
Dermot Hudson: NKNews is an anti-DPRK, anti-KFA, propaganda website that operates out of Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
NKNews was founded by Chad O'Carroll, who had worked for the German Marshall Fund which has been named as a CIA front. O'Carroll, though apparently an Irish national resident in the UK, was trained in the US in journalism. O'Carroll also, for a time, used the alias Tad Farrell. O'Carroll is also linked to a curious outfit called the 'House of the Rising Stars’, which appears to be linked to Western intelligence bodies and think tank.
Sputnik: Isn't NKNews an honest media site that offers some insight into the country?
Dermot Hudson: No, definitely not. NKNews is a very shadowy outfit without transparency, it initially was registered as a UK company by O Carroll, but the registration was withdrawn before any accounts were filed and instead it was registered in the US tax haven of Delaware, where other CIA front companies in the past were registered.
We have no idea who the subscribers to NKNews are.
The very fact that NKNews operates out of South Korea means that they cannot be impartial or objective because South Korea has the National Security Law which defines the DPRK as the main enemy of South Korea and criminalises any support or sympathy for the DPRK. If NKNews ever wrote anything positive about the DPRK, they would be shut down immediately by the South Korean authorities and deported from the country.
NKNews relies heavily on ‘defectors‘, traitors to the DPRK for material about the DPRK.
NKNews is basically a means for the CIA and South Korean National Intelligence Service (formerly the ‘Agency for Security Planning’ and before that KCIA) to launder propaganda stories about the DPRK and to give them a stamp of ‘independence’ and ‘credibility‘.
Sputnik: Who is behind NKNews and who funds them?
Dermot Hudson: NKNews appears to be some kind of joint operation or collaborative effort between different Western intelligence agencies such as the CIA and MI6, plus the South Korea intelligence agencies. Probably Japan as well.
Despite for many years bleating about their ‘independence’ or trying to laugh off allegations about their links to Western intelligence agencies, a US government website revealed that in fact NKNews received $200,000 in funding from different US government departments including the US State Department and US Department of Defence. The South Korean Unification Ministry also gives NKNews some funding through the UniKorea foundation. The Japanese Foreign Ministry also has given funds to NKNews.
Sputnik: What kind of people work for them?
Dermot Hudson: To put it simply: people who are anti-communist and anti-DPRK!
The founder, Chad O'Carroll, once worked for the US German Marshall Fund which has been identified as a CIA front. O’Carroll, despite being an Irish citizen based in London, got training in journalism in the US rather than Britain.
Hamish McDonald, former Chief Operating Officer of NKNews is now a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute and also something called Project Sandstone. Oliver Hotham who was editor of NKNews for a long time (and responsible for harassing a KFA UK picket of the south Korean embassy in 2013, then slandering KFA UK in 2019) was formerly with the Sunday Times. He left NKNews to work for Agence France Presse in Hong Kong (an interesting posting). Hotham appeared to have some kind of link with Tory [British Conservative Party] leadership contender Rory Stewart.
Lastly, there is Jacco Zwetsloot. He is a graduate of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands which is known as an anti-DPRK centre and believed to be heavily associated with Dutch intelligence.
NKNews includes former US and South Korean army and intelligence officers on its staff and people who are described as OSINT (‘Open Source Intelligence’) specialists.
Sputnik: Can you give me some examples of them running fake or propaganda stories against the DPRK?
Dermot Hudson: Recently, NKNews claimed that the DPRK would conduct a nuclear test during the visit of US President Joe Biden to South Korea, but this did not happen.
A few years ago, NKNews ran a story which said “Reports from Pyongyang suggest that some members of North Korea's top security agency are being issued with Kim Jong Un badges.” No such thing happened and there are no badges in the DPRK which bear the portrait of the supreme leader.
NKNews propaganda against the DPRK tends to be more general and sometimes subtle and not always obvious.
1. "Everyone is starving”, and the DPRK is just like Ethiopia in the 1980s. A long running myth which has been disproved time and time again. Even when the DPRK faced the "arduous march" in the mid 1990s the DPRK rationed food and distributed it to everyone through the distribution system. Visiting the DPRK in 1996 it did not look like Ethiopia in the 70s and 80s.
2. The DPRK is "totalitarian", it is George Orwell's 1984 in the modern day. Again a long running myth, very much a hackneyed propaganda cliché. As to Orwell, he was a nasty anti-communist hack writer, anti-Irish racist and later shown to be an MI5 informant. '1984' was a tawdry and poorly written piece of propaganda.
3. Recycling of malicious rumours about the DPRK supreme leadership from South Korea.
4. Claiming that there is an "elite" in the DPRK, usually ill-defined but assumed to be party members, along with the idea that there is a gap between the rich and poor. Well, the ruling Workers' Party has millions of members, most families will have at least one party member. The WPK's members are not just high officials but waitresses, barmaids, cleaners, drivers, ordinary soldiers. All officials and cadres are expected to do one day of manual labour a week.
5. Rumours about "reform" and "opening up” and a capitalist market economy, basically trying to deny the socialist nature of the DPRK and its planned economy.
4 and 5 are basically deliberately aimed at leftist in Western countries and aim to turn them against the DPRK.
Sputnik: Do the authorities in the DPRK know about NKNews and its activities?
Dermot Hudson: Yes, NKNews reporter Alek Sigley, an Australian national, was detained in Pyongyang in June 2019 and subsequently deported or expelled from the DPRK in July 2019.
Sigley had craftily entered the DPRK as a student rather than applying for a journalist visa to report from the DPRK, and had been in the DPRK since April 2018. He took advantage of this to move around Pyongyang easily and to publish stories about the DPRK. Sigley was arrested for both espionage and anti-state activities.
Sigley's articles about the DPRK were different to the usual staple tabloid fare about the DPRK — "they are all starving", executions and labour camps — but instead claimed that there was an elite in the DPRK, that there was "a growing middle class". Sigley based this conclusion on a few trips dining out in restaurants in the DPRK.
This is of course a more modern and subtle version of anti-DPRK propaganda which seeks to confuse and mislead people by denying the socialist nature of the DPRK.
Sigley himself confessed to spying and anti-state activities. Sigley managed to avoid being put on trial and jailed due to the intervention of Sweden on behalf of Australia.