{"id":1428,"date":"2007-10-01T09:06:56","date_gmt":"2007-10-01T16:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2007-10-01T09:06:56","modified_gmt":"2007-10-01T16:06:56","slug":"our-man-in-pyongyang-or-rather-hackensack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/01\/our-man-in-pyongyang-or-rather-hackensack\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Man in Pyongyang (or rather, Hackensack)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Both Vanity Fair<\/a><\/i> and The New Yorker<\/a><\/i> have astonishing profiles of Bobby Egan, a “freelance diplomat” to the DPRK who otherwise runs a BBQ joint in Hackensack, NJ.<\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a><\/i>: <\/p>\n

Egan, who has run Cubby\u2019s for twenty-five years, is well known in Hackensack, though not solely for the quality of his ribs. For nearly fifteen years, he has served as a kind of unofficial ambassador\u2014a go-between and a gofer\u2014for the government of North Korea. He is, as he puts it, \u201cKim Jong Il\u2019s guy in New Jersey.\u201d Dozens of photographs on his restaurant walls offer testimony to Egan\u2019s improbable involvement in international diplomacy. Among the pictures of friendly Giants and Yankees are several images of besuited, slightly ill-at-ease-looking Asian men posing at Cubby\u2019s. \u201cThat\u2019s Minister Han, before he became Ambassador here,\u201d Egan said to me, pointing to a youthful, bespectacled man in a blue suit. (Han Song Ryol, who joined North Korea\u2019s U.N. delegation in 1993, ended his tenure as Ambassador last year and returned to Pyongyang.) \u201cAnd that\u2019s Ambassador Ho Jong.\u201d (Ho left his post in 1994.) In another photograph, a gentleman with the same black hair and grin as Egan stands with a beaming young female athlete, Kye Sun Hui. \u201cThat\u2019s my dad at the Atlanta Olympics, in \u201996,\u201d Egan said. \u201cShe won the judo title when she was just sixteen. She\u2019s a hero in North Korea. She still asks about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one corner of the restaurant is a photograph showing a dreary skyline, shot from what looks like a viewing platform. \u201cThat\u2019s Pyongyang,\u201d Egan said. \u201cThat\u2019s when they gave me my pin.\u201d The pin to which he refers bears an image of Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea\u2019s Stalinist state, who died in 1994, and whose son is Kim Jong Il, its current leader. North Koreans wear similar pins as a sign of respect for their head of state. Egan keeps his pin in a small, cluttered back office at Cubby\u2019s. \u201cI\u2019m told there are only two Westerners that have pins\u2014me and some guy from Romania,\u201d Egan said. \u201cI got the pin at the end of my first trip. They inducted me into their family. They said, \u2018You are part of us.\u2019 I thought, When in Rome, I\u2019m Roman.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

Photo via Vanity Fair: Bobby Egan outside Cubby’s with his North Korean friends, including Minister Kim Myong Gil (to Egan’s right) and Han Song Ryol, the former deputy ambassador to the U.N. (with water bottle). Photograph by Michael Bronner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker have astonishing profiles of Bobby Egan, a “freelance diplomat” to the DPRK who otherwise runs a BBQ joint in Hackensack, NJ. The New Yorker: Egan, who has run Cubby\u2019s for twenty-five years, is well known in Hackensack, though not solely for the quality of his ribs. For nearly fifteen years, he has served as a kind of unofficial ambassador\u2014a go-between and a gofer\u2014for the government of North Korea. He is, as he puts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[65,103,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","category-journalism","category-north-korea","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-n2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}