North Korea’s faithful Western employee makes no apologies

TARRAGONA, Spain — Despite his nation’s deep rift with the West, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can count on one comrade to argue his case behind enemy lines: a multilingual Westerner who is as much at home in Pyongyang’s secretive halls of power as he is in Silicon Valley or his hometown on the Spanish Riviera.

Alejandro Cao de Benos, a 38-year-old aristocrat from Spain’s Catalonia region, is believed to be the highest-ranking foreigner working for the North Korean government. For 11 years, he has served as a special delegate of the Foreign Ministry. It’s an honorary, unpaid position that comes with a free apartment in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where he sometimes celebrates Christmas.

Cao de Benos, a successful technology consultant who worked in Palo Alto in the early 2000s, devoted himself to North Korean ideology as a teenager in Spain. He founded the Korean Friendship Assn., which claims 12,000 members and organizes trips to North Korea for communist sympathizers. He also goes by the Korean name Cho Son Il, which means “Korean is one.”

“We are not living in a paradise in North Korea. I have seen the starvation. Everybody leads a humble life, but with dignity,” Cao de Benos said in a two-hour interview on the terrace of a seaside hotel in Tarragona. “Social paradise is our goal. I believe the [North Korean communist] system, if left to flourish, does justice for a greater number of people than capitalism does.”

A descendant of landowning barons from the Pyrenees mountains, he was born Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Perez, an aristocrat, not a communist. But when he was an adolescent, his family was forced to leave Catalonia and relocate to Andalusia, the southern stronghold of Spain’s Socialist party, where Cao de Benos’ father found work. Cao de Benos’ grandfather had made a series of bad investments and lost much of the family’s fortune. The young man watched his father go from being a nobleman to a laborer.

“It was a big shock. I had to start a new life in Granada,” Cao de Benos recalled. He hid his aristocratic roots and threw himself into leftist politics, joining the Spanish communist party at 15.

“First I started reading [Karl] Marx, which is the typical socialism that you’ll find. But I heard that there was a country that had another kind of socialism, another kind of experiment based on their own culture and history, and that was North Korea.”

Bewildered but eager to support her son’s intellectual curiosity, Cao de Benos’ mother, Elvira Perez, took him to meet a group of North Korean diplomats at a United Nations event in Madrid. Young Alejandro went home vowing to fight for the Korean revolution, his mother recalled.

“All our friends and neighbors were really surprised, and they still are!” said Perez, 60, who spoke by telephone from her home in Granada. “I suppose that happens when someone does something different, or takes a different path; people think it’s strange. But we have always sought to support our two sons. And for Alejandro, this is a passion.”

Cao de Benos now spends about half the year in Pyongyang as a government minder for the few foreign diplomats, businesspeople or journalists allowed to enter the isolated nation. He splits the other six months between his hometown in eastern Spain and other Western democracies, where he organizes university conferences about North Korean ideology and tries to drum up business for the ailing government.

It’s a tough job, given sanctions the United States and its allies have piled on North Korea for failing to halt its development of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.

“I once brought a group of Canadian businessmen to North Korea, and they were ready to make investments of 2 or 3 million euros. But how can we transfer millions of euros from Canada to Pyongyang if the U.S. blocks even a $100 wire transfer!” Cao de Benos exclaimed. “We can’t even use credit cards! The U.S. controls everything. When I bring tourists [to North Korea], they all have to carry cash.”

Journalists are occasionally among those Cao de Benos guides on tours of the communist state. In 2004, he made headlines for his harsh treatment of then-ABC News correspondent Andrew Morse, video of which is included in the 2006 Dutch documentary “Friends of Kim.” After a disagreement over a reference to famine in one of Morse’s reports (which never aired), the journalist’s hotel room was ransacked and 32 hours of videotape confiscated. Morse was forced to sign an apology and expelled from the country.

Cao de Benos said he regretted being put in a sticky situation by a journalist who he says broke the rules. The two maintain professional contact.

Cao de Benos said that he has met Kim Jong Un once, briefly, and that he treasures gifts from the leader’s father and predecessor, the late Kim Jong Il, with whom he met several times.

But his real access to top officials in Pyongyang remains unclear. It is impossible to get any official confirmation of his government role, though he is a familiar face to North Korea experts and journalists. His Facebook page is splashed with photos of him in Mao-style communist garb at official ceremonies in Pyongyang.

He acknowledged that his devotion prompts quizzical looks even in North Korea. He spent 12 years producing self-funded propaganda for Pyongyang, paying his own way to North Korea with profit from his consulting work, before he was granted an official title by the government, he said.

“Even today there are people who think I’m a double agent! But let them play with their Hollywood movies; I don’t care. My friends and family have known my ideas since I was a teenager,” he said.

“After 23 years, it would be very complicated to fake that! I would be a great agent if I could.”

Frayer is a special correspondent