Book details Hackensack burger flipper's tale as North Korean envoyMonday, April 26, 2010
Last updated: Monday April 26, 2010, 7:54 PM
BY WILLIAM LAMB
The Record
STAFF WRITER
The notion that "a guy who flips burgers for a living" in Hackensack could pull double duty as a freelance envoy between the United States and North Korea sounds too far-fetched to be true.
And yet Bobby Egan, owner of Cubby’s barbecue restaurant on River Street and the self-proclaimed burger flipper in question, has the photos, an FBI file as thick as the Hackensack telephone book and the word of enough former intelligence officials to suggest he isn’t just blowing smoke.
Egan, 52, has bundled this unlikely tale into a book hitting store shelves Tuesday. Written with journalist Kurt Pitzer, "Eating with the Enemy: How I Waged Peace with North Korea from My BBQ Shack in Hackensack" traces Egan’s improbable evolution from successful restaurateur to back-door diplomatic conduit. Hunched over a corner table at Cubby’s on Monday, Egan said he hopes the book will shine a light on what he says are unheralded good-faith efforts by North Korean diplomats to normalize relations with the United States.
"What did the North Koreans do here for 14 years?" he said. "The American public is not aware of that — how much effort they put into trying to have friendly relations with the U.S. And they did that through me. I think this book gives the American people a true window as to who the North Koreans are and what they’re about."
Egan’s book deal with St. Martin’s Press followed a flurry of media interest in his story in the fall of 2007. Two long stories about Egan — a 13,000-word piece on Vanity Fair’s website and an 11-page New Yorker profile were published within days of each other in October of that year. Reporters from a pair of European newspapers — Britain’s The Independent and Germany’s Die Welt — came calling in the weeks that followed.
Egan said he has traveled to North Korea “four to six” times beginning in 1994, not long after diplomats attached to the Hermit Kingdom’s mission to the United Nations approached him seeking help establishing better relations with the United States.
Since then, Egan has welcomed members of North Korea’s U.N. delegation to Cubby’s for dozens of rib lunches, and has escorted the diplomats on nearly as many hunting and fishing expeditions. He says he has coached the North Koreans on American culture and politics, and helped them parse the rhetoric coming out of the White House. He states matter-of-factly that his efforts have helped both countries avoid World War III.
"It’s what I do," Egan said. "Intelligence is my game. Why did Mozart write music? Because that’s what he did. You take an individual that has a certain amount of talent, and that individual decides that society is not going to dictate how he uses his talents, OK?"
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, told The Record shortly after its profile of Egan was published that his story was "irresistible."
"Here is the most mysterious country on earth, surrounded essentially by a kind of 'cone of silence,' as they used to say on 'Get Smart,' and very few Americans — non-journalists and non-politicians — ever go, let alone have any kind of relationship with North Koreans," Remnick said. "And here is this kind of bluff New Jersey barbecue guy who may, to some extent, put primary colors on the portrait of his relationship with North Koreans. But in fact he does have the relationship, and it’s very peculiar and funny and strange."
By the time he traveled to North Korea for the first time, Egan had established a track record for freelance diplomacy.
An adolescent obsession with the Vietnam War had evolved into a conviction that Vietnam continued to hold live American prisoners long after the war had ended. Egan writes in “Eating with the Enemy” that he called Vietnam’s mission to the U.N. and said he wanted to “form a friendship” to push the POW issue. The relationship paid dividends in 1992, when Egan delivered a Vietnamese defector he’d befriended, Le Quang Khai, to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
Khai, a former foreign ministry official, testified about the existence of a secret underground prison in Hanoi where he said American prisoners had been held.
When the North Koreans were looking for warmer relations with the United States, Egan writes, the Vietnamese suggested they talk to him.
Slowly and methodically, Egan built trust with the North Koreans. The friendship he cultivated with Han Son Ryol, North Korea’s ambassador to the U.N., is the narrative core of the 370-page book. Egan encouraged the North Koreans to be more open, coaxing them to Cubby’s in January 1994 for a rare public appearance — covered by The Record — during a break in negotiations over international inspections of the country’s nuclear sites.
Egan traveled to North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, for the first time in 1994.
"It was like no place I’d ever seen," he said. "Time stood still. I’ve seen a lot of Third World countries, and when I entered North Korea I knew I’d entered a country that was unique to itself. You could see it, you could feel it, you could smell it — that there was no outside influence on that country in the last 50 years."
Egan would return to North Korea several times, most recently in 2003. The North Koreans eventually made Egan the president of something called the USA-DPRK Trade Council, an organization that Egan acknowledges was a “front” that allowed both parties to push their respective agendas.
For Egan, that meant pressing the North Koreans for information about American servicemen still unaccounted for from the Korean War. The North Koreans, meanwhile, saw Egan as someone who could help them achieve their goals: "Complete normalized relations with the U.S., a reunified North and South Korea, 38,000 American troops off the DMZ and [the United States] taking [North Korea] off the preemptive strike list," Egan said.
All the while, Egan has been upfront with the North Koreans about his ongoing contact with the FBI — a relationship that developed after Egan had a series of low-grade scrapes with the law during his days as a roofer.
Capt. Eugene "Red" McDaniel, a naval officer who spent six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, accompanied Egan on a four-day trip to North Korea in 1996. They came home “empty handed,” McDaniel said, having failed to get the North Koreans to give up information about missing American servicemen.
McDaniel said Egan is "kind of rough around the edges." More than a decade after their trip, McDaniel said he still doesn’t know how Egan managed to earn the trust of the North Koreans.
"I was very impressed with his ability to deal with the North Koreans, who we didn’t have [diplomatic] recognition of," McDaniel said in a telephone interview. "I was skeptical initially and I made sure that I talked to certain people before I would deal with him. But after meeting with him and going to the mission up in New York with him, I was convinced that he had a special 'in' with them."
Michael Bronner, the freelance journalist who wrote the Vanity Fair piece, calls Egan "the Forest Gump of Hackensack," citing his uncanny ability to talk his way into "fascinating, restricted realms."
"Egan’s stories are generally embellished, but often with a compelling the nugget of truth at the core," Bronner said in an e-mail message. "Separating the wheat from the chaff was a mind-bending process, one that depended heavily on secondary sources. I culled considerably from a deposition he gave to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, which had the added benefit of having been given under oath."
Over the years, Egan has weathered criticism from the intelligence and diplomatic communities — repeated in the Vanity Fair article and attributed to anonymous sources — that he is sticking his neck where it doesn’t belong, and that his meddling is counter-productive.
Egan’s response is that he has done things the U.S. government can’t — or won’t — do. McDaniel said he agreed with that assessment.
"I personally think he’s getting things done," McDaniel said. "I just feel he has credibility with [the North Koreans] for some reason, and I never saw him do anything that was anti-U.S. It was strictly dealing with an issue that the government refused to deal with."
Egan said Tuesday that he put his career as a freelance diplomat on hold for the last two years while he collaborated with Pitzer on the book.
"The guys over here now, I’m not presently working with," he said of the diplomats currently staffing North Korea’s U.N. mission. "We keep in touch from time to time, I’ll say that. I don’t fish and hunt with them anymore. How much of your life can you give up? I’m running a business now, raising my family. I chose to write the book, to take a step back."
He adds that he doesn’t rule out re-entering the fray.
"If Obama needs me for something, if there’s something he thinks I can help with," Egan said, "he knows where to find me."
E-mail: lamb@northjersey.com