The "axis of evil" loves barbecue
By Peter Carlson
The Washington Post
HACKENSACK, N. J. Ñ Waiting for the North Korean ambassador to show up for dinner, Bobby Egan, who is the world's only barbecue chef/self-appointed unofficial American ambassador to rogue nations, launches into an impassioned monologue on why he, Bobby Egan, is a better diplomat than America's real diplomats.
"You couldn't put Condoleezza Rice or Madeleine Albright on a level with me in dealing with the Koreans," he says. "They've never even been in a fistfight. I've been in fistfights Ñ including with the Koreans. These are tough guys. Condoleezza Rice is a piano player. She's not a rugged, all-American boy."
Egan keeps peeking out the window of Cubby's, his barbecue joint, looking for North Korea's ambassador, Pak Gil Yon. Pak isn't here yet, so Egan hops up to point out some souvenirs of his bizarre career as a diplomat without portfolio.
He points out a photo of himself sitting in a limo with Nizar Hamdoun, who was Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the United Nations. They were on their way to a New York Giants game.
"Hamdoun was a great, great guy," Egan says.
"His daughter took karate lessons with my daughter."
He points to a picture of himself on a boat with a group of Korean men holding big, dead fish.
"This is the first time I took the North Koreans fishing," Egan says. "The FBI didn't want me to take them. I said, 'This is the United States of America Ñ I need your permission to go fishing?' We caught a ton of fish, and when we came back to the dock, the FBI was taking pictures so I said, 'Let's show 'em what we caught!' "
What do Egan's customers make of these pictures of the owner entertaining diplomats from two-thirds of the "axis of evil"?
"They don't care," he says. "Most Americans understand that as much as the Koreans are full of [bleep], so is our own government."
A gift for his guests
Intense, garrulous and profane, Egan, 50, looks and sounds like an extra in "The Sopranos." He glances out a window and spots Pak and his entourage in the parking lot.
"They're here," he says. "Get in the back!"
North Koreans don't like reporters, Egan explains, as he hustles his interviewer into a tiny office behind the kitchen. He fiddles with a TV and a picture appears Ñ a silent, closed-circuit TV image of the Koreans entering Cubby's dining room. Egan leaves.
A moment later, Egan appears on the TV screen, greeting the Koreans. Egan seats them; servers appear bearing trays. Egan starts talking, his mouth moving silently on the screen as his hands gesticulate grandly. After a while, he presents a fishing rod to Pak. The Koreans stand and applaud.
He hustles off and reappears on the TV screen, carrying ribs out to the Koreans. He sits down to eat and chat, then he stands up and gets a fancy bow and arrow, the bow equipped with high-tech pulleys, the arrow bearing a razor-tipped point.
Several Koreans examine the bow and arrow, looking suitably impressed.
"They like weapons," Egan says later.
Trying to help POWs
It all began with Vietnam.
In the early '70s, when Egan was growing up in the tough Jersey town of Fairfield, he figured he'd finish high school, then go fight in Vietnam. But the war had ended by the time he graduated, so Bobby worked for his father, a roofing contractor, and in 1982 started his barbecue business.
But he remained obsessed with reports that the Vietnamese were holding American prisoners of war in secret prison camps. He decided to investigate by befriending the diplomats at the Vietnamese mission to the United Nations, inviting them to Cubby's and taking them fishing.
When his father saw him hanging around with communist diplomats, he was shocked. "Do they have him brainwashed?" Walter Egan recalls thinking. He reported his son to the FBI Ñ "I'm a flag-waver," he explains Ñ and was relieved to learn that Bobby was informing the bureau about his activities. "They said, 'We know everything he's doing.' "
The FBI declines to confirm or deny any relationship with Egan, Bureau spokesman Stephen Kodak says.
In 1990, Egan traveled to Vietnam but failed to bring back any POWs. In 1992, a Vietnamese diplomat defected to the United States and wound up living in Egan's apartment. Egan and the defector were interviewed by John McCreary, an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
Now retired, McCreary remains amazed at Egan's ability to befriend America's enemies. "He's friendly, he's generous and he doesn't judge them," McCreary says. "He just makes friends easily."
About 15 years ago, Egan, who had read reports of American POWs held in North Korea, began courting the Koreans the same way he'd wooed the Vietnamese: feeding them barbecue, taking them on hunting and fishing trips and to Giants football games.
Willingly drugged
In 1994, Egan was granted permission to travel to North Korea, an isolated Stalinist dictatorship that rarely welcomes foreign visitors. When Egan arrived, he says, he was given what his translator called a "chemical interrogation" Ñ an injection of a drug that made him woozy and talkative, followed by a lengthy interview he barely remembers.
"The act of trusting them is important to them," he says. "Being willing to get sedated said more than anything I might have said when they did it."
Egan claims a North Korean official told him that all their diplomats are required to undergo a "chemical interrogation" when they return home. Alas, that's impossible to confirm: The North Korean mission to the United Nations declined to return calls requesting an interview about Egan.
In December 1996, Egan returned to North Korea, this time accompanied by several Americans Ñ Mark Sauter, author of a book on American POWs; Eugene "Red" McDaniel, a former Navy pilot who had been a POW in North Vietnam for six years; and Pennsylvania state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, who took a container of medical supplies for victims of a flood in North Korea.
The travelers changed planes in Beijing, where North Korean customs officials tried to charge Greenleaf duty on the medical supplies he was donating to their country. Irate, Egan launched into an expletive-studded tirade.
"He was very animated," Greenleaf recalls dryly.
As Egan argued, Greenleaf recalls, the duty dropped from $1,000 to $500 to nothing.
"Sometimes you have to raise your voice," Egan explains. "What are you gonna do? I'm from Jersey, you know?"
When they arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Egan, Sauter and McDaniel met with a North Korean official to discuss American POWs.
The official was maddeningly evasive, Sauter recalls. When Egan asked to meet with an American defector known to be living in Pyongyang, the official refused and Egan exploded.
"Bobby lit into him with a level of invective that would bring admiration in the toughest bar in Hoboken," Sauter says. "It was invective that would have made the Sopranos blush. Bobby was a foreigner in the most frightening place on Earth, and he was browbeating this government official."
Egan's tirade didn't work. Still, his traveling companions were impressed by his guts.
"I marveled at his ability to dress down the Korean leadership Ñ that he could use that language and still be accepted by them," McDaniel says.
"Bobby has world-class street smarts that he has raised to a geopolitical level," Sauter says. "Some people who have these street smarts do well in business, some do well in crime. Bobby has used them to inject himself into the most isolated place in the world."
Nuclear intermediary
"I said, 'Are you willing to give up your nuclear weapons?' and he said yes," Egan says, "so I said, 'We're going right to The New York Times.' "
Egan is telling this story to explain a newspaper clipping on the wall at Cubby's. The Nov. 3, 2002, front-page story was headlined: "North Korea Says Nuclear Program Can Be Negotiated."
Times reporter Philip Shenon recounted his exclusive interview with Han Song Ryol, then North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations. Han told Shenon that his government had changed its policy and was now willing to negotiate with the United States over its nuclear-weapons program. Deep in the story was this revelation:
"The North Korean Mission contacted The Times through a New Jersey restaurateur, Robert Egan."
It happened like this, Egan says: His friend Ambassador Han worried that President Bush, who had dubbed North Korea part of the "axis of evil," was planning to invade his country. Egan suggested that Han announce, through the Times, his willingness to negotiate. When Han and his bosses in Pyongyang agreed, Egan contacted Shenon.
"He said he had a connection to the North Koreans Ñ and he did," Shenon says. "He sort of inserted himself into the situation. He has lines of communication with the North Koreans and he has a line to the State Department and he was keeping them informed on what he was doing. He's smart enough to know that this is a tricky game and he'd better let people know what he's doing."
Egan claims that his diplomacy saved North Korea from an American invasion and maybe saved the world from a nuclear war Ñ not bad for a guy whose day job involves slathering pork ribs with hot sauce. He knows North Korea is a brutal dictatorship, but he believes the United States can get along with the regime. Of course, he conveys his plea for peace and friendship in his own inimitable style.
"They are the toughest [bleeping] guys in the world!" he says. "We don't want to [bleep] with them! And they don't want to [bleep] with us! So what the [bleep] is the problem? We got a few political differences, that's all."
For 15 years, Egan has courted the North Koreans, feeding them, fishing with them, traveling to their country four times. Thus far, he has failed to win the release of a single American POW. He also has failed to obtain hard information from his Korean friends about Americans who may or may not be imprisoned in their country.
What makes the owner of a Jersey barbecue joint persist in this crusade of bizarre personal diplomacy?
"He believes in what he's doing," his father says.
"He wants to help," Greenleaf says. "He's rough around the edges, but his motives are good."
"Bobby is motivated by interest in the issue of missing Americans," Sauter says. "And it doesn't hurt that he gets some publicity out of it."
"Why?" Egan asks. The expression on his face indicates that he finds the question ridiculous.
"Why did Mozart compose music? It's what he did good."
© 2008 The Seattle Times Company