CP Note: Robert Egan was a restaurant owner from a mobbed-up New Jersey town, who for thirteen years inserted himself into the high-stakes diplomatic battles between the United States and North Korea.

His life took an astonishing turn when his interest in the search for Vietnam-era POWs led to an introduction in the early nineties to North Korean officials desperate to improve relations with the United States. So Egan turned his restaurant, Cubby’s, into his own version of Camp David. Between ball games, fishing trips, and heaping plates of pork ribs, he advised deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, and other North Koreans during tumultuous years that saw the death of Kim Il-Sung and the rise of Kim Jong-Il, false starts toward peace during the Clinton administration, the Bush “Axis of Evil” era, and North Korea’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2006. All the while, Egan informed for the FBI, vexed the White House with his meddling, chaperoned the communist nation’s athletes on hilarious adventures, and nearly rescued a captured U.S. Navy vessel---all in the interest of promoting peace.

November 23, 1992. Washington politicos were trying to clear a path for normalized relations with the government of Vietnam, almost twenty years after the end of the war there. They needed a little help, and I jumped at the chance. How often does a guy from Hackensack have the ear of the U.S. Congress?

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When I asked what the country would do after the death of the president, a party member replied: “If he dies—I mean, when he dies—we’ll find another leader.” Kim Il-sung’s choice for the job was his son, Kim Jong-il, then a chubby thirty-seven and running the secretariat of the Workers’ Party. The younger Kim had disappeared from the public view in the late 1970s. Rumors had said he was dead, or had been injured in an automobile collision and was a “vegetable.” By 1979, it was known that he was alive and healthy, but still his name was hardly mentioned publicly. Rather, he was referred to by the code term “the Party Center” or, often, “the Glorious Party Center.”

Many Pyongyang-watchers figured that his curious anonymity had to do with efforts to buy time in which to get rid of elements opposed to such a reactionary phenomenon as a hereditary succession, unknown elsewhere in the communist world. A Soviet newsman stationed in Pyongyang told me the opponents included military men. But the Russian added that Kim Jong-il “has power in the party. He’s a strong man, groomed for power and pushing to take over.”

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