ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1974, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked me to open an embassy in Pyongyang, which was to be under the auspices of the ambassador in Beijing. At that time, I had spent the previous half-dozen years occupied with matters concerning development cooperation – half of the time in Africa, the other half within the UN system. During these years the revolutionary left-wing ideas, which had fuelled the violent student demonstrations across Western Europe in 1968, became all the more prevalent within the foreign aid establishment, and many embraced the thesis that ‘the freedom of the free world was the freedom to starve’. This led to an increased interest in the socialist state of North Korea, which in only two decades seemed to have managed to guarantee its food supply and build up an industrial nation from what had been a colony that supplied raw materials, and one that had also been bombed to destruction and twice over-run by the armies of the Korean War. It was thus with certain expectations that I prepared myself for the move to Pyongyang.
