Caviar, Cognac and Cruelty: Inside the Secret World of North Korea's Billionaire Ruling Class

{"title": "Caviar, Cognac and Cruelty: Inside the Secret World of North Korea's Billionaire Ruling Class", "content": "

In the spring of 2019, a young woman named Jang Hye-rin watched from a Pyongyang street corner as a convoy of black Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans swept past her, their windows tinted, their licence plates blank. Inside, sources would later confirm, were senior officials from Bureau 39 — Kim Jong-un's personal slush fund operation — returning from a private banquet at the Koryo Hotel where a single meal had cost more than her family earned in three years. Eight months later, Jang was crossing the Tumen River into China, carrying nothing but a mobile phone packed with photographs. What she had witnessed, and what she told debriefing officers in Seoul in February 2020, tears apart the carefully constructed myth of collective sacrifice that Pyongyang sells to the outside world: North Korea has a ruling class, it is staggeringly rich, and it does not apologise for a single won of it.

\"Ryugyong
Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The Donju: North Korea's Shadow Billionaires

They call themselves — or are called by others — donju, literally "masters of money." A decade ago, the term described the cautious merchant class that emerged from the catastrophic famine of the 1990s, when an estimated 600,000 to one million North Koreans starved to death and the state distribution system effectively collapsed. By 2024, according to South Korean intelligence assessments shared with Reuters correspondents in Seoul, the upper tier of the donju controls private fortunes estimated between $5 million and $50 million USD each — wealth accumulated through a labyrinthine system of bribes, front companies, state contracts and currency speculation that would be illegal under North Korean law, if that law were ever applied to them.

Park Chul-min, a former mid-level official in the Korean Workers' Party who defected through the Liaoning province route in October 2021 and is now based in Incheon, described the hierarchy in blunt terms during a recorded interview with North Korea Untold conducted in March 2024. "There are two economies," he said, leaning forward across a café table. "The economy they show you — the Arirang Mass Games, the farms on television, the children waving flags. And then there is the real economy, which runs on USD and Chinese yuan and favours. The donju are the ones who operate between those two worlds. They make the regime function, and in return, the regime lets them live like kings."

Park named specific individuals he claimed to have met personally, including a Pyongyang-based trading company director he identified only as "Director Choe" who owned three apartments in the capital's prestigious Ryomyong Street development — apartments that officially do not exist as private property under North Korean law — as well as a villa in the hills above Wonsan. North Korea Untold cannot independently verify these specific claims, but they align closely with testimony gathered by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, which by December 2023 had documented over 400 individual accounts referencing the visible wealth of elite families in Pyongyang.

Cognac for Breakfast: The Consumption of the Chosen

The goods themselves tell the story. UN Panel of Experts reports, most recently the March 2024 assessment, document in exhaustive detail the smuggling networks that funnel luxury goods into North Korea in direct violation of Security Council Resolution 2397, adopted in December 2017. French Hennessy Paradis cognac, retailing at approximately $800 per bottle, enters via Chinese border cities including Dandong and Tumen through shell companies with names deliberately chosen to obscure their purpose. Swiss Rolex and Patek Philippe watches — favoured as gifts between officials because their value is universally understood — arrive through Macau-based intermediaries. Italian suits, Japanese Wagyu beef, Norwegian smoked salmon: the manifests of seized shipments read like the inventory of a Knightsbridge department store.

Kim Ryon-hui, a former employee of a state trading company who defected to South Korea in 2018 and testified before the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK, described her role in procuring luxury alcohol for senior officials. "My job, from 2009 to 2016, was specifically to source cognac and whisky," she told investigators. "We had a monthly quota. If we did not meet it, there were consequences. The officials expected it. It was considered their right." She described receiving a personal commendation from a Party secretary in 2013 after securing a shipment of Johnnie Walker Blue Label during a period when international sanctions had tightened supply chains.

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North Korean soldiers — Wikimedia Commons

Bureau 39 and the Architecture of Enrichment

At the apex of this system sits Office 39 of the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee — also known as Bureau 39 — a secretive financial organ established under Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s and now believed by the US Treasury Department to control assets worth between $2 billion and $5 billion globally. Bureau 39 funds Kim Jong-un's personal lifestyle, finances the loyalty payments that keep generals and party secretaries in line, and bankrolls the weapons programme that the regime uses as its ultimate security guarantee. It operates through a web of front companies spanning Singapore, Malaysia, China, Russia and several African states, generating revenue through arms sales, insurance fraud, cyber theft — North Korean hackers stole an estimated $3 billion in cryptocurrency between 2017 and 2023 according to a UN report published in January 2024 — and the export of forced labour.

The connection between Bureau 39's revenues and the personal enrichment of the elite is direct and documented. A 2022 investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project traced funds from a North Korean front company registered in Vladivostok through a series of transactions that ultimately funded the purchase of a luxury apartment in a Beijing compound popular with foreign diplomats. The registered owner was a relative of a senior State Security Department official. The apartment cost the equivalent of $1.2 million. In the same month that purchase was completed, the World Food Programme reported that 42 percent of North Korea's population was experiencing food insecurity.

The Price of Silence — and the Price of Speaking

For those inside the system, the rewards of loyalty are substantial and the penalties for disclosure are absolute. Lee Sung-jin, a former Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies graduate who worked briefly as a translator for a state trading entity before defecting through Mongolia in August 2022, described the unspoken social contract with precision. "Everyone who is part of that world knows the rules," he said in an interview conducted via a secure messaging platform in April 2024. "You do not ask where the money comes from. You do not talk about the apartments or the cars or the parties. You enjoy the privileges and you perform your loyalty when it is demanded. The moment you break one of those rules, you lose everything — your position, your family's position, sometimes your life."

The consequences for those who speak from outside the system are less lethal but no less serious. Jang Hye-rin, the woman who fled Pyongyang in late 2019, told debriefing officers that her brother, who remained in the capital, was summoned for questioning by the State Security Department in June 2020 — four months after she arrived in Seoul. She has not received any communication from him since. She believes he is alive. She is not certain.

What is certain — documented in satellite imagery, UN reports, defector testimony, and the forensic accounting of international investigators — is that while Kim Jong-un publicly demands sacrifice from 26 million North Koreans in the name of socialist solidarity, a carefully selected few are living lives of extraordinary, hidden opulence. The Ryomyong Street skyline, the foreign cars, the cognac, the Swiss watches: they are not aberrations. They are the point. They are how a regime that cannot feed its people still commands the loyalty of the people who matter most to its survival. And until that calculus changes, the banquets at the Koryo Hotel will continue — long after the cameras are gone and the curtains are drawn.

", "labels": ["North Korea", "Kim Jong-un", "Bureau 39", "Donju", "Defectors", "Sanctions", "Pyongyang", "Corruption", "Human Rights"]}

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