North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney Page A

aloft. The two great men enter a vast stadium, clapping Mao-style, lightly on their hands, while the masses roar their adoration. Then they sit down at two vast wooden desks, as big as a lifeboat on a Channel ferry, and feel the love. The masses oblige.
    Opposite the stage, a sign at least 100 feet wide, created by a vast throng of people holding up flash cards, proclaims: ‘Traiasca Tovarasul Nicolae Ceausescu Conducator Iubit Si Stimat A1 Poporului Roman!’ which means: ‘Long live Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu Esteemed and Beloved Leader of the Romanian People!’ The show continues, with the flash-card crowd building Kim Il Sung, against a background of heavy industry, using a walkie-talkie pointing to a giant tractor and lorry. A real biplane puffs out show smoke at an extraordinarily slow speed; fireworks make white puffy clouds against a perfect blue sky; the twosome shake handsaloft, Kim Il Sung jolly and delighted, Ceausescu a bit peevish.
    A few video frames back from the end, you can make out, sat between the two dictators, a small Romanian diplomat in a black suit, grinning at the fun; thirty-five years later that man sits in front of me in his small flat, not far from the centre of Bucharest: living history.
    Izidor Urian – small, wiry, sprite, instantly likeable, his English extraordinarily precise for a man in his eighties – first went to North Korea, by train, in 1954. Back then, the journey from Bucharest to Pyongyang lasted fourteen days.
    With Izidor now was his wife, Emilia, who clucked around her husband, a loving hen, occasionally putting her head to one side and smiling as a detail of something that happened four, five decades ago eluded him. Their flat was no palace, being on the seventh floor of a typically nondescript block in a not conspicuously fashionable area of the Romanian capital. But, within, the walls were decorated with pictures of Korea and framed ideograms, the calligraphy dark strokes against the white of the artist’s paper.
    Why North Korea? ‘God decided.’ In the early 1950s the Communist lords of Romania were looking for bright working-class boys to become the new diplomatic corps, and Izidor, who fitted that bill, was picked for Pyongyang. He became so fluent in Korean that, in the 1990swhile serving as ambassador of Romania to South Korea, he won the first prize in a translation competition for foreigners. But, boy, did he suffer for his art.
    To begin, I asked Izidor about that trip to Pyongyang in1978. ‘It was extremely difficult for me,’ he said, ruefully. He had been working on the Asian desk for the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs but at a few days’ notice he was ordered to fly out to Pyongyang. Ceausescu arrived, the visit started but the leaderhadn’t brought an official note-taker. ‘My job was to translate, but I also had to make notes at the same time. I scribbled notes, then at night I stayed up to two or three in the morning, transcribing my scribble into formal memos. After three or four days of this I was so exhausted I could barely function. Once, during the visit, Ceausescu and Elena’ – hisg hastly wife, a barely educated numbskull the Romanian propaganda machine had magicked into a doctor of chemistry – ‘had left Pyongyang and we were going on a train to a mountain residence of Kim Il Sung for a short break from talks. We were in a special carriage. I told them that I was so exhausted I could neither see nor hear. It was Elena who was nastiest: “Why can’t you take notes, write every word down?” I replied that I had been translating all day and writing up the notes all night. I hadn’t eaten in two days. “Why not?” asked Elena. “I can’t eat and translate at the same time. When you leave, I have to leave too, so I don’t get to eat,” I replied. Elena barked back the Korean translator had no problem. “That’s because there are three of them, and they work in rotation.” Elena put on her nastiest face and said: “It’s