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Yet with a complete ban on a free press and no freedom of travel (and the fact that Americans have been prohibited by the U.S. State Department from traveling there since 2017 when Otto Warmbier was sentenced to life imprisonment for stealing a poster from his Pyongyang hotel and eventually returned to the U.S. in a vegetative state), how could one not crave information about such a state?
My own fascination with North Korea was sparked when I moved to Seoul in 2009. There, I watched my first documentary of the country, Crossing the Line, about an American defector living in Pyongyang. Despite eventually leaving Korea, I never stopped thinking about the northern half, which I believe to be illegally occupied by a despot and the only fat man in a country of starving people. My own rabbit hole was during the pandemic (the same year The Mole: Undercover in North Korea was released), watching loads of fascinating footage by Russian YouTuber Anton Lyadov/"Anton is here" as he pretended to be a lawyer living in Pyongyang. I therefore don't blame anyone for becoming fascinated with North Korea and even wanting to go undercover.
For the mole in question (a retired chef named Ulrich Løvenskjold Larsen from Denmark) in this documentary, directed by Mads Brügger, we're told a lot of his own motivation had to do with his formative years, in which he befriended young East Germans after Germany reunified and the Cold War ended. He's at the heart of this story. The title ("Undercover in North Korea") is a bit misleading—hardly any of the mole's (or viewer's) time is spent in North Korea. It doesn't provide you with what life can be like for an average North Korean, as documentaries like State of Mind, Out of Breath, and My Brothers and Sisters in the North or books like Without You, There Is No Us or Nothing to Envy do. Instead, it focuses on the mole. He's retired because of some kind of illness that is never explained, but Brügger explains that after Ulrich viewed Brügger's 2009 documentary The Red Chapel about two comedians who travel in North Korea under the pretense of a cultural exchange, he reached out to the filmmaker to inform him that he had been infiltrating the infamous Korea Friendship Association and would like to know if he would be interested in turning the project into a film. Brügger was not thoroughly interested, but didn't cut ties and instead let things fall as they may. Given that Brügger is banned from re-entering North Korea, Ulrich and his espionage might be an avenue to continue to explore the nefariousness of Kim Jong-un's government, so they kept in touch.
The main villain here is not Kim but Alejandro Cao de Benós Les y Pérez, the Spanish president of KFA and kind of a chubby and uninspiring Bond villain. At one point, he is described as a small dictator in his own universe, leading a band of peculiar eccentrics who have found some sort of community in Western groups that believe they see through the "propaganda" that is the narrative around this tyrannical hermit kingdom. (He's also a bit of a racist, using language I would rather not repeat, but he also is an equal-opportunity offender, opining that Brits are very dirty.) Alejandro may be Spanish, but he is a wannabe-North Korean, constantly referring to Kim Jong-un as "the Grand Marshal" and the pronoun "we" when referring to DPRK. For example, when luring the mole and a potential buyer, he says, "We can do things that no other country can do." What are these things referring to? Quite illicit things, to be frank, namely in attempts to skirt sanctions that have made it hard for the regime to gain funds.
Throughout years and years of going undercover as a Western simp for North Korea, Ulrich brings a possible investor named Mr. James to Alejandro in the hopes of North Korea selling weapons despite the sanctions. Mr. James is obviously not a real investor but instead a former French foreign legionnaire and convicted drug dealer. His name is Jim Mehdi Latrache-Qvortrup; he's a very charismatic fellow with a maniacal laugh who looks like he could be the Danish Billy Zane and also straight out of a Bond film. From here, their adventures take them to Uganda, where they come up with a plan to "buy" an island so the North Koreans can secretly build the weapons under ground. What about the people living there? Mr. James and the North Koreans need to "remove people without causing friction," so they get the Ugandans to agree to trick the locals into thinking that Mr. James is there to build a hospital, and that's why they must leave their land. "Now," the Ugandan says after they've come up with their plan, "let us pray."
I mentioned that Alejandro is uninspiring; he is also clumsy. When discussing Brügger privately with Ulrich, he vents and vents and wags his finger at the North Korean officials who fell for Brügger's stunts in The Red Chapel, insisting that had they simply informed him, he would have been able to discern the act and stop them from losing face on the world stage (again). The irony is almost painful, for Alejandro repeatedly misses several hints that practically slap him in the face that something is amiss. One such scene is the most suspenseful in the entire film.
Has this film changed Alejandro's perception among the regime in North Korea? It's difficult to say. He doesn't seem to have appeared in as many documentaries about North Korea as he used to. We do know that two years later, a U.S. federal arrest warrant was issued against him, but he is still at large. "I thought it would lead to the arrest of Alejandro Cao de Benós," Brügger told Variety five years ago. "All of this made me contemplate that maybe he is a double agent himself. Never say never." What about the consequences for North Korea as a whole? Having been essentially the last country to drag itself out of the COVID-19 pandemic and recently becoming a firm ally in Russia's fight against Ukraine, the new funds have allowed its economy to grow nearly four percent, the largest in almost twenty years. Kim Jong-un proudly walked beside Vladimir Putin and their host, Xi Jinping, in Beijing last year to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The Kim dynasty is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
Some scenes in The Mole come across as goofy and should have been discarded, like when Brügger has Ulrich get some sort of training from an ex-CIA agent. Like much of anything about North Korea, these scenes and the better ones feel almost like science fiction. North Korea indeed is something that if you explained it to an alien who had never heard of such a place, they'd probably think you had made it up. That's one of the reasons why a film like The Mole: Undercover in North Korea is so important. For the tankies who defend the regime and lie about it (the Alejandros of the world), they are caught red-handed. I hope Brügger finds a way to make more documentaries like this. It's a fascinating look at amateur espionage.
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