Michael Spavor, the Canadian spirit who twice funded Chicago Bulls legend Dennis Rodman’s visits to Pyongyang – including for a birthday with leader Kim Jong Un – was sentenced to 11 years in a Chinese prison on Sunday. last week. The crime for which Spavor was found guilty, after having been virtually incommunicado since December 2018, was having spilled state secrets, including images, on a former Canadian diplomat who has also been jailed all this time.
Spavor’s conviction and sentence marks the disastrous downfall of a businessman with close ties to North Korea. As the founder and operator of the “non-profit” cultural exchange Paektu in Dandong, the bustling Chinese city that crosses the Yalu River from the decrepit North Korean city of Sinuiju, he specialized in tours in China promoting a North Korean cultural and economic agenda. enrichment. It was in Dandong that the court fed what Chinese prosecutors considered “evidence” and found him guilty while the other Canadian, Michael Kovrig, awaits his verdict and sentence.
Manuel Balce Cenata / Getty
Having met Spavor in communications and email meetings during his visits to Seoul, I enjoyed hearing him brag about his professional exploits. One evening at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club, it was the life of the party, hugging anyone within arm’s reach, raising the glass of toast, laughing and joking about his role as a tour operator with a specialty : North Korea. Although Spavor had absorbed, however, he was careful not to say anything that might attenuate the magic of his relationship with the North Koreans, who obviously saw him as a useful intermediary.
However, it would not take long for the Chinese legal system to imprison almost anyone who was on the wrong side of the authorities. His trial, of course, was held behind closed doors, with no one recording what was said and in no way being able to call his own witnesses or have a lawyer defend him, let alone question the system under which he remained without bail and virtually no visitors, apart from brief occasional meetings with Canadian consular officers, before COVID-19 provided a pretext to cut off contact.
Seemingly extroverted and always very kind, Spavor, now 45, was happy to chat and clap his hands with almost anyone he met. Speaking of his achievements, however, he had a way of smiling and squashing when asked what he really knew about North Korea’s atrocious human rights record or the most intimate secrets of the Kim dynasty. I met him during the attempts to access North Korea.
AP Photo / Mark Schiefelbein
Despite his good humor and camaraderie, he was smart enough to tell me, in person and in emails, that he was simply not able to get a visa in North Korea, as he was a journalist known as American. I managed to visit North Korea several times, twice for visits of more than two weeks under other auspices, claiming to be a professor or academic.
On one of these visits, I met him with another tour group, as always doing an act of old friends denying the dedication with which he established contacts between North Korea and eager foreign visitors.
“COME BACK ALONE!” began a message sending him an advertising visit to South Korea scheduled for early December 2018. His cheerful tone, advising contacts that he would come down from Dandong “for a few days for a new consulting job,” does not leave no doubt he had not made a clue of what would come when he returned to China. It wasn’t until he showed up when we received the news of his arrest.
Interspersed with smiling emojis, he continued with his usual hyper-convivial style: “Yes! And a few meetings, ”he said in his email, which I retained as a colorful reference to one of the most attractive intermediaries between curious foreigners and a system that remains closed to all who are not superficial.
“I’ll be busy, but if you want to have a few Makgeollis (Korean rice wine) or beers with some of my friends coming out on Tuesday and / or Friday,” he kindly invited everyone. “Everyone is welcome. Feel free to tag yourself and bring friends.”
Spavor was at his effervescent party when he joined Dennis Rodman on the occasion of Kim Jong Un’s 30th birthday in Pyongyang in 2014. Spavor, whose travel agency handled the details of the visit, has the distinction of being one of the few westerners I have met Kim.
The January 2014 trip is the most memorable for Rodman singing “Happy Birthday” to the North Korean leader, who had inherited his post just over two years before the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, the December 2011. Reuters cites Spavor as describing the events as “an explosion” in which “we were three days”, arguably “the most amazing experience I’ve ever had in my life”.
Photographs show Rodman riding with Kim at a basketball game and Spavor having drinks with the North Korean leader on a yacht in the east coast port of Wonsan, near one of Kim’s palace residences.
All in all, according to a veteran diplomatic source who requested anonymity, it could have contributed to Spavor’s defeat. “What I apparently did with NK was always extremely risky,” the source told me in an email.
Of course, he continued, “There had to be a lot of intelligence officers from the services of many states everywhere for at least several years.” But the Chinese, he explained, “would, of course, have been deeply distrustful of him and those who assumed he was working. And even if they weren’t sure he was working for a service, how easily they would have considered getting dirty when they needed someone to take hostage against Canada. “
As for why the Chinese would go looking for Spavor when he was so friendly with North Korea, he said, “The Chinese are heartbroken and even hate the North Koreans,” despite their long-standing alliance with North Korea. North dating back to the Korean War. Also, they may have assumed that “he wasn’t really a friend of NK, but he worked for others.”
Spavor can still appeal against his sentence, but both he and Kovrig are widely seen as pawns in a much larger power game.
Both were picked up almost immediately after the 2018 Vancouver arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese technology giant Huawei, at the U.S. request for extradition from Canada. Almost free with a $ 7.5 billion bail, he goes nowhere without an escort, has to wear an ankle bracelet and has to go back to his luxury digs at night. Hearings in Vancouver have just ended and the court is expected to decide in two months whether to send him to the United States on trial on charges of fraudulent violation of sanctions banning trade with Iran in statements to HSBC Holdings.
While U.S. relations with China are deteriorating amid military and trade disputes, the case is an explosive international issue, considering Huawei’s global reach as a technology giant. Spavor and Kovrig can only wait for the courts to rule in favor of Meng and Huawei, which has strongly denounced their arrest for political reasons.
As for the Chinese case against Spavor, the Canadian ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, said he “had no fairness or transparency.” Some of the so-called evidence against “the two Michaels,” as they are sometimes called in Canada, revolves around photographs that Spavor was said to have taken of military aircraft. Barton, according to NK News, a Seoul website that tracks North Korea, said both Spavor and Kovrig “are being arbitrarily detained” and vowed to “continue to demand their immediate release.” The claim to photograph military aircraft is suspicious, as Chinese military aircraft are often seen at or near commercial airports and are easily photographed by anyone making souvenir shots.
Meanwhile, the taste remains hopelessly optimistic, at least judging by a comment on the case transmitted through the Canadian embassy in Beijing. “I’m in a good mood,” NK News said. “I want to go home.”