Eating with the Enemy: How I Waged Peace with North Korea from My BBQ Shack in Hackensack

Growing up in working-class Fairfield, N.J., Robert Egan dropped out of high school, and after a few years wasted on drugs and petty crime, his life took an astonishing turn. His involvement in the Vietnam POW debate in the ’80s and early ’90s curried favor with Han Song Ryol, the North Korean ambassador to the U.N., who wanted to improve relations with the US. So Egan turned the back table of his roadside restaurant, Cubby’s, into his own Camp David, advising Han and his team on serious diplomatic issues over the course of thirteen years that saw the death of Kim Il Sung and the rise of Kim Jong Il; false starts toward peace during the Clinton Administration; the Bush ‘axis of evil’ era; and North Korea’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2006. Between ball games, fishing trips, and heaping plates of pork ribs with the North Koreans, Egan informed for the FBI, vexed the White House, submitted to chemical interrogation in Pyongyang, nearly rescued the USS Pueblo, and promoted world peace. Egan’s unorthodox but patriotic efforts demonstrate what one private citizen can do (and what US intelligence agents could not). But this is more than political intrigue; it tells the story of a close, unlikely bond between Bobby and Han—an odd couple from enemy countries who formed what has to be one of the strangest friendships of our time.