North Korea’s “largest car theft in history” from Sweden is still not solved | The world | News
The world knows North Korea for its status as the Hermit Kingdom: the place where no one can leave and few can enter. In recent years, the isolationist state has flexed its nuclear capabilities on the world stage, regularly firing missiles at empty targets outside its borders. Some of these missiles, its leader Kim Jong-un claims, can even reach Europe and the United States. Turn back the clock almost 50 years, but North Korea was in the headlines for something unrelated to Armageddon.
In 1974, Pyongyang got away with one of the biggest car robberies in history. When a deal was agreed to buy 1,000 Volvo cars from Sweden, upon receiving them, North Korea refused to pay.
Footage of the 1,000 cars ordered by the country has recently gone viral online, labeled the “biggest car theft in history” by Twitter page @Historicvids. The video has raised questions about the episode and whether North Korea was ever persecuted by Sweden.
The country, then led by Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, requested that the vehicles be manufactured and supplied by Sweden; Stockholm followed up on the request and later that year the engines were on their way to Pyongyang.
Excavated accounts show that Sweden has continued to send bills to North Korea twice a year, with interest on the amount owed. A First Post report predicts the cars’ cash value is currently around €300m (£266m).
The saga itself was reported by The Wall Street Journal journalist Urban Lehner, who visited North Korea for the story in 1989. The reporter wrote about his experience, describing how the Volvo cars “screamed around tight curves”.
He continued: “In another country it would be a suicide trip, but in North Korea so few cars ply the highways that each can often have the road to themselves.
“You had an interpreter and a driver and a Volvo, and you were a family for two weeks. Honestly, they were great cars. Even when you were slaloming across five lanes, they were basically safe.”
Referring to the theft scandal, Lehner added: “We had heard the story that the North Korean [authorities] had bought these cars, then froze Volvo and didn’t pay. We joked that we drove around in stolen cars.”
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At the time of North Korea’s Volvo order, the country was in a period of change. Financially it went well and emerged as an economy where money could be made.
Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NPR in 2019 that after the Korean War, which ended in 1953, Pyongyang’s “economy was rebuilt.”
He continued: “It became a functioning industrial state, still very dependent on aid – but it wouldn’t have seemed such a bad bet, in the circumstances.”
As a result, Sweden happily sent over the goods and was so pleased with the relations between the two countries that the leftist leadership even demanded that a diplomat be sent there.
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Erik Cornell, the man given the assignment, was sent and stayed until 1975. He described in his 2002 memoir, North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise, how the country had overestimated its capabilities.
He described factories being left to rust and the economy being falsely advertised as booming. But by opening an embassy in Pyongyang, Sweden and Cornell had earned the dictatorship’s trust. At the time, it even helped act as an “intermediary between North Korea and the outside world.”
Pollack continued: “The Swedes are very good at this. The Swedes have often played such a role in diplomacy of various kinds. They are seen to some extent as an honest broker.”
But the cars were still unpaid. Journalist Florin Amariei described how Sweden “never expected that North Korea would not keep its promise… that’s why they waited for the money”.