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Halting leaflets and loudspeakers: Seoul and Washington close remaining channels to North Korea

Published: 08 Aug. 2025, 00:04

John Everard

The author is the former British ambassador to North Korea.

It is getting harder and harder for North Koreans to find out about the outside world or to hear views different from those of their own government. This is a great pity.

North Korea never has been an open society. But until the start of this decade it was possible, especially for the chattering classes of Pyongyang, to get some access to news and views from outside North Korea. One key source was the foreigners resident in Pyongyang — diplomats, United Nations staff and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) — but the last NGOs and UN agencies left Pyongyang in March 2021, and by October of that year, the last staff members of Western embassies had left, too.

But even after their departure, it was possible, at some risk, to learn about the outside world by watching media smuggled in on USB drives, or by watching or listening to broadcasts from abroad. However, that access too has been curtailed for two reasons.

Signage for U.S. broadcaster Voice of America (VOA) is seen in Washington on March 16. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on June 20 ordered mass layoffs at VOA and other government-funded media, moving ahead with gutting the outlets despite legal disputes and criticism that U.S. adversaries will benefit. Kari Lake, a fervent Trump supporter named to a senior role at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said the notices were a ″long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.″ [AFP/YONHAP]

Firstly, North Korea has tightened controls both on receiving such information and on its circulation internally. The anti-reactionary thought law threatens much stiffer penalties than before on those who bring in or circulate information or views from outside the North. In certain circumstances, these can include the death penalty. The radio wave control law bans the possession of equipment able to receive foreign broadcasts and requires all radios in North Korea to be tested to ensure that they can receive only state broadcasts. Violators face up to three months in a labor camp.

But the second reason has little to do with the regime. It is because so many broadcasts into the North from outside have been stopped. This started on March 14, when U.S. President Donald Trump curtailed funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the umbrella organization for the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA). Without funding, VOA ceased broadcasting to Korea soon afterward. RFA managed to continue for some months using existing funds, but finally ceased broadcasting in July. Also, in early July, four radio channels and one TV channel operated by South Korea's National Intelligence Service stopped broadcasting into the North.

Together, these stations represented about 80 percent of broadcast hours into North Korea. Worse, they were able to broadcast on multiple frequencies, thus making it much more difficult for the regime to jam them. Now that they are gone, at 11 p.m. — one of the most common times for North Koreans to listen to foreign broadcasts — instead of having to jam 25 frequencies, Pyongyang needs to only jam six to prevent its citizens from listening to foreign news.

So what is left? In addition to the two South Korean stations, Britain's relatively new BBC Korean service continues to broadcast. Three private radio stations in the South continue to broadcast, but because much of their funding was from either the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy or the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for Democracy, both of which have been cut, it is not clear how much longer they can continue. Also, some Christian groups continue to broadcast into North Korea, with a mixture of religious messaging, news and music.

This is thin gruel, and it will be much harder for North Koreans who want different information, or a different perspective, to listen to radio broadcasts now than it was a few weeks ago. This matters.

USB drives are relatively easy to conceal and smuggle into the North, but are only useful for the single dose of information they carry. Television is effective, but its range is much more limited. But radio can reach almost the whole country, and once a freely-tuneable radio set is inside the country, and provided it remains undetected, it can be listened to almost indefinitely. So even in these days of rapid advances in communications technology, old-fashioned radio remains one of the most effective ways of getting information into closed societies.

We do not know how many North Koreans listen to foreign radio broadcasts. But when the closed societies of Eastern Europe finally opened up, Western analysts found that they had greatly underestimated the number of people who had listened to foreign broadcasts, which suggests that such estimates as there are for North Korea may also be too low. So that while it is likely that only a minority of North Koreans have been listening to foreign radio broadcasts, that minority is likely to be quite sizable.

Moreover, in most closed societies, those who have access to outside information share it — there is a multiplier effect. In my experience, this is particularly true of North Korea. So even if only a few people heard something on foreign radio, this news would spread quickly.

Soldiers dismantle a fixed loudspeaker facility at an unspecified location, which had been used for propaganda broadcasts against North Korea on Aug. 4. [YONHAP]

Altogether, the information broadcast into North Korea from outside probably reached a lot of people, including in Pyongyang. We know from other cases how important the spread of such information can be in changing societies. In East Germany, it was information from West German broadcasts about the demonstrations in Leipzig that encouraged East Berliners, too, to take to the streets, which led to State Council Chairman Erich Honecker's resignation. Information from Western broadcasts about union-organized strikes encouraged the Solidarnosc party in Poland to try the same, leading to Poland’s first free direct presidential elections. Information from Western broadcasters about the shameful cover-up of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a major factor in convincing Soviet citizens that things had to change, which catalyzed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.

In these examples, and many others, giving the citizens of authoritarian regimes good information led not to chaos but to internal debates that in turn led to reforms. The same goes for North Korea. It is in the interests not just of North Korea but of all of us that North Korean citizens are as well-informed as possible about the outside world and about different ways of doing things. Good information is a moderating force and a curb on irrationality.

It is deeply regrettable that North Korean citizens’ ability to learn about different ways of doing things than their own regime’s is being curtailed at a time when the number of people looking for alternatives is probably rising. If we want the country to reform, to become less irrational and more predictable, then ceasing radio broadcasts to its citizens is a retrograde step.