How a ‘normal family man’ found himself singing karaoke and drinking spirits during a North Korean weapons deal

One cold morning in 2017, Ulrich Larsen, a “normal family man” from Denmark found himself in a luxurious conference room underneath a North Korean factory on the outskirts of Pyongyang.

Officials from the reclusive regime were singing karaoke and drinking spirits while Larsen and his business partner were closing an illegal weapons deal.

“At that moment, I feared I would never come back to Denmark,” Larsen told 9news.com.au in an interview from his home.

“I was sitting in a steel basement in the middle of North Korea with no access to a phone or satellites or anything.”

Larsen was in the midst of a 10-year undercover operation to expose North Korea’s illegal drug and weapons trading. 

He was filming the entire thing.

“They could practically have killed us there, and it was so bizarre because in North Korea, there’s a lot of alcohol involved when you are together,” Larsen recalled.

With the spirits flowing, the pair were under pressure not to blow their cover.

“We just had some basic backstories, so we didn’t make any mistakes.”

Halfway through the banquet, one of the officials, a major figure in North Korea’s weapons industry, began to sing a patriotic pop anthem.

“Every six to seven words is about Kim Il Sung, or Kim Jong Il, or Kim Jong Un,” Larsen said. 

Larsen’s partner in the operation, an actor posing as a billionaire weapons buyer named “Mr James”, was signing the papers.

Contracts for missile systems worth hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands.

In turn, Larsen was asked to sing a song of his own.

The North Koreans suggested he perform Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. 

Not quite up to that challenge, a slightly tipsy Larsen sang a Danish children’s song that he usually performed for his kids at bedtime.

“One of the officials was standing right behind me, and he put his arm over my chest, and he said, ‘I felt that song came from your heart,'” Larsen said.

The long road to Pyongyang

In 2010, Larsen started a project with director Mads Brügger with the idea to shine a light on an unusual bunch of their fellow Danes – a group called the Korean Friendship Association of Denmark (KFA).

Larsen describes the group as a Monty Python-style group of people devoted to North Korean ideology.

He thought it would be fun to travel with them to the nation to see their reaction to the country, and make an absurd documentary.  

After Larsen joined the KFA, he rose up the ranks and eventually befriended the head of the European wing of the movement, a Spanish national named Alejandro Cao de Benos who cultivated his own ties to the regime.

Larsen and Cao de Benos developed a friendship, but all the while, Larsen was recording their conversations on hidden cameras.

Cao de Benós told Larsen he was seeking investors who would be willing to invest in North Korea, despite sanctions against the country. 

Larsen and the film’s director Brügger invented “an investor of their dreams,” the charismatic billionaire they called Mr James who was played by actor Jim Latrache-Qvortrup.

Larsen and Mr James were invited into the heart of North Korea to conduct a weapons deal, at the invitation of Cao de Benos.

One of North Korea’s biggest streams of revenue, which remains under severe international sanctions, is the international weapons and drug trade.

What had started as a documentary poking fun at the Korean Friendship group rapidly turned into a damning expose on the workings of North Korea’s clandestine dealings.

Later in the documentary, which was eventually released in 2020 as The Mole, the pair visited Uganda with a North Korean delegation to start planning a deal for an arms factory hosted in the African nation.

Hundreds of hours of conversations were secretly recorded by Larsen, uncovering damning evidence of how North Korea was skirting international sanctions.

Having secured the evidence they needed, Larsen and Brügger eventually revealed to their contacts that they had been playing them for fools for almost a decade.

When the documentary was released, Larsen became an overnight celebrity.

“I went to bed Saturday evening, and Sunday morning I was on the world media, which flipped my life completely,” he said.

For the first year after the documentary’s release, Larsen was accompanied by a former Danish Navy Seal as a security precaution.

Whenever he travelled to South Korea, he was met by members of the country’s intelligence service.

“(It’s) a bit awkward – I’m just me, but I’m also aware that I might have pissed off some people,” he said.

Larsen had also kept the true purpose of his undercover activity secret from his family for nearly 10 years.

“First of all, it was a shock for my wife,” he said.

“She literally thought I was travelling around with filmmakers to care for cameras.”

She did know he had travelled to North Korea and Uganda.

“But if she was told the truth she would not have allowed me to go, of course.”

Parents at the school where Larsen’s children attended were also concerned by his activity.

He recalls that one parent became concerned their school would be targeted by North Korean missiles.

Larsen now tells his story around the world.

He is also concerned about the current North Korean deployments to the conflict in Ukraine, which he said he predicted more than a year ago.

Asked what projects he was working on next, Larsen said it would have to remain a secret.

“I’m undercover at 9News,” he joked, adding that he was working on a book about his time infiltrating North Korea.