How North Korea’s Man in the West Ran Afoul of US Authorities

Alejandro Cao de Benós is the primary contact for anyone in the West who wants to do business with North Korea. Although he lives in Tarragona, Spain, and his day job is as an IT consultant, he serves the world’s most repressive regime as a quasi-official spokesperson—part cultural attaché, part fanboy. In May 2020, Bloomberg Businessweek published a profile about him.

About a year prior to our story, he had organized North Korea’s first cryptocurrency conference. (“For a country banished from the global banking system,” we wrote, “crypto has obvious appeal.”) In doing so, he ran afoul of US authorities, who said that Cao de Benós had conspired—with help from an American crypto researcher—to violate sanctions. The FBI wanted him extradited, and in late 2023, Spanish police arrested him after he got off a train in Madrid. A judge released him without conditions, pending extradition.