Kitchen Diplomacy

Egan arranged for his friend John Kallis, an oral surgeon, to examine Han. Kallis concluded that he needed to yank out many of Han's teeth, which would require him to sedate the ambassador, which made the operation a serious geopolitical affair.

"Listen, you gotta close your office down," Kallis recalls Egan instructing him. "He'll be your only patient that day. I'll be there, and he'll come with a couple guys."

On the day of the operation, Egan arrived with Han and two North Korean bodyguards, Kallis recalls. One bodyguard stood outside the operating room door, the other came inside. So did Egan, who uttered a cheery warning to Kallis: "God forbid something happens to this guy -- nobody will get out of this room alive."

That made Kallis "a little nervous," he says, but somehow he managed to do his job.

"We sedated him and took out 12 teeth and put in, like, 13 implants," he recalls. "And believe it or not, the guy didn't even take an aspirin afterward."

After the operation, Egan took Han to Cubby's for lunch. Egan expected the ambassador to order something soft, like mashed potatoes. He was wrong. Han devoured a rack of ribs.

"He's a tough guy," says Kallis. "I became friendly with Ambassador Han and invited him to my daughter's Sweet 16 party. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to come, but he sent a gift."

Diplomacy and Ribs

Egan opens the door of his black Humvee, lifts a big cardboard box, lugs it into Cubby's and plops it on a table. The box is stuffed with documents -- his FBI file, newspaper clippings, letters from the North Koreans. He fishes out a tape recorder and a cassette tape.

It's a recording of phone calls Egan made in December 1996, when the United States and North Korea were engaged in sensitive negotiations in New York. A few months earlier, a North Korean submarine had run aground in South Korean waters, and commandos from the sub fought South Korean soldiers. In the New York negotiations, the Americans demanded that North Korea officially apologize for the incident, but the North Koreans balked. At that point, Egan says, he tried to broker a deal in which the North Koreans would agree to release American POWs instead of apologizing.

"Isn't getting our men back more important than an apology?" Egan asks.

He presses a button and the tape starts rolling. He recorded it on the phone here at Cubby's, where he tried to arrange his diplomatic deal while running his restaurant and selling Christmas trees in the parking lot. On the tape, Egan talks to his North Korean friend Han, and to a South Korean official, and to an FBI agent, and to Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who was active in POW issues. He also talked to Charles "Jack" Pritchard, a special assistant to President Clinton for National Security Affairs, who was then negotiating with the North Koreans.

On the tape, Egan thanks Pritchard for coming to Cubby's a few nights earlier and Pritchard thanks Egan for his efforts in the negotiations. But then the two men quarrel over Egan's proposal, which Pritchard describes as blackmail.

At one point in the conversation, Egan sneezes, then apologizes: "I'm getting a cold from selling these Christmas trees."

Ultimately, Egan failed to broker his deal. He blames Pritchard. "Jack Pritchard didn't want to take me seriously," he says. "He's a typical pompous diplomat."

Pritchard, now president of a Washington-based research group called the Korea Economic Institute, declined requests for an interview about Egan. But last year, he discussed Egan with Mark Bronner, who was writing an article for Vanity Fair: "He was inserting himself into affairs of state -- in the diplomacy and negotiations," Pritchard said. "He had no business being involved in something like that."

"What's wrong with trying to get our POWs back?" Egan says, quite loudly, as he sits in Cubby's. A couple of customers glance up from their ribs. Others ignore the outburst, perhaps because the sound of the owner loudly airing his geopolitical views is not unusual at Cubby's.

For 15 years, Egan has courted the North Koreans, feeding them, fishing with them, traveling to their country four times. Thus far, he has failed to win the release of a single American POW. He's also failed to obtain any hard information from his Korean friends about Americans who may or may not be imprisoned in their country.

Still, he keeps trying. Why? What makes the owner of a Jersey barbecue joint persist in this crusade of bizarre personal diplomacy?

"He believes in what he's doing," says his father.

"He wants to help," says Greenleaf. "He's rough around the edges, but his motives are good."

"Bobby is motivated by interest in the issue of missing Americans," says Sauter. "And it doesn't hurt that he gets some publicity out of it."

"Why?" asks Egan. The expression on his face indicates that he finds the question ridiculous. "Why did Mozart compose music? It's what he did good."