Christopher Ems was in “survival mode” when he was transferred to his second prison in Saudi Arabia.
His first was the dark and cramped detention facilities at Riyadh airport, where he was arrested with a red Interpol note before taking his morning coffee. His new cell was full of even more people, and now his wrists and ankles were in chains.
“I saw that the situation could be quite unstable … my strategy was just to sit down, look at the floor and not meet anyone,” he told Sky News.
There was a time when he thought that his visit to Pyongyang in North Korea in April 2019 was just a strange tourist trip, something he could tell a story about. Now, almost three years later, the 30-year-old man was in a foreign prison facing extradition to the United States.
The US Department of Justice suspects that Ems and a Spanish defendant organized a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang to advise the North Korean government to use technology to circumvent a bank embargo imposed because of its “hostile nuclear ambitions.”
Image: Christopher Ems speaks at the World Blockchain Forum in Dubai in 2018
During Ems’ arrest, a sealed indictment accused the couple of conspiring with a US cryptocurrency developer named Virgil Griffith to violate the International Emergency Economic Law, a crime punishable by a $ 1 million fine and a maximum sentence of 20 years. .
Griffith himself has already pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
In an exclusive interview with Sky News, detailing his experiences in North Korea and Saudi Arabia, Ems, now on bail in Jeddah, said he was innocent and had informed British security services about his trip without telling them. causes alarm.
He asked the United States to allow him to return to the United Kingdom to face extradition proceedings.
“I really just want to go home and deal with it through the British judiciary, which I don’t think is a big thing that even Americans should be asked to do,” he said.
Image: Virgil Griffith pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than five years
Getting to Pyongyang
As early as 2018, Ems was a regular speaker in the cryptocurrency conference chain. He was the head of business development at bitcoin.com and had started his own business, which included providing legal and compliance services for the latest crypto mania at the time: the initial offering of coins.
He told Sky News that the business was “a huge failure in many ways” because “even now, but especially then, it was a very wild west.”
In those days, “there was a blockchain conference with a description somewhere in the world at least three times a week,” he said, but it was still unusual when the man who became his co-accused, Alejandro Cao de Benos, turned to him. speaks in one in Pyongyang.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Look, is this legal?’ Will I break any laws by doing so? ”So I did my due diligence, checked the British government’s website about the trip to North Korea. I looked at the UN Resolutions on North Korea. I did do my research to see if I, as a British citizen, would break any laws, and it didn’t look like I would break any laws, “he said.
Hao de Benos comes from an aristocratic family in Spain and has been a staunch supporter of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for several decades, leading the International Korean Friendship Association, which celebrates the country’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un and offers tours of the country.
“I don’t really know the gentleman,” Ems said, explaining that they had talked about the conference but had not kept in touch. “All I can comment on is what we all see online on its various different channels, at which point, you know, I think that speaks for itself.”
Repression after open pornography on the phone
North Korea was “almost exactly what you see in any documentary ever made by Western journalists,” Ems said.
They arrived and their passports were thoroughly checked before being released to go through baggage checks and “what seems normal to fly to the UK for example, but it’s not quite the same” because officers started going through all the images of electronic devices of visitors.
“Then it got pretty scary at first,” Ems said. “One of the gentlemen who attended the conference had decided for some reason to present a pornographic film.
“It was discovered by the authorities. So as soon as it happened, everyone’s passports were confiscated. So this is your first impression. You can imagine what it feels like again. It’s not a pleasant feeling.”
Without their documents, they were taken to their hotel, “which is essentially a complex, there is no way out [and] you will not enter unless you are accredited to be in this hotel, which is almost empty. “
They were taken on typical tourist excursions, visiting sites around Pyongyang, and went on a day trip to the demilitarized zone, from where they could look south.
“And then to the back end [of the trip] there was this “conference” with and without citations, “Ems said.
“Many other people who were present were talking about it now. It would be very difficult to describe it as a conference as we know it in the conventional sense.
“Essentially, we were given materials that we were told were pre-approved by the North Korean government, which were basically pieces of paper that were copied and pasted by Google that had a lot of basic blockchain information.
And we’re starting to get hints from local guides, if you want, “better this go well” and they keep telling us “better go well, that’s a very serious thing that happened with this video that was discovered “So everyone is very on edge.”
Image: The Pyongyang Science and Technology Complex was built in 2015. Photo: Christophe95 / CC4.0
“We were told you had to do it”
According to Ems, the conference itself was held in a large facility, “but there was no one in it but us [the speakers] and those people who are present, I would say no more than 20 people. “
“What we ended up doing at this conference is, you know, we read the information sheets and obviously advertise a little bit, but we’re not trying to break any laws or anything like that.
“It was so boring that most of the participants fell asleep. In fact, I fell asleep at one point.
According to the FBI, Ems opened the conference, saying: “I’m sure there are a lot of people in this room [who] work in the banking system will understand how much the United States controls the way money moves around the world, and that can be very, very unfair. “
He spoke of how the cryptocurrency makes “it possible to transfer money to any country in the world, regardless of … sanctions,” the indictment said.
Speaking to Sky News, Ems said: “I think you need to put it in the context of what I explained about the pressure we were all in in this room.
“You know, we were told you had to introduce yourself. The last thing I would go in there and do was say, “I totally disagree [sic] with each sanction [and] embargo imposed on North Korea. ” I really believe that this would put me in a very real danger if I did. “
It wasn’t until the conference was over, just before they left for the airport, that Ems and the other participants got their passports back.
“Just before I left for the airport and many people don’t know it because I didn’t make it public, I was the only person, I was called to my hotel room and I searched my hotel room and I was questioned by the drivers.
“So this whole assumption or accusation that I was somehow a friend of North Korea is just completely untrue. It was a very scary experience.”
Ems said he was not physically searched, but “the whole room was turned upside down after I left and I was asked to enter. And then I’ll always remember quite vividly that the wipers were out with a lot of, you know, frowning faces, if you will.
“And these guys were asking me questions about, do you have anything in your room that you hid?” Do you have something like that? If you sign us up, if you do that, these are all kinds of questions.
“You know, I was sitting there, I was really praying on the way back to the airport bus that I would be stamped to get on the plane, which, fortunately, I did without any problems, but it was scary. “
Interaction with the British authorities
The indictment against Ems quoted a text message he sent to a group of attendees saying: “Hello everyone, I have just been picked up by the airport police[.] I would recommend that you remove all photos from the conference, as they knew a lot. “
He told Sky News that he was “towed to Gatwick Airport when I landed in the UK after I returned, and I was asked some very basic questions about what happened, which I took into account.
“As soon as I got home, I felt so worried that I actually called the British intelligence hotline and said, ‘Look, if I can be helpful with anything, please contact me. I didn’t want to do something wrong, if I did something wrong, please let me know and let’s fix it.
“And I didn’t hear anything until after the arrest of Virgil Griffith, in which I spent some time with the British authorities in Dubai, where I have lived for the last few years.
“At the end of the time I spent with them, they let me know that they didn’t think I had done anything wrong and would not go any further. That’s why I thought …
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