Gelöschtes P5DX Statement

Da N6PSE sein interessantes Statement vom 25.4.2016 zur gestrichenen P5DX-Expedition wieder gelöscht hat (er hat sich inzwischen mit dem "Betroffenen" (N0UN) ausgesprochen), kopiere ich es hier mal für Archivzwecke herein.

P5DX-what could have been….

As a Blogger, my blog represents my thoughts and my views only.
The content of this Blog does not represent anyone else but me.

This morning, I had to cancel a DXpedition. It was one of the
hardest decisions of my life. It was not for lack of permission,
it was not for lack of a team and equipment willing to go.

The prospect of a P5 activation brings out the worst in this
hobby. The posers, the nuts, the ill-informed and the
opinionated. But in the end, it mostly came down to a
surprising lack of support and lack of funding from some of the world’s
paramount DX foundations when asked to fund grants to the world’s #1
Most Wanted Entity.
This is the story of P5DX.

Throughout several years of ongoing negotiations, the North Koreans
have told us that they have never before given permission for an amateur
radio activity within the DPRK. Of course we don’t know if this
is true or not as others have gone before us and have been approved for
DXCC, but this is what we were told. We had hoped to be the first
large DXpedition with clear and unambiguous proof that we were active
within the country and with real evidence of permission. After
tireless efforts, we finally had a letter of invitation in hand from
DPRK authorities inviting us into the country as the first-ever large
scale amateur radio event.

In April, 2013, we informed the world of our “P5 Project”. We
were making numerous visits to the DPRK and establishing real
contacts. We were spending thousands of dollars of our family’s
money shuttling back and forth from our homes to Pyongyang, and we
wanted to give hope to the DX Community that an operation might actually
take place.

All told, we made nine visits to the DPRK. Despite several
false leads, for the most part our efforts seemed pointless,
unproductive and futile.

Until recently, when we finally got our big break.

As part of our P5 Project, we retained an expert in all things North
Korea to work and lobby on our behalf. Our
“Emissary” was very interested in our project and asked for no
money from us. Our “Emissary” has strong relationships within the
DPRK and regularly travels there.

In February 2016, our Emissary contacted us while we were on the
VP8STI/VP8SGI DXpedition. Our Emissary had been
communicating with relevant DPRK officials and sensed a new willingness
to consider our proposal.

We renewed our proposal and the talks continued. When we
returned home, we learned that we were very close to having complete
permission. After a couple more months of back and forth
negotiations, the DPRK agreed to a ten day amateur radio activity with
three radios and up to 20 team members. A venue was investigated
and approved.

Like the 2012 7O6T Dxpedition, the DPRK officials wanted to showcase a
new resort and offered it as a DXpedition location. Within a span
of a few weeks our Emissary and one of our team leaders made a visit to
Pyongyang to have face to face meetings with high level
officials. These officials had been involved in Dennis Rodman’s
visit as well as the just-completed Pyongyang marathon race. Now
that the marathon was over, we had their full attention and
cooperation. Things were moving fast.

The DPRK officials stipulated that only three Americans could be on
the team and no Japanese, but beyond that we were given the green light
to begin assembling a team of varying nationalities from Europe, South
America, and Oceania.

The DPRK officials insisted on no publicity in advance of us going on
the air, so everyone joining our team was sworn to
secrecy. A website was developed but would not be launched
until we were live and on the air within the DPRK. It was agreed
that we would use the call sign P5DX.

Teil 2 des Statements (das Forum akzeptiert nur 10.000 Zeichen pro Post):

Our last major hurdle was that the DPRK was asking for a very large
fee to be paid for the permissions at various government levels and
ministries to operate from within the DPRK. It is a very common
practice for various governments throughout the world to request a fee
to be paid for DXpedition permission and licensing. These fees are
typically several thousand dollars in many Third World
countries. As we would see, the DPRK fee would be
considerably more.

While still trying to keep everything a secret, the largeness of this
fee required that we approach several of the biggest amateur radio
foundations for financial grants to help us with our tremendous up-front
costs.

We also consulted with an international attorney who counseled us how
to avoid becoming entangled in violations of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act. Essentially, it is a serious crime for Americans to
bribe foreign government officials. However, it is not a crime
for Americans to be charged extra fees to visit a foreign country.
All of our fees would be paid directly to a China-based tour company
and no direct exchange would take place with the North Koreans.

Given the outpouring of support that these amateur radio consortia
had given to lesser-needed entities in the past, it never occurred to us
that they would resist supporting a trip to P5. One organization
actually said that we didn’t need their funding because we could charge
whatever we wanted for the QSLs! It was a disheartening
revelation that they seemed more interested in our ability to raise
funds by charging high fees later for confirmation “because we can”
rather than in assisting a major DXpedition that was in dire need of
immediate pre-departure funding to pull it off. We later proposed
that they merely pledge an amount to be donated if we were successful
and our operation was accredited by the DXCC staff, thus giving them an
easy way out if they were not pleased with our performance. This
still did not sway them. Here we were, just a couple of weeks away
from the first authorized multinational DXpedition from the world’s
most needed country, and we were told we were on our own. I never
thought it would come to this.

I have tremendous respect for these organizations and I am deeply
disappointed that they could not find a way to support our plans.

This left my Co-Leader, David-K3LP and I no other recourse but to
drain our own personal retirement savings to provide the bulk of our
funding. In addition to our upfront license fees, we needed to buy
radios, power supplies, coax, antennas and many more items. We
purchased roughly $16,000 in equipment and we spent almost $4000 to ship
it FedEx to Beijing to our staging area, where it still sits as I write
this Blog.

We continued to discreetly build our team. Many potential team
members were not able to travel to the DPRK with such short notice,
which was understandable. We worked very hard and we were glad
that we were able to complete a final team of 14 very able operators by
the time the deadline to apply for our DPRK visas was upon us. Our
plans continued to come together and everyone booked their flights to
Beijing. A hotel in China was secured for our pre-DXpedition
briefings. Reservations with Air Koryo, the DPRK’s national
airline, were made. Less than two weeks to go now. We were
delighted that everyone seemed to respect our need for
confidentiality. Nothing had been leaked.

But that euphoria would not last. Much to our disappointment,
April 19 featured the first of many betrayals of our trust when a
blogger opined that he was “hearing rumblings of a P5 activation by 10
US/EU Ops planned for May 2016”. Someone talked. These
leaks came almost immediately after our attempts to recruit our team
and to get grant funds, despite our repeated insistence that our plans
not be made public. And soon the repercussions of that would
unravel our plans and cost tens of thousands of DXers a possible contact
with P5.

Within a short time, we were contacted by numerous other amateur
radio websites and bloggers asking if we were the ones involved in these
rumors. We tried not to comment at all, but the rumors would not
go away. Finally we admitted we might be making progress but
begged for discretion, saying that negotiations were still ongoing and
that one of the conditions of the trip was that we not go public until
we were ready to go on the air. But in pursuit of their own
interests in having a “scoop”, most re-published the unsubstantiated
rumors and, as expected, this brought out the crazies and every armchair
DXer with an opinion chimed in.

One eHam commenter posted that if all, or some of us were to wind up
in a North Korean gulag, that none of us would have his sympathy.
We were powerless to act or respond and we kept our heads down and
focused on moving forward. Within days, four of the leading Web
and Email based DX news sources ran with the rumors, providing links to
the original Blogger. All of this was in defiance of the directive of
the DPRK officials that we make no pre-event publicity. All of this was
working against our efforts.

The Internet ramblings continued and more and more information was
shared. Things began to spiral out of control. Impostors
pirated my call sign and made numerous posts on DX Summit revealing more
of our plans. I had to ask DX Summit to block the use of my call sign
after that.

On April 23, just a week before our departure to Beijing and then
into Pyongyang, our Emissary traveled to Pyongyang to make final
arrangements and obtain our visas. On April 24, our
Emissary alerted us that all of the visas were approved with a
couple notable exceptions, myself included.

I will never know why my DPRK visa request was refused. I had
been to the DPRK on two previous visits and everything was quite
positive. It is possible that my pirated call-sign on DX Summit was seen
by the DPRK authorities who may have viewed it as a violation of their
trust and me not keeping quiet. But i feel I know where the real
blame lies.

As I was one of the team members bringing a significant amount of
equipment to Beijing with me as well as providing a major portion of the
upfront funding from my own personal savings, this proved to be an
insurmountable problem. I could not devote a sizable chunk of my
life savings for a project that I could no longer participate in.

And since we received absolutely no financial support from the DX
foundations we courted for funding despite our desperate pleas for
assistance, we decided we had no choice but to cancel the P5DX
DXpedition. We waited another 24 hours hoping for a miracle that
would never come before finally sending word to Pyongyang to ask our
Emissary to inform the DPRK officials of our decision to terminate the
project.

At this time, we have a significant amount of equipment waiting for
us in Beijing that we shipped a few weeks ago and that would consume
another several thousand dollars to ship back. We all have
full-fare non-refundable flights that we have to cancel at considerable
expense. The financial losses suffered by Intrepid DX and all of
our team members are substantial.

I can’t help but feel a tremendous sense of frustration that someone
felt the need to betray our request for confidentiality by blabbing
about our plans to others, and by those who published these rumors
despite being told this would be counterproductive. I am also
certain that if some of the large foundations that we had approached had
funded our grant request, the remaining team members who already had
visas cleared would have been able to continue on to the DPRK and
conduct a successful CW/SSB/RTTY activation.

Let me reiterate. We had permission. We had a team.
We had all necessary equipment staged in Beijing. We had a venue
in North Korea. We had flights and hotels to China and the DPRK
confirmed.

What we did not have was the support of those we asked to remain
quiet, nor the support of anyone we asked for help with
funding. This could have been a DXpedition for the record
books.

But now we will never know.

What do you think?

Paul N6PSE