Kim Jong-un’s Spanish Mouthpiece

LONDON â€" Kim Jong-un may lead the world’s most isolated state, but the North Korean leader is not entirely without foreign allies as tensions rise on the Korean peninsula.

According to his top man in Europe, an aristocratic Spaniard named Alejandro Cao de Benós, foreign volunteers have flocked to sign up for an International Defense Brigade to defend the country in the event of a showdown with the United States.

Around 430 had put their names down by Tuesday, the former IT consultant told Spain’s El Confidencial Digital news Web site shortly before he headed for Pyongyang.

The 38-year-old special delegate of North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries says on his blog that he started recruiting for the Brigade after receiving hundreds of e-mails from sympathizers around the world who wanted to do something to help confront the U.S. military menace.

As founder of the Korean Friendship Association, Mr. Cao de Benós has moved up the ranks in Pyongyang to become the only foreigner to work officially for the North Korean government, which has granted him honorary citizenship.

He claims the K.F.A. has 15,000 members. It attracts the kind of niche enthusiasts who “jostle to outdo each other with their trainspotters’ grasp of the minutiae of North Korean life,” according to Tim Hume of Britain’s The Independent.

Despite Mr. Cao de Benós’s devotion to all things North Korean, it took him a decade of wooing the authorities in Pyongyang before he was granted permission to set up the country’s first Web site, which has since painted an invariably rosy picture of life north of the 38th parallel.

Mr. Cao de Benós has said he was first drawn to North Korea in 1990 when, as a serious-minded teenager, he was seeking a solution to the world’s problems.

“I didn’t want to dedicate my life to be a slave in the capitalist system,” he told Mr. Page in an interview last year. “My dream was to be a part of the revolution.”

Born in the Catalan city of Tarragona to an aristocratic family with a strong military tradition, he says he is heir to the titles of Baron of Les, Count of Argelejo and Marquis of Rosalmonte and has not given up the idea of one day claiming them, according to El Confidencial Digital.

As Pyongyang’s voice to the outside world, the portly former soldier has been much in demand in the present crisis. But, as he explains on his Facebook page, he is turning down further interviews until he gets back from Pyongyang at the end of the month.

Before he left, he insisted that new sanctions on Pyongyang would barely affect the North Korean economy. “We want peace,” he told Russia Today’s Spanish-language service. “But we won’t go on our knees to get it.”

As for his International Defense Brigade, he says the list is open until mid July when it will be handed to Pyongyang as a gesture of solidarity with the North Korean people in their “just cause.”