Does the success of industrial policy depend on bureaucratic capacity? We use novel archival data on South Korean bureaucrats who implement a formally uniform industrial policy. These bureaucrats promote Korean exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965 and 2001. We exploit the rotation of bureaucrats between offices to show that individual bureaucrats matter greatly in boosting exports. Moving from a bureaucrat at the 20th percentile to the median is associated with a 50-60% increase in exports. This is comparable to the effect of an office opening, implying that export promotion is ineffective under a 20th percentile bureaucrat. Better bureaucrats may increase exports by transmitting information about market conditions. We find that Korean exports react more strongly to import demand under high ability bureaucrats. Finally, isolating quasi-random variation in bureaucrat experience, we find that exports increase in a particular product when the bureaucrat has previous experience with it. The effect of experience is small compared to the differences in bureaucrat effects, suggesting selecting good bureaucrats may be more important than training them.