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Category: Axis of Evil

April 7, 2017

If Assad is the murderer of Idlib, Kim Jong-un was an accessory

With impeccable timing, His Porcine Majesty has sent friendly greetings to one of his best customers: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent a congratulatory message to Syria over the founding anniversary of the country’s ruling party, Pyongyang’s media said Friday, amid global condemnation against Damascus’s suspected chemical weapon attack on civilians. The North’s leader sent the message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the controlling Ba’ath party, according to Rodong Sinmun,...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
March 25, 2015

Must read: Iranian bank handled arms transactions for Tehran, Pyongyang through Seoul branch

Investigative journalist Claudia Rosett, who covered the Tienanmen Massacre and exposed the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, has written an extensive report about the operations of Iran’s Bank Mellat in Seoul during the administrations of Roh Moo-Hyun and Lee Myung-Bak: In a cable dated March 20, State asked its embassy in Seoul to tell the South Korean government that “Bank Mellat has facilitated the movement of millions of dollars for Iran’s nuclear program since at least 2003.” Four days later, State followed...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
January 9, 2015

Der Spiegel: N. Koreans helping Syria to nuke up. Again.

Evidently, I refreshed your memory of the 2007 Al-Kibar reactor raid just in time for this cheery piece of news: Der Spiegel, citing anonymous intelligence sources, reports that Syria “has apparently built a new nuclear facility at a secret location” in the mountains near the Lebanese border. The conclusion is based, in part, on signals intelligence: [T]he clearest proof that it is a nuclear facility comes from radio traffic recently intercepted by a network of spies. A voice identified as belonging to a...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
November 25, 2013

How the Iran deal affects North Korea policy

You would think that the world’s biggest government would be capable of handling more than one global proliferation crisis at a time. Unfortunately, Washington isn’t wired for that kind of bandwidth. Major policy initiatives require political capital, and it will take all of this administration’s dwindling reserves to fend off a new round of Iran sanctions in Congress.* The administration couldn’t defend a deal with North Korea now if it had one, and that goes double for the sort of...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
October 10, 2013

Review: Treasury’s War, by Juan Zarate

Let me begin with an apology for the lack of posting lately. While tossing a football around with some friends, I took a direct head-on hit to that finger you need for typing words that contain the letters “l” or an “o,” which turn out to be less dispensable than you might think. The time I didn’t spend typing, I spent reading instead: [clicking the image takes you to Amazon] If you want to understand why the Banco Delta Asia...

Categories Axis of Evil/Books & Films/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
October 3, 2013

Sanctions are working in Iran. They’ll work better against North Korea, and here’s why.

Drag a modest grant check through DuPont Circle and you’ll accumulate at least ten pundits, several dozen grad students, and a multitude of assorted kooks who would willingly write you an academic paper entitled, “Why Sanctions Never Worked.” And that’s true, except for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, Nauru, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, and only if you limit the argument to trade sanctions and exclude other tools of economic pressure, like coordinated divestment, third-party financial sanctions like those in Section...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 11, 2013

The Syria-North Korea Axis

After watching North Korea get away with shipping anti-aircraft missiles to terrorists and its past chemical and nuclear proliferation to Syria, it’s gratifying to see people catch onto North Korea’s role in the tragedy in Syria.  There are several more op-eds and stories on this today, all of them well worth reading: Bruce Bechtol, writing in the Korea Times: “North Korea has designed and built at least two chemical weapons facilities in Syria.  Indeed, despite the lack of statements coming from...

Categories Axis of Evil/Geopolitics/Proliferation/WMD
August 22, 2013

Is North Korea importing oil from Iran?

Remember when Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard wrote that North Korea, notwithstanding the deepening misery of most of its people, had begun to show a current account surplus in recent years? Their conclusion was based largely on trade data showing that North Korea was importing more foreign goods, mostly through China.  If you believe these official Chinese government statistics for the last six months, however, Pyongyang’s imports from China fell sharply … for the first time in four years. Is this welcome evidence that sanctions...

Categories Anju Links/Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
March 9, 2012

Did Iran test a nuke in North Korea?

It would be a very serious matter if Iran had tested a nuclear weapon in North Korea in 2010, as this German language report in Die Welt claims. The claim has received much less attention in the U.S. press than it would seem to merit, and most bloggers who have picked up the story have merely wondered aloud whether it could be true (the notable exception being Stephan Haggard). I’ll add my summation of the evidence to Stephan’s, but I’ll...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation
January 30, 2012

North Korea shipped chemical reagents to Syria, possibly via China

This is a little old now, but I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it, so I will. The U.N. has launched an investigation into an attempted shipment of chemical weapons reagents and protective suits to Syria, a close ally of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and whose government gave safe passage to recruits on their way to Iraq to join Al Qaeda forces there. In November 2009, Greek authorities seized a container from a Liberia-registered freighter as it headed toward...

Categories Axis of Evil/China/Proliferation/Taiwan/WMD
September 25, 2011

Al-Kibar Redux

There’s nothing more I really care to say about what we should have done about the North Korean-built nuclear reactor at Al-Kibar in Syria, which Israel destroyed in a September 2009 air strike. This was a matter of some temporary inconvenience to Chris Hill’s efforts (abetted by the President and Secretary of State) to sell us a shiny, pre-owned agreed framework, complete with rust-proofing and warranty. Recently, however, Dick Cheney’s memoir has revived that debate. Michael Anton, writing in The...

Categories Axis of Evil/Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/U.S. Politics/WMD
June 11, 2011

IAEA report concludes that North Korea aided Syria in nuclear proliferation

Recently, a friend provided me a bootleg copy (thanks) of an International Atomic Energy Agency report implicating North Korea and its Syrian client in violating IAEA safeguards by developing a clandestine nuclear weapons capability. The IAEA doesn’t appear to have released the report publicly; it appears to have been leaked. With that said, it’s really nothing we haven’t known since the spring of 2008, when congressional pressure finally forced Chris Hill to lift his embargo on all information related to...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
May 16, 2011

U.N. Report Implicates China in N. Korea-Iran Missile Transfers; China Tries to Block Said Report

If Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are an Axis of Evil, then China must be the Limited-Slip Differential of the Axis of Evil: North Korea and Iran appear to have been regularly exchanging ballistic missile technology in violation of U.N. sanctions, according to a confidential U.N. report obtained by Reuters on Saturday. The report said the illicit technology transfers had “trans-shipment through a neighboring third country.” That country was China, several diplomats told Reuters on condition of anonymity. [Reuters] China...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/China/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
June 8, 2010

Brazil: The New Venezuela?

Is Brazil Joining the Axis of Evil? I’d be skeptical if anyone less than Bertil Lintner had written this, but Lintner has a well established history of finding out some rather amazing things that no one else can: Recent indications are that Pyongyang has sought willing trade partners outside of Asia and its new closest commercial ally appears to be Brazil. Relations between the two countries have warmed considerably since leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva became president in January...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation
May 17, 2010

North Korea Calls Israeli Foreign Minister an “Imbecile”

North Korea has reacted, and predictably, to the allegations of the Israeli Foreign Minister that it’s arming terrorists: A spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry described Lieberman as an “ultra-rightist” and “an imbecile in diplomacy.” The spokesman, quoted by the North’s official news agency, said Israel was itself being criticized for its nuclear program and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. He also said it would never pardon Israel for “daring slander the dignified (North) by faking up sheer...

Categories Axis of Evil/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
May 12, 2010

North Korea Arms Terrorists, State Department Dozes

The Foreign Minister of Israel has become the first government official to openly accuse North Korea of arming terrorists since the U.S. government removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008: The Israeli foreign minister said on Wednesday that North Korean weapons seized in Thailand last year were headed for Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. [….] “With huge numbers of different weapons … (it had the) intention to smuggling these weapons to Hamas and to...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
March 20, 2010

Axis? What Axis?

In the wake of reports that North Korea shipped raw uranium to Syria just before the al-Kibar strike, North Korea is now suspected of exporting yellowcake to Iran: Leonard Spector, a deputy director of the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, made the remarks Tuesday. Spector quoted reports as saying the 45 tons of what is known as “yellowcake” were then delivered to Iran via Turkey. The material would be sufficient for several nuclear weapons...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
March 2, 2010

Did North Korea Ship Yellowcake to Syria?

Say it with me: thank God Chris Hill came along in time to keep us safe: Syria in 2007 received approximately 45 tons of raw uranium from North Korea for use in producing fuel for a secret nuclear reactor, informed military and diplomatic sources told Kyodo News on Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 26). An Israeli air assault destroyed the undeclared reactor not long after Syria received shipment of the material and the “yellowcake” uranium is thought to have been sent...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD