Kim Jong Il, Unplugged

“You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.”
— Al Capone

In an interview with Radio Free Asia (Korean only), Raphael Perl of the Congressional Research Service suggests exactly what I suspected about polite requests from U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey to crack down on North Korean money laundering — the polite requests are backed by some powerful veiled threats:

One option available to the US government, although this is quite an extreme option, would be in effect to kick banks that facilitate N. Korean criminal activity out of the international banking system.

That sounds a lot like other things Perl, an expert on North Korea’s illegal revenue, has said before, and suggests that the U.S. might use PATRIOT 311 against other banks, as it did with Banco Delta Asia, and with devastating effect on both BDA, Kim Jong Il, and his business associates. In fact, you have to suspect that those comments were aimed at someone whose cooperation the U.S. government isn’t getting, and leave it up to you to guess who.

North Korea is pretending not to care:

Earlier Friday, North Korea said it does not care about the United States’ move to impose additional sanctions against Pyongyang.

Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey said in a telephone interview with Yonhap News Agency on Thursday that the U.N. member states should freeze the assets of 11 North Korean entities that Washington designated last year as proliferators of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, as the first step in implementing the recent U.N. resolution against Pyongyang for its missile tests.

“It shows Washington’s intention of putting more pressure on us. We do not care about it,” Jung Sung-il, spokesman of the North Korean delegation, said.

That statement came in the context of six five ten-party talks in Malaysia, now comprising just about every nation in Taepodong range.

After years of preparing its people to fight uniformed Yankee hordes, the regime’s undoing could be a few unassuming men in pinstripes. One can hope that North Korea’s privileged classes would not be willing to share the misery and deprivation that those in the countryside and decayed industrial towns have felt for decades.

Follow the money.

Postscript: Is this, or is this not, the coolest news grapic ever?