I can’t wait to read this one: “Treasury’s War,” by Juan Zarate

I wonder if Amazon can deliver this while I still have an unexpected windfall of leisure time:

Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, plays the role of the bureaucrat. He joined the Treasury Department just weeks before the 2001 attacks to aid the agency’s enforcement wing. [….]

Treasury launched its most ambitious assault with this new weapon on a tiny bank in Macau. That bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), caught the department’s attention in 2003 for doing a hefty amount of business with North Korea. Classic sanctions, such as freezing individual bank accounts and forbidding commercial activity, had succeeded in isolating Pyongyang, but BDA, among others, helped the country stream its profits from illegal arms sales, money laundering and counterfeiting into the international financial system. In the most notable revelation of the book, Zarate recounts a chain reaction that no one predicted. Within two weeks of its September 2005 designation as a primary money laundering concern under Section 311, a hemorrhaging BDA shuttered all of its North Korean accounts and handed its administration to the Macau government. Fearing the North Korean taint, banks in financial hubs worldwide, and even North Korean ally China, ended business with North Korea.

The Kim regime initially dismissed the designation as yet another feckless sanction. But as its lifelines collapsed, it panicked. North Korean leaders refused to return to the six-party nuclear talks until Treasury, in Zarate’s words, removed “the scarlet letter from their reputation.” By designating BDA for its North Korean dealings, the United States exposed a raft of illegal North Korean financial activity, from money laundering to drug trafficking, that no bank wanted to be associated with.

The designation bought the United States real leverage with North Korea. But just when it could have waited for Pyongyang to flail its way into concessions, the administration folded. Zarate bitterly recalls watching from his new perch at the National Security Council as, without any North Korean compromise, the State Department badgered Treasury into reversing the action so as to kick-start the talks. By trying to “put the genie back in the bottle,” Zarate argues, Washington undermined its credibility and “cashed in on BDA too soon.” [Washington Post]

This sounds like the most engrossing read a person can possibly have without having to clear one’s browser history afterward. In fact, it’s exactly the strategy behind H.R. 1771, one of the worthier projects this Congress has taken on–and 1771 would be far more comprehensive and deadly than an action against one dirty little bank in Macau.

Hat tip to a reader.