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Treasury designates N. Korea’s Himmler & “Angel of Death,” & Kim Jong-un’s sister

On Wednesday, the Treasury Department designated seven North Korean officials under Executive Order 13687, and two ministries under Executive Order 13722 (the authority has legal implications, which I’ll touch on later in this post). Along with the designations, Treasury and State issued, respectively, a statement and a report explaining the designations.

“The North Korean regime not only engages in severe human rights abuses, but it also implements rigid censorship policies and conceals its inhumane and oppressive behavior,” said John E. Smith, Acting OFAC Director.  “Today’s action exposes individuals supporting the North Korean regime and underscores the U.S. Government’s commitment to promoting accountability for serious human rights abuses and censorship in North Korea.”

Today’s designations were issued pursuant to E.O. 13687, which targets, among others, officials of the Government of North Korea and the Workers’ Party of Korea.  As a result of today’s actions, any property or interest in property of those designated by OFAC within U.S. jurisdiction is frozen.  Additionally, transactions by U.S. persons involving the designated persons are generally prohibited.  The identifications of two entities as blocked were issued pursuant to E.O. 13722, which, among others, blocks the property and interests in property of the Government of North Korea and the Workers’ Party of Korea, including those two entities. [Treasury Dep’t]

The Hill and Yonhap both reported on the designations. The individuals designated included Kim Won-hong, Kim Il-nam, Kim Yo-jong, Choe Hwi, Min Byong-chol, Jo Yong-won, and Kang P’il-hun.

  • Kim Yo-jong is Kim Jong-un’s younger sister and Vice Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, which Treasury calls “North Korea’s primary agency responsible for both newspaper and broadcast censorship, among other things.” The PAD is also the business partner of the Associated Press. Although officials in both Seoul and Washington have played up Kim Yo-jong’s influence, I tend to doubt that a regime as patriarchal as this one has really entrusted functions as vital as propaganda and censorship to a 26-year-old woman.
  • Choe Hwi, also designated today, is another Vice Director of the PAD. But, acknowledging that no analogy is perfect, the real Goebbels of North Korea is probably Kim Ki-nam, who has many decades of experience in the field, and who was designated by Treasury earlier this year, also under EO 13687.
  • If Kim Ki-nam is North Korea’s Goebbels, its Himmler is Kim Won-hong, the Minister of State Security. The MSS (formerly the State Security Department until it was renamed recently) is responsible for the Gestapo that enforces internal security, and the Totenkopfverbände that guard its political prison camps.
  • Kang P’il-hun is Director of the General Political Bureau of the Ministry of People’s Security. The MPS is North Korea’s regular police force, but it is also much more. It runs local interrogation centers all over North Korea, refers some of those it arrests to the prison camp system, and previously ran (and perhaps currently runs) a camp of its own, the closed-and-recently-reopened Camp 18.
  • Kim Il-Nam is responsible for the Yodok political prison camp, or Camp 15, in South Hamgyeong Province, best known through the gulag memoir of Kang Chol-hwan, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.”
  • Min Byong-chol is known locally as the “angel of death” for “his record of political inspections and purges.” Think of him as an internal enforcer, like Heinrich Müller, Nikolai Yezhov, or Lavrentiy Beria. Officially, his his title is Director of the Inspection Division of the Organization and Guidance Department.
  • Jo Yong-won is the Vice Director of the Organization and Guidance Department of the ruling Worker’s Party. The OGD has been firmly in charge in Pyongyang at least since the purge of Jang Song-taek in late 2013 — longer according to some experts. If anything, State and Treasury may be understating Jo’s importance. Jo is often photographed with Kim Jong-un during his “looking at things” tours, which is one of the indicators of an official’s importance.

Special thanks to a good friend of OFK, who will remain nameless, for providing additional background for this post.

Now, the weird part. Note how the seven individuals designated are noted as “DPRK2,” meaning Executive Order 13687. That’s a status-based EO that allows for the designation of any agent of the North Korean government or Workers’ Party. Treasury and State offer extensive, conduct-based justifications for the designations. There are certainly good public advocacy reasons for doing that, but legally, it would have been enough to say they were ruling party officials.

On the other hand, Treasury designated North Korea’s State Planning Commission and Ministry of Labor as “DPRK3,” meaning EO 13722, which partially implements the NKSPEA and is conduct-based (in this case, for human rights violations). Yet Treasury’s statement explaining the designations under a conduct-based EO only says it’s because they’re “agencies, instrumentalities, or controlled entities of the Government of North Korea,” which happens to be language ripped straight from EO 13687. Admittedly, the statement also says that the ministries have roles in allocating labor to the mining sector, which is subject to sectoral sanctions under EO 13722.

Anthony “the Beard of Knowledge” Ruggiero also finds the choice of EOs odd, and wonders if this is an effort to avoid the conditions for suspending and lifting sanctions in the NKSPEA. Overall, however, the choices of targets are good ones (if belated). One important objective of sanctions should be to de-fund and break down the system of control, and shift North Korea’s internal balance of power. Here’s what it would look like in practice if that half of the strategy actually works. Here’s how the other half would work.