Christine Ahn, Pak Chol, and the United Front Department

A week ago, I fisked a report by the NGO Korea Peace Now! about the impact of sanctions on the North Korean people, which at least some journalists covered without questioning its many factual or logical flaws. The report was calculated to absolve Pyongyang of the blame for seizing land and destroying crops the poor grow on it, for its massive diversion of resources from food to weapons, for exporting scarce food for cash, for the gross inequality Kim Jong-un has widened between the Pyongyang elite and everyone else, for the aggressive and dangerous proliferation that forced the world to impose the sanctions to begin with, and for Pyongyang’s refusal to engage in good-faith disarmament negotiations that would make sanctions relief possible. Most of the report’s “evidence” cited the effects of sanctions during time periods when sanctions were an effective nullity, and when those effects could only have been caused by Pyongyang’s own policies. Nor did it call on Pyongyang to change any of those policies. And because its transparent objective is to get all sanctions that matter lifted, regardless of the broader security consequences for Korea and the world, it missed its best opportunities to call for tailored remedies, including targeted and monitored food aid for coal and munitions industry workers, or the freezing of Kim Jong-un’s slush funds to pay for that aid.

For the few of us who’ve been paying attention to this, these arguments are not new. The loudest voice making them has long been Christine Ahn, who wrote this soon after most of the dead from the Great Famine were buried:

North Korean policy has long prioritized feeding all North Koreans; it has also sought to make the country food self-sufficient. For decades, North Korea was able to ensure that everyone had an adequate diet and access to basic goods and public services, such as education and health care. This was in spite of the fact that only 14 percent of North Korea’s predominantly mountainous land is arable.

Ahn has a long pedigree of promoting this sort of pro-Pyongyang agitprop. But this year, Ahn’s organizations are suddenly flush with new funding, and with money comes influence. Thus, Korea Peace Now! was begotten by Women Cross DMZ, which in turn is was begotten by Ahn, who is front and center in the banner images on Korea Peace Now!’s website. And by her own admission, Ahn also has a long history of coordinating her political activities with a North Korean diplomat named Pak Chol, whose work turns out to involve more than diplomacy. One thing no one can accuse Ahn of is making any secret of her associations with Pak.

Wow that’s Pak Chol with Kim Yong Chol! He was at the UN Mission when we were negotiating the 2015 DMZ women’s peace walk. He’s incredibly witty and worked so hard to help us convince Pyongyang. A true diplomat and peacemaker. #koreapeacetreatynow! https://t.co/qOhtAEmRNR

– Christine Ahn (@christineahn) January 18, 2019

Totally agree! Btw isn’t that Pak chol?

– Christine Ahn (@christineahn) July 23, 2018

Indeed you did! You were the first one to write about Pak Chol!

– Christine Ahn (@christineahn) January 27, 2019

We’ll return to the latter tweet later in this post. Ahn may have gotten to know Pak and his office when they collaborated closely to organize her march through Pyongyang and to the DMZ, again, by her own admission:

“We are at the crossroads to either survival or self-destruction,” Pak Chol of the DPRK UN Mission wrote me in an email. “We have no time for hating and killing each other. We should put an end as soon as possible to all those cold war legacies for good and pull together to tackle our common task.” [Christine Ahn, Huffington Post]

This is to inform you that Pyongyang expressed its full support to the International Women’s Peace Walk. The Korean Committee for Solidarity With World Peoples, the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea, the Committee for Overseas Compatriots of Korea and other related organizations will render all necessary assistances to the event for its success. Since this is an international peace event timed in this special year marking 70th anniversary of liberation and simultaneous division of our beloved country and nation, we hope that the event will be a specially significant contribution to terminating the current status of war, replacing armistice with peace agreement, and thereby achieving permanent peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula. [Christine Ahn, Huffington Post]

There is also this, by one of Ahn’s closest simpaticos.

More recently, when Ahn was negotiating with the governments of North and South Korea and the UN Command in Korea for the first women’s crossing of the DMZ in 2015, she met frequently with Pak Chol in New York. “I credit him as the key North Korean diplomat who advocated for the peace walk,” she said. Pak’s presence in Washington with Kim Yong-chol, she added, shows “he has the ear” of Kim Jong-un.

“It heartens me to see that his experience and expertise is so highly regarded and that he can use all of that to help end the war and help transform North Korea,” she said. [Tim Shorrock, The Nation]

But as even Shorrock implicitly admitted, the march was a debacle. The group rode to the DMZ in a bus. The South Korean government refused them permission to walk across. A crowd of angry counter-protesters was waiting. Press coverage (except for the New York Times, because of course) was mostly negative, and even the engagement-friendly but journalistically aggressive NK News reported that the march’s organization, route, and banners were cut right from the same propaganda cloth that Pyongyang issues to all of its visiting foreign sympathizers.

Ahn even ducked out of her own post-march press conference after Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmum quoted her as praising Kim Il-sung for devoting “his entire life to the freedom and liberation of the Korean people.” Ahn denied saying this, and most reporters took her at her word, but the offense of Pyongyang’s flagship “news”paper putting admiring words about Kim Il-sung in her mouth wasn’t sufficient to prevent her from resuming her close collaborative relationship with Pak Chol. Officially, Pak was a diplomat at North Korea’s U.N. Mission in New York, although a man named Ri Ki-ho replaced him in his diplomatic post in April of 2016. Ahn’s tweets make it sound like the North Koreans gave her the door code and told her to just let herself in.

I was at the UN Mission when this was dispatched. They referred to the Singapore Declaration which had in order 1.) improve relations; 2.) establish peace regime; 3.) denuclearization; 4.) repatriation. The pragmatism from the US that led to this diplomatic breakthrough is MIA. https://t.co/qhZwWQ1uEc

– Christine Ahn (@christineahn) August 10, 2018

[Pak Chol in 2011, after Kim Jong-il’s death]

Pak was replaced, but he was not purged. Far from it. A few months later, he was joining his boss, Kim Yong-chol, in meetings with President Trump, and Ahn was boasting of her connections to the North Korean U.N. Mission and offering her services as an emissary.

Do it and declare an end to the Korean War at Panmunjom! I’ll forward your message to the DPRK Permanent Mission to the UN in case your admin is having a hard time reaching them. @KoreaPeaceNow https://t.co/VtOW7o9OG2

– Christine Ahn (@christineahn) June 28, 2019

Pak’s other reported duties should attract even more curiosity about him. For that, we return to the tweet by Shorrock that I flagged previously in this post. It links to an article from the Joongang Ilbo, usually one of the more reliable and less ideological newspapers in South Korea, though it serves us a howler this time. See if you can spot it:

Little is known about Pak, a former senior counselor at the North Korean Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. He is also not listed on the South Korean Unification Ministry’s database of key North Korean figures released in 2018.

Foreign affairs and security officials were buzzing about who this relatively unknown figure was as the high-profile North Korean delegation made a visit to Washington earlier this month to work on holding a second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

[….]

Recently, Pak has surfaced as the right-hand man of Kim Yong-chol, who also doubles as the director of the North’s United Front Department, which is responsible for inter-Korean relations. [Joongang Ilbo]

Kim Yong-chol, who was until recently the head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau and North Korea’s top spy, is believed to have directed the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan (46 dead), the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island (four dead), and the Sony cyberattack. He is a curious choice of associations for a “peace” activist. He also headed the Korean Workers’ Party’s United Front Department (UFD) until his reported replacement in April of this year. The Joongang Ilbo article is frustratingly vague about just how Pak Chol is Kim Yong-chol’s sidekick. After all, Kim wears many hats, including as a negotiator, and also as a terrorist. But from various sources, we learn that Pak is Vice-Chair of something called the “Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee,” which settles the question. The KAPPC is a front for the UFD. For the Joongang Ilbo to say that the UFD is “responsible for inter-Korean relations” is like saying that the ex-head of ISIS was “an austere religious scholar.” The UFD’s job is propaganda and influence operations. Via various official sources:

The United Front Department of the [Korean Workers’ Party] Secretariat conducts psychological warfare through radio, TV and loudspeaker broadcasts, leaflet distribution, and visual displays. Major propaganda apparatus employed are such radio and TV stations as Pyongyang Broadcast Service, Pyongyang FM Service and the Kaesong TV Station.They are operated by the Committee on Broadcasting toward South Korea which is under the direct control of the United Front Department. [Republic of Korea 1997 Defense White Paper]

The United Front Department (UFD) overtly attempts to establish pro”“North Korean groups in the ROK, such as the Korean Asia-Pacific Committee and the Ethnic Reconciliation Council. The UFD is also the primary department involved in managing inter-Korean dialogue and North Korea’s policy toward the ROK.

The 225th Bureau is responsible for training agents to infiltrate the ROK and establish underground political parties focused on fomenting unrest and revolution. [2017 Dep’t of Defense report to Congress on North Korea, pp. 14-15]

The UFD also allegedly meddled in South Korea’s 1997 presidential election in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the election of Kim Dae-jung, by broadcasting that he was “close to North Korea,” a claim the author assumes was meant to harm DJ’s chances of winning. Why? Possibly to preempt the rise of a liberal democracy to which violent revolution would presumably be a less appealing alternative. If you want to read an insider’s account of the UFD’s work at planting disinformation in South Korea, read Jang Jin-sung’s book, “Dear Leader.”

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So, why am I so interested in a group whose report no one will read anyway? Because if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that we’re easier marks for foreign influence than we often want to admit, that no ideology or party is immune to it, and that extremes can metastasize into the mainstream faster than we could have believed. Because people will read the misleading headlines from The Hill and The Wall Street Journal generated by the lazy reporters for both publications who largely passed Ahn’s propaganda about sanctions along without scrutiny. And Ahn does seem well-connected to staff for a few far-left members of Congress, including Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. So far, thankfully, her political influence finds little support in the congressional record. For example, Ahn and her allies were breathless about the passage of this amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which Ahn strongly supported, except … well, read all two pages of it. It’s as bland as dry white toast. By comparison, new bi-partisan provisions strengthening financial sanctions could have more impact, if the President enforces them.

Let’s be clear about what I’m not claiming here. I’m not accusing Ahn of being a North Korean spy. It can’t be good tradecraft for any spy to be so open about her relationship with her “handler,” after all. I am not saying that Pak Chol or Ri Ki-ho necessarily influenced the contents of Korea Peace Now!’s report, although it seems fair for any responsible journalist who writes about the report to ask the authors how many times they’ve met Pak Chol, Ri Ki-ho, or other North Korean “diplomats,” or whether any of them made suggestions about the report’s content. I do not assert, based on the evidence I’ve cited here, that Ahn is an unregistered agent who was “subject to the direction and control of a foreign government or official.” Only a fly on the wall could say with certainty, if flies could enunciate. Furthermore, I doubt that Christine Ahn is particularly inquisitive about exactly who her North Korean contacts are or what they do. I doubt she has actual knowledge that Pak Chol works for the UFD, or even cares much what the UFD does. She might be the most naïve person who has ever “negotiated” with the North Korean government, although the competition for this distinction would be too fierce to adjudicate. She probably comes by her pro-Pyongyang sympathies independently. It’s possible that Pak didn’t need to offer her any “direction” at all. It might even be the other way around.

What I am asserting is that Ahn has a pro-Pyongyang bias, that this bias obligates us to be as skeptical of her arguments as we should have been about Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and that at best, she seems to be easily influenced by Pyongyang’s agents of influence. What’s clear is that Christine Ahn has coordinated her political activities closely with at least one senior North Korean government official whose duties included foreign influence operations, and that she has had some limited propaganda successes during that same period. That obligates Hill staff, reporters, think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, and lobbying groups like the Ploughshares Fund to do some due diligence and ask themselves whether, by amplifying her arguments, they also become Pyongyang’s indirect and unwitting agents of influence themselves. In 2019, no one should be surprised that unfriendly foreign governments should want to influence Americans on both the left and the right. What’s surprising is how easy it continues to be for them to do so in plain sight.

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