March 17, 2017

Will China cooperate on North Korea sanctions? That depends on which “China” you mean.

I often talk about the importance of pressuring China to pressure North Korea. When I do, people sometimes cock their heads like my dog would do when he heard a new sound, and ask me whether China would cooperate with that. I answer this question with a question of my own: “Which China?” China, for all its top-down authoritarianism, isn’t a monolith. Like most societies, it has different constituencies with different views that fear different risks and pursue different interests....

Categories China & Korea/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 16, 2017

N. Korea, Lazarus & SWIFT: Are the white hats closing in? (Update: SWIFT cuts off remaining N. Korean banks)

In the last month, major news stories about North Korea have bombarded my batting cage faster than I’ve been able to swing at them. I’d wondered when I’d have a chance to cover Katy Burne’s detailed story in the Wall Street Journal about the empty half of the SWIFT glass – that despite its recent decision to disconnect three U.N.-designated North Korean banks, it’s still messaging for banks that are sanctioned by the Treasury Department, but not by the U.N.:...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law
March 15, 2017

UN report finds extensive evidence that China hosts N. Korea’s proliferation networks

A new report from the Wall Street Journal, quoting “U.S. and Asian officials,” says that the Trump Administration is considering “increasing financial penalties on Chinese companies in response to growing evidence of their support for North Korea’s weapons programs.” Such as: In a case that particularly alarmed the Trump administration, a North Korean businessman attempted to use Pyongyang’s embassy in Beijing to export a lithium metal that is used to miniaturize nuclear warheads, according to the U.N. report. [Wall Street...

Categories China & Korea/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
March 14, 2017

Another North Korean ship sinks, this time off the Chinese coast

In an effort to hide their sanctions violations from the prying eyes of the U.N. Panel of Experts — and from Leo Byrne and the sharp-eyed investigators at C4ADS — North Korean ships have taken to turning off the transponders and navigational devices that allow others to know where they are. Now that I’ve explained the advantages of that, let’s talk about one big possible disadvantage: other ships might crash into you and sink you. That’s the best explanation I...

Categories Shipping sanctions
March 13, 2017

North Korea calls U.S. Ambassador to U.N. “a political prostitute,” usual suspects fall silent

The regime that called President Obama a “wicked black monkey” and an “ugly subhuman,” and called Justice Michael Kirby “a disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality,” has responded to Ambassador Nikki Haley’s statement at the U.N. last week that Kim Jong-un was not rational: KCNA Commentary Brands U.S. Representative at UN as Political Prostitute     Pyongyang, March 11 (KCNA) — The U.S. representative at the UN Haley known for her capricious political savvy has now gone helter-skelter.  ...

Categories Diplomacy/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
March 9, 2017

Trump admin leaning toward tougher sanctions & (maybe) “covert actions”

For weeks, we’ve heard that the Trump administration was expected to complete a top-to-bottom review of North Korea policy by the end of this month. Barely into the second week, Reuters is already giving us a peek at where the review is headed. Skim past the mandatory all-options-are-on-the-table disclaimer and “senior U.S. officials” say this: They added a consensus was forming around relying for now on increased economic and diplomatic pressure – especially by pressing China to do more to...

Categories U.S. Politics/Washington Views
March 8, 2017

China is waging economic war against S. Korea. We must stand by our ally.

Less than two years ago, I wrote of the coming Korea missile crisis. That crisis has now arrived. As I’ve documented at this site, that crisis is, in large part, a crisis of China’s making. North Korean missiles are made in part from Chinese technology, in large part from components purchased in or smuggled through China, and that are almost always procured by North Korean agents who operate more-or-less openly on Chinese soil. North Korea’s missiles ride on Chinese trucks....

Categories An Alliance?/China/China & Korea/Japan & Korea
March 7, 2017

Malaysia holds the upper hand in its hostage dispute with North Korea

Three weeks ago, Malaysia was one of North Korea’s most important trading partners — a haven, hub, and way station for its arms trafficking, money laundering, and slave labor. Money has long been the limiting reagent in Pyongyang’s experiment with phobocracy. It’s now clear that Kim Jong-un will soon pay a heavy financial and diplomatic price for the badly botched murder of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam with a persistent nerve agent in a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur last month....

Categories Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)
March 6, 2017

Yay, it happened! Jim Rogers got burned by hyping North Korea!

And just like that, crackpot investment advisor Jim Rogers joins the distinguished company of Hyundai Asan, Volvo, Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Roh Jeong-ho, and Orascom’s Naguib Sawaris, all of whom won Darwin Awards in North Korea. I’ve previously written about Rogers and his enthusiasm for North Korea and its worthless currency. That OFK post caught the eye of a New York Times reporter, who has just published a story on the relationship between Rogers and his self-described business...

Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
March 6, 2017

U.N. report: SWIFT banking network violated North Korea asset freeze

Since last year, this blog has covered SWIFT’s continued provision of financial messaging services to North Korean banks, despite suspicions that North Korea was involved in stealing almost $100 million from the Bangladesh Bank by hacking into SWIFT’s messaging software. Later, I wrote about an effort in the last Congress to ban North Korean banks from SWIFT, mirroring a sanction that was one of our most effective measures against Iran. SWIFT is effectively the postal service of the financial system,...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
March 3, 2017

Class struggle in North Korea

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”  – Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto And yet, no place is...

Categories Capitalism/Class Warfare
March 2, 2017

N. Korea, dissent & desertions: as internal control tightens, border control degrades

I haven’t yet had time to read Nat Kretchun’s new report on the circulation of samizdat inside North Korea, but Reuters, The Washington Post, and Sokeel Park helpfully summarize its bleak findings: Kim Jong-un is not a Swiss-educated reformer, is not bringing Glasnost to North Korea, has turned Koryolink into a tool for hunting down dissent and dissenters, and is slowly winning the war to restore thought control. (Still unanswered is whether Syracuse University’s “engagement” program that taught Pyongyang how to do digital watermarking also helped...

Categories Border Control/NK Military/Subversion
March 1, 2017

Weirdly, corroboration emerges that Kim Won-hong was ousted for “human rights abuses”

Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. – Apocalypse Now Earlier this month, when the purge or demotion of State Security Minister Kim Won-hong was first reported, I seized on one rather bizarre part of the justification for his ouster from that key post for “corruption, abuse of power and human rights abuses.” North Korea has always angrily denied the existence of human rights abuses and called itself a...

Categories Human Rights/Kremlinology
February 28, 2017

North Korea should negotiate with the U.S.: No Rodong Sinmun op-ed, ever

This was supposed to be a big week for talk-to-North-Korea crowd, a constituency that’s well-represented in certain academic circles and op-ed pages … and pretty much nowhere else. Track 1.5 talks between current North Korean diplomats and former U.S. diplomats were supposed to begin tomorrow — in Washington, no less. This aroused certain Nobel Peace Prize aspirants and their megaphones in the New York Times and the AP about the prospect that Donald Trump want to might cut a deal...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
February 27, 2017

Malaysia’s lax enforcement of North Korea sanctions has finally come home

Over the weekend, Malaysian authorities painstakingly decontaminated a terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport where North Korean agents – including a diplomat – carried out a lethal attack with the nerve agent VX, a substance so deadly that a tiny droplet can kill an adult. The authorities are clearly concerned that the use of a persistent chemical weapon of mass destruction in a crowded airport terminal will cause panic among Malaysian citizens and members of the traveling public, as...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/Southeast Asia
February 24, 2017

N. Korea just killed a guy with one of the WMDs that caused us to invade Iraq … in a crowded airport terminal, in a friendly nation.

Last night, Malaysian police revealed that Kim Jong-nam’s killers murdered him with VX, the deadliest of the nerve agents. I had hypothesized before that the killers almost certainly acted on orders from His Porcine Majesty. Saddam Hussein’s suspected possession of stockpiles of VX was at the core of our justification for invading Iraq. This time, the case doesn’t rely on grainy satellite photos or shadowy, unnamed sources. (And this time, an invasion is also the wrong answer to the problem;...

Categories Anju Links/Southeast Asia/Terrorism (NK)
February 23, 2017

Must read: Brian Myers on what North Korea really wants (hint: it’s South Korea)

Over the years, the soft-liners’ explanations for why Pyongyang sacrificed billions of dollars and millions of lives to build a nuclear program have shifted. First, they said it just wanted the electricity. Then, they said it wanted a bargaining chip to trade away for better relations with us. Now, they say it just wants to protect itself from us. Unlike them, Brian Myers has listened to what Pyongyang has been telling its own subjects — it wants reunification, on its own terms. North...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Korean War II
February 22, 2017

Does Kim Jong-un consciously imitate Dr. Evil?

As I contemplate both the competence and the incompetence with which North Korea (probably) executed the murder of Kim Jong-nam, I can’t help reflecting on how it often seems to combine the guile and ruthlessness of SPECTRE with the executive competence of Dr. Evil. On one hand, the plot worked with ruthless efficiency. The target is dead. A potential Pu Yi is removed from the scene, and its terrorist objectives have been successful, at least in part. The South Korean...

Categories Kim Jong Un