January 18, 2015

Must read: Washington Post on AP’s Pyongyang Bureau

I think Paul Farhi, The Washington Post‘s media reporter, wrote an interesting and balanced article, although I wish he’d stressed the point that I stressed to Farhi — that readers could more easily accept the limits on AP’s coverage if AP would be more forthcoming about what those restrictions are. I want to know more about the terms of the AP’s reporting, both written and unwritten. Farhi did manage to squeeze some of this out of the AP, including the...

Categories AP Watch
January 18, 2015

Forgive Shin Dong Hyok the man, but not Shin Dong Hyok the activist

What had always puzzled me the most about Shin Dong Hyok’s account of growing up in and escaping from Camp 14 was how someone raised in such isolation from the rules of North Korean society could have had the resources and survival skills to infiltrate all the way from the Taedong River to the Chinese border, and then successfully cross it. How did he replace his prisoner clothing? How did he find money to bribe railroad police and border guards?...

Categories Activism/The Camps
January 16, 2015

Actually, sanctions are looking like the best thing that ever happened to engagement

Since December 19th, when the President blamed North Korea for the Sony hacking and cyberterrorism attacks, Congress has been pushing for tougher sanctions against North Korea, and it has looked increasingly like it has been pushing against an open door. And suddenly, a North Korean leader who has never gone abroad or met a foreign leader during his three-year reign (no, Rodman doesn’t count) has taken a sudden — even urgent — interest in personal diplomacy. On January 1, Kim Jong Un made a highly...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
January 14, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika watch: crackdown forces border guards to become robbers

Last week, China filed an official protest with North Korea over the December killing of four Chinese civilians by a rogue North Korean border guard who had turned to robbery. A Bloomberg reporter researches this further, in search of a pattern, and finds one: A spate of murders by North Koreans inside China’s border is prompting some residents to abandon their homes, testing China’s ability to manage both the 1400-kilometre shared frontier and its relationship with the reclusive nation. The...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
January 13, 2015

House Foreign Affairs Committee holds briefing; members demand tougher sanctions on N. Korea, China (updated with video of full hearing)

The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a briefing on North Korea and the Sony hack today. Three witnesses appeared: The Honorable Sung Kim Special Representative for North Korea Policy and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Korea and Japan U.S. Department of State [full text of statement] The Honorable Daniel Glaser Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence U.S. Department of the Treasury [full text of statement] Brigadier General Gregory J. Touhill, USAF, Retired Deputy Assistant Secretary for...

Categories Anju Links
January 12, 2015

The Interview: A Review (Updated)

Does The Interview trivialize the suffering of North Koreans?  I’m not sure what you had a right to expect from the likes of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I’d say it did so less than I expected. A central theme of the film’s climactic scene — Franco’s interview with Kim Jong Un — was hunger, and the contrast between Kim’s obscene wealth and the squalor of his people. Was The Interview a good parody of North Korea? It was a...

Categories Books & Films
January 12, 2015

U.S., S. Korea reject N. Korea’s nuke test offer

North Korea has offered to stop testing nuclear weapons — something that several U.N. Security Council resolutions already prohibit — if President Obama cancels annual military exercises (full KNCA article below the fold.) Which sounds something like a bank robber promising to stop robbing you if you disable your alarm system and leave the safe unlocked. Which is almost exactly what the Korean Defense Ministry thought. To his credit, President Obama saw this for what it was: “The DPRK (North...

Categories North-South/Proliferation/WMD
January 10, 2015

But wouldn’t Su-35s divert money needed for flat-screens and ski resorts?

I could be wrong, but I doubt even Vlad Putin would violate U.N. Security Council Sanctions so blatantly as this: North Korea made an attempt to purchase advanced fighter jets from Russia by sending a special envoy, a senior South Korean military official told the JoongAng Ilbo on Thursday. “Choe Ryong-hae, who visited Moscow as a special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in November last year, asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets,” the...

Categories Anju Links
January 9, 2015

Der Spiegel: N. Koreans helping Syria to nuke up. Again.

Evidently, I refreshed your memory of the 2007 Al-Kibar reactor raid just in time for this cheery piece of news: Der Spiegel, citing anonymous intelligence sources, reports that Syria “has apparently built a new nuclear facility at a secret location” in the mountains near the Lebanese border. The conclusion is based, in part, on signals intelligence: [T]he clearest proof that it is a nuclear facility comes from radio traffic recently intercepted by a network of spies. A voice identified as belonging to a...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
January 9, 2015

Dear President Bush: You had eight years.

The George W. Bush center has released a call for “a new approach” to improve human rights in North Korea, complete with a video of the former President, looking a little older than the man we once knew. It’s hard to disagree with anything in the Bush Center’s call. For example, it calls for raising global awareness of the situation, citing polls showing that just half of Americans have heard of North Korea’s political prison camps. (This polling, of course, was done before Seth Rogen...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
January 8, 2015

N. Korea threatens U.S. with “a hail of bullets and shells on its own territory.”

Via our friends at the Korean Central News Service, North Korea’s official journo-terrorism service. In 2011, the Associated Press signed two memoranda of agreement with KCNA in which AP and KCNA agreed to cooperate in the reporting of “news” about North Korea. The AP refuses to disclose the contents of those memoranda. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
January 8, 2015

FBI Director: Yes, I’m sure North Korea did it. (Update: So is NSA’s Director)

The other day, a reporter asked me whether the “considerable doubt” about Pyongyang’s responsibility for the Sony hacks and terror threats undermined the legitimacy of the President’s response. I suppose the answer depends on your perspective. I’m not privy to the FBI’s evidence against North Korea, but my greater doubt is whether the President’s response, so far, is meaningful. A week ago, however, I decided that the FBI was losing the battle for public opinion. I recalled the CIA’s video...

Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
January 7, 2015

Dear Professor Lankov: Shall we make it double or nothing?

As he did in 2012, Andrei Lankov has gone all-in supporting the latest rumors of economic and agricultural reforms in North Korea, calling them “revolutionary.” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Alastair Gale describes Lankov’s prediction, notes the skepticism of the South Korean government, and notes that Lankov is “not often associated with very bullish views on North Korean reform.” The plan, he says, citing recent visitors to the country, would give more freedom and land to the country’s farmers. North...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 7, 2015

Jean Lee resigns from AP

Via Nate Thayer. Lee says this had been planned for some time. I think Lee made some bad choices as a reporter in Pyongyang, but I wish her well in her new career. I don’t know the extent to which the much worse choices made by AP corporate management constrained Lee’s decisions or coverage. One day, I hope she’ll tell us. One last note on this: Lee recently tweeted that she was receiving hate tweets from people who called her a North...

Categories AP Watch
January 6, 2015

Activists send 600K leaflets into N. Korea

An activist group of North Korean defectors has launched balloons containing anti-North Korea leaflets across the inter-Korean border, police said Tuesday, in an act that could dampen a burgeoning thaw in inter-Korean relations. The Campaign for Helping North Korean in Direct Way scattered some 600,000 leaflets from Yeoncheon, a county bordering North Korea, on Monday evening, local police said. Lee Min-bok, the head of the group, and his wife participated in the 30-minute leaflet-scattering event, the police said, adding the...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion