Category: North Korea

It was only a matter of time before the North Koreans began to pile on to the bizarre Choi Soon-sil political scandal rocking South Korean politics:

North Korea is joyfully jumping into a bizarre political scandal rocking Seoul, calling it the inevitable result of a corrupt regime and saying the administration of South Korean President Park Geun-hye is “the most deformed, abnormal and stupid in contemporary society.”

Pyongyang, while allowing none of its media the freedom to point criticism at its own leadership, has wasted no opportunity to lambaste Park in the harshest ways it can.

The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency on Monday called the scandal a “hideous power-backed corruption case unprecedented in South Korean history.”

Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North’s ruling party, added the “deformed, abnormal and stupid” characterization and, just for good measure, called Park a “colonial stooge.”  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link.

That is what Kim Jong-un is thinking after having 7 of his past 8 Musudan missile launches end in failure:

North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un has ordered a full-blown investigation into the recent missile launch failures, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing a North Korean defectors’ group. The test firing of two intermediate-range ballistic missiles, or Musudan, ended in failure about two weeks ago.

The investigation will reportedly include all those who were involved in the making of the missiles amid suspicion of a sabotage by the US and South Korea.  (………….)

“Officials and workers who engaged in the launches of the missiles are now banned from travelling and their mobiles phones are confiscated to check their conversation records,” he added.

The North Korean leader believes spies from the US and South Korea were responsible for the Musudan missile failures, he said. North Korean authorities believe the spies could have meddled with the missile parts that were imported from foreign countries, leading to the launch failure,   [IBT via reader tip]

You can read more at the link, but I guess we will see if they try and scapegoat someone for these missile launch failures and claim they were working for the US.

That is what some North Korean watchers are thinking considering that she has been out of the public spotlight for the past 7 months:

Ri Sol-ju, the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, has not shown up at public events for over seven months, an analysis of the North’s media reports showed Sunday.

Ri’s public activity was last reported by the North’s media on March 28, 2016, when she accompanied Kim on his visit to a newly built commercial district and health complex in Pyongyang. At that time, Kim and Ri met with officials and employees at the Mirae Shop and the health complex.

Earlier, Ri accompanied Kim 18 times in 2012, 22 times in 2013 and 15 times in 2014. But the number fell sharply to seven last year and three this year, according to the analysis.

“Ri showed up at public events every two months last year but has not appeared in public for over seven months this year. That’s quite extraordinary,” said a North Korea watcher. “Some sources speculate Ri’s disappearance may be linked to a check on her activities by Kim’s younger sister Kim Yo-jong.”

Other watchers are raising speculation about a possible pregnancy or marital rift. [Korea Times]

This year the US finally sanctioned as many North Korean entities as Zimbabwean. Still waiting on Obama-promised additional sanctions. https://t.co/d0jqiSNJJP

— Bruce Klingner (@BruceKlingner) October 28, 2016

Here is an interesting read from Barbara Demick in the LA Times about the bizarre kidnapping of a South Korean actress and film director by the North Koreans that has come back into the public’s focus with the release of tapes that feature the voice of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il:

The voice on the tape recording is squeaky and excitable, the speaker using such a strong dialect that it is difficult even for native Korean speakers to understand. What comes across is that the man speaking in a rapid clip is anxious about his own shortcomings, and his country’s.

The speaker, in fact, is Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011. Tape recordings of him from the 1980s are featured in a new documentary, “The Lovers and the Despot.” Although Kim died in 2011 and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Un, the tapes provide rare insight into the psyche of the North Korean regime, both its audaciousness and its insecurity.

It is one of the strangest stories out of a strange country: In 1978, the South Korean film actress Choi Eun-hee was kidnapped during a business trip to Hong Kong and brought to Pyongyang on the orders of Kim Jong Il. When her former husband, Shin Sang-ok, a leading film director, went to look for her, he was captured as well. Reunited, they were coerced to make movies for Kim Jong Il, gradually earning his trust to the point that he allowed them to travel to Eastern Europe, then still part of the Soviet block, to shoot films and attend film festivals. In 1986, the pair escaped to the U.S. embassy in Vienna.

Shin feared rightfully that nobody would believe this outlandish story, so he and Choi secretly taped Kim Jong Il. With a microrecorder stashed in Choi’s purse, they captured Kim, who was then in charge of the film industry, pouring out his insecurities about how his country lagged behind capitalist rival South Korea.

“Why do all of our films have the same ideological plots? There is nothing new about them. … We don’t have any films that get into film festivals. In South Korea, they have better technology. They are like college students and we are just in nursery schools.”

In the tapes, Kim also confesses that he had ordered the couple to be kidnapped so that they could make movies for him.

“I asked my adviser, who’s the best director in the south? He said that his name is Shin.”

Later, Kim apologized to Shin for the mistreatment he endured from the agents who kidnapped him, and for the fact that the couple were kept apart for four years.

“I didn’t tell them about my plan to use you and collaborate with you. I just said bring them to me.”  [LA Times]

You can read more at the link.

If the contents from the hacked email are true then it appears that Kim Jong-il genuinely had a liking for Bill Clinton and even invited him to vacation in North Korea:

A memo attached to a hacked email shows that in 2009, former President Bill Clinton was invited to go sightseeing in North Korea by then-ruler Kim Jong Il, and seemed open to the offer.

Clinton was in North Korea to help with negotiations to free two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been arrested and jailed; he was successful, and the women were released. The memo was apparently written by David Straub, a Stanford University professor whose name was at the bottom of it, BuzzFeed reports, and it was attached to an email forwarded to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff. It’s believed Podesta’s email was hacked by Russians.  [The Week]

You can read more at the link.

This sounds just like the campaign to end smoking in North Korea where Kim Jong-un is still seen going around smoking cigarettes despite the campaign:

Kim Jong Un called for an end to the worship of imports, calling the popular preference for foreign-made goods a “disease” that must be eradicated.

The North Korean leader, known for his fondness of French wine, Swiss watches and British fabrics, made the statement at the seventh assembly of the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea on Tuesday, in a letter titled “The contemporary mission of the working class of Kim Il Sung–Kim Jong Il“, state-controlled news agency KCNA reported Thursday, local time.

GFTUK is the sole legal trade union federation in North Korea formed on November 30, 1945.

In the letter Kim said North Korean workers must “uphold the honor of the fatherland and the know-how of the people, and with pride and courage make with their own hands products better than [other countries], thereby eradicating the disease of imports.”  [UPI]

You can read more at the link.

I always find it amazing the intelligence collection capabilities the US and the ROK has to do this kind of analysis:

North Korea’s failed Musudan missile launch caused considerable damage to one of its mobile launchers, official sources here said Wednesday, the latest sign of shortcomings in the country’s military capabilities.

Pyongyang launched a ballistic missile, believed to be a Musudan, last Thursday from an airfield in the northwestern city of Kusong. The intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) is known to have exploded soon after liftoff. This launch appeared to have been an attempt by the North to save face from another failed Musudan test conducted less than a week earlier on Oct. 15.

“The exploding missile caused the launcher to catch fire and it was seriously scorched,” a government official told Yonhap News Agency.

South Korean military and intelligence authorities believe that North Korea was testing a Musudan missile with a modified liquid-fuel rocket engine when the missile exploded. They believe the explosion was caused by defects in fuel conduits.

The shape of the missile’s warhead was not disfigured in the blast, which suggests that the recent failure was not caused by warhead overload, a government official said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Further Reading:

https://www.rokdrop.net/2016/10/north-koreas-eighth-test-of-its-musudan-missile-ends-in-failure/

Talk to them all you want. Just don't pay them. https://t.co/thARC0AVZU

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) October 24, 2016

I and many others have been saying this for years that the North Koreans would never denuclearize and it appears the smart people in the US government are starting to realize this:

The U.S. policy of trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons “is probably a lost cause” and the best that could be hoped for is a cap on the country’s nuclear capability, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper said on Tuesday.

However, underscoring conflicting views in the Obama administration, the State Department said U.S. policy was unchanged and continued to be to seek the “verifiable denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.

President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that the United States will never accept North Korean as a nuclear-armed state.

Clapper made clear at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York he did not think that the policy the administration has stuck to, in spite of repeated North Korean nuclear tests, was realistic.

“I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause,” Clapper said at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York. “They are not going to do that – that is their ticket to survival.”  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link.