Tag: North Korea

The North Korean are continuing to print counterfeit US currency as one of their major criminal enterprises:

A high-quality fake $100 note recently discovered in South Korea has stoked concerns of North Korean counterfeiting, Agence France Presse reported Tuesday.

Forgery experts at KEB Hana Bank said the $100 note, which was found at a Seoul branch in November, was almost identical to real notes.

“It was the first of a new kind of supernote ever found in the world,” Yi Ho-Joong, head of KEB Hana Bank’s anti-counterfeit centre told AFP.

North Korea made near perfect $100 bills — dubbed “supernotes” by US officials — for decades as part of a highly sophisticated counterfeiting program. The US believes that, at times, North Korea had earned up to $25 million per year from counterfeit notes.

“You need facilities worth some $100 million to produce counterfeit bills of this quality and no crime rings would invest that much to make fake dollars,” Yi added.

While no evidence directly links the note to North Korea, AFP reported there are suspicions North Korea has resumed its forgeries.

“There would have always been sufficient disrespect for the US financial system there to create counterfeits, which is the main reason why South Korean banks are suspecting the origin of the notes to be North Korea,” Roald Maliangkay, director of the Korea Institute at Australian National University, told Business Insider.  [Business Insider]

You can read more at the link, but last year a North Korean agent was arrested in China trying to pass off $5 million in counterfeit US currency.  It appears that the North Koreans have expanded their operations of passing off counterfeit currency into South Korea.

The male North Korean soldier that defected last month across the DMZ is actually a very small minority of the demographic that composes North Korean defectors.  The vast majority of the defectors are actually women:

The backward North Korean economy produces very little that the world wants.  But Big Brother China, however, is hungry for the two things Pyongyang does have in relative abundance: coal and women. The coal keeps the fires burning in energy-poor China. The women help to meet the shortage of brides in China’s male-dominated society.

China’s one-child policy has devastated the female population. Over the past three-and-a-half decades that the policy has been in place, tens of millions of girls have disappeared from the population. They were killed in utero by sex-selection abortions, at birth by female infanticide, or after birth by simple neglect.  (……)

One place that Chinese men look for brides is the other side of the Yalu River, for in North Korea there are lots of hungry young women longing for a better life. The population of Kim Jong Un’s socialist paradise subsists in near famine conditions, with two in five North Koreans undernourished and more than two-thirds on food aid.  [Fox News]

You can read more at the link, but the 85% number discussed in the article has actually increased from the 80% number in 2015.

Besides the sex industry in China, the other factor that plays into this is that most of the men in North Korea are also tied up working in state owned factories or the military.  This leaves the women to often be the ones working in the various markets that have sprang up around North Korea.  The women working in the markets develop contacts with businessmen bringing goods in from China.  This makes the women thus more susceptible to seeking to cross the border themselves.

Of further interest is that many of the North Korean refugees when they do come to South Korea end up becoming part of the sex industry in that country as well.

Five more bodies, probably North Korean, have been found along Japan's west coast as "ghost ships" continue to roll in https://t.co/870EyQeohL pic.twitter.com/acw1tCQW6v

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) December 13, 2017

Could an Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile test be the next North Korean provocation?  I guess we will find out:

The Pentagon says the U.S. is “well postured” to deal with a possible submarine-launched ballistic missile from North Korea.

The Japanese daily Tokyo Shimbun reported last week that North Korea has completed development of five prototypes for an upgraded SLBM and will likely test it soon.

Pentagon spokesman Robert Manning wouldn’t comment on any matters of specific intelligence regarding North Korea on Monday – but said within the deep arsenal of U.S. capabilities, Washington is well postured to deal with it.  [KBS Global]

You can read more at the link, but an SLBM test is something that has been speculated on for many months.

Another ICBM test has quickly changed the calculations at the State Department in regards to talks with North Korea:

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday that Washington is willing to begin talks with North Korea without preconditions.

Tillerson’s remark came as tensions have increased over North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs with its latest test of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Nov. 29.

“We’re ready to talk whenever North Korea is ready to talk and we’re willing to have a first meeting without preconditions,” he told a forum here. “We can talk about the weather if you want.”

It was a markedly different tone from Washington’s earlier insistence that Pyongyang first halt its missile and nuclear testing and demonstrate its sincerity about denuclearization.

“I don’t think it’s realistic if you say we’re only going to talk if you give up your programs,” Tillerson continued. “It really depends on how you bring it up. He’s clearly not like his father or his grandfather, and we don’t know what it will be like to engage with him.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

It appears that the Kim regime is ready to nuke Mt. Mantap again:

North Korea appears to be preparing for another nuclear test despite probable aftershocks from its sixth and largest nuclear test, Sept. 3, still occurring, according to American experts on Pyongyang.

In a joint analysis released Monday, Frank Pabian, Joseph Bermudez Jr. and Jack Liu, citing satellite imagery, said there has been a “consistently high level of activity” at North Korea’s main nuclear test site in Punggye-ri.

The analysis was released by 38 North, a U.S. website specializing in North Korea-related issues.

The analysts claimed the suspected activity was detected at the West Portal, leading to an unused tunnel complex, but not the North Portal, where five of the six tests took place.

“Despite the continuation of small tremors near Mt. Mantap since North Korea’s last nuclear test, tunnel work at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site is still underway,” they said. “These efforts continue to be concentrated at the West Portal, leaving the North Portal…mostly dormant and likely abandoned, at least for the time being. At the West Portal, there has been a consistently high level of activity since North Korea’s last nuclear test.”

The activity included the routine presence of vehicles and personnel around the portal, movement of mining carts to an adjacent spoils pile and signs of fresh spoils being dumped there.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Defected North Korean soldier to have free Choco Pies for life https://t.co/3z8zSiRhpN

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) December 12, 2017

The unofficial US ambassador to North Korea, Dennis Rodman now is advocating for a basketball game to be played between North Korea and the US territory of Guam:

Dennis Rodman plans to organize a basketball game between North Korea and the U.S. territory of Guam, the retired basketball star said Monday, as he seeks to personally mitigate a dangerous war of words between Washington and the isolated, nuclear-armed state.

“We thought, ‘This would be awesome!’” Rodman said in an interview in Beijing, his third stop on a “humanitarian tour” of Asia to promote peace between the U.S. and North Korea. “The people in Guam are all about it. They love it. You get a team from North Korea, get these guys from Pyongyang. Play it in Beijing.”

Guam’s national basketball team’s head coach, E.J. Calvo, said in an email that “this possible game would be a great opportunity.”

“We hope to inspire our young players and with something like this, the positive impact could be much greater,” he wrote.  [LA Times]

You can read more at the link, but like I have said about efforts to get North Korea to participate in the Olympics, why is sports diplomacy being used with North Korea, but not when Apartheid South Africa existed?  During its existence Apartheid South Africa was shunned from most international sporting competitions.  The Kim regime has a far worse human rights record than Apartheid South Africa ever had and are arguably the greatest threat to world peace today and yet people are begging the North Koreans to participate in international sporting events.

Just like Apartheid South Africa, the Kim regime should be shunned from international sporting events not championed to participate in them.

The sad Cold War era tale of Charles Robert Jenkins has come to an end:

Charles Jenkins, a U.S. soldier who defected to North Korea and became a movie star there, has died in Japan, according to reports on Tuesday. He was 77.

The former U.S. sergeant died on Sado island on Monday, where he was living with his wife Hitomi Soga, also a former prisoner of North Korea.

He was among four U.S. soldiers who defected to the North in 1965 and was the only one who was released. The others reportedly died in the isolated state, including James Dresnok, who was said to have died of a stroke in 2016.

According to the BBC, Jenkins collapsed outside his home and died of heart problems in hospital. His wife said in a statement that she was “very surprised” by his death and “cannot think of anything,” according to AFP.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but what is interesting about this death is that back in August 2017 Jenkins said in an interview that the North Koreans wanted him dead:

Then there was the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam — Kim Jong Un’s half-brother — in a Malaysian airport in March. Two women ambushed Kim with VX nerve agent, one of the world’s most toxic substances. To Jenkins, it was a reminder that Pyongyang’s brutality knows no bounds — and no one is immune.

“I worry about my daughters more than anything,” he said as he drove his Subaru along the coast. He has forbidden them to comply if Japanese police should attempt to pull them over while driving. Anyone could be a North Korean agent.

“North Korea give them enough money, you don’t know what they’ll do,” he said. “North Korea wants me dead.”

Jenkins’ death is probably just a coincidence, but it is kind of eerie how he died so soon after making that statement.  Jenkins was a heavy smoker so heart problems from his smoking is definitely plausible.

You can read more about Jenkins’ time in North Korea from this interesting interview he gave back in 2006.  You can also read his book, The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea that was actually a very good read.  Despite being a deserter, I always appreciated how Jenkins took responsibility for his own actions and did not try to blame others for what happened to him.

Condolences to the friends and family of Charles Robert Jenkins.

RFA notes KCNA accidentally aired footage of a NK soldier being burned to death by Hwasong-15's exhaust flames during Nov 30th launch. The footage was edited out for subsequent broadcasts but NK residents in Yangkang province insist they saw him in flames.https://t.co/cX2GVeCLMd

— Noon in Korea (@NoonInKorea) December 8, 2017