Tag: North Korea

Over at the PBS Frontline website their latest program “North Korea’s Deadly Dictator” can be watched. The program focuses on the assassination of Kim Jong-nam and has a number of interviews with his friends that he went to school with in Europe.  Former North Korean diplomat turned defector Thae Yong-ho and ex-CIA analyst Su Mi Terry also features heavily in the program.

It appears the reason for the assassination was Kim Jong-nam’s criticism of Kim Jong-un combined with the fact that based on his friends’ testimony he planned to move to Switzerland and defect to the West.  For those that regularly read this site there is really nothing new in the program, however for those not familiar with the issue it is a great run down on who Kim Jong-nam was and why his half brother Kim Jong-un is doing the things he has done.

In my opinion proclamation like this to the media are unhelpful because it is almost creating an expectation of Kim Jong-un to do something or appear weak for not conducting a provocation:

North Korea is likely planning something very provocative around Columbus Day next week, which happens to fall the day before the anniversary of the founding of the North Korean communist party, a top CIA official warned on Wednesday.

“We are concerned…that risk exists at any time on the Korean Peninsula,” said Yong Suk Lee, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, while speaking at a conference at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “I told my own staff, October 10 is the Korean Workers Party founding day. That’s Tuesday in North Korea, but that’s Monday — Columbus Day holiday in the U.S. — so stand by your phones.”

“North Korea is a political organism that thrives on confrontation,” Lee added.  [Newsweek]

You can read more at the link, but it has been quiet recently and it seems like we should not be encouraging the Kim regime to break the quiet to conduct more provocations.

The CIA concurs with what I have been saying for a long time, that everything Kim Jong-un has been doing from his perspective make rational sense.  He has been playing a delicate balancing act of consolidating power internally while conducting provocations and developing his ICBM and nuclear weapons programs to deter external foes:

President Donald Trump has depicted the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a “madman”—but U.S. intelligence officials do not agree.

According to Yong Suk Lee, the deputy assistant director of the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, the young North Korean ruler is actually a lot less erratic than he is often portrayed.

“Beyond the bluster, Kim Jong Un is a rational actor,” he said at a conference on the CIA at George Washington University on Wednesday, quoted by AFP.

Trump and Kim have reguarly traded insults but despite the latter’s threat to the American president last month, the North Korean ruler does not seek a military confrontation because he is more interested in ensuring his regime’s survival and stability.

“We have a tendency in this country and elsewhere to underestimate his conservatism” Lee said, adding “He wants to rule for a long time and die in his own bed.”  [Newsweek]

You can read more at the link.

If this report is true the US President has plenty of different options to choose from if military force becomes the only way to deal with North Korea’s nuclear and ICBM programs:

US defence chiefs have drawn up nine options for military action against Kim Jong-un’s North Korea to destroy its nuclear weapons threat, the Evening Standard has been told.

They escalate to different levels of intensity and could be pre-emptive or retaliatory, and could be ordered by Donald Trump in response to an attack on the US Pacific naval base on Guam or American allies such as Japan or South Korea.

However, all of them risk triggering a devastating response by Pyongyang against South Korea, using conventional weapons. At least one senior Whitehall figure is concerned that there may be a shift in Washington towards military action.  [Evening Standard]

You can read more at the link.

It appears there may be more work going on in regards to North Korea submarine launched ballistic missile program:

As concerns over North Korea’s missile threats continue, 38 North wrote in a recent analysis that Pyongyang was continuing work on its second known submersible ballistic missile testing facility at the Nampo navy shipyard on the country’s west coast.

Analyzing commercial satellite imagery from Sept. 1, 38 North, which is run by the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, wrote last Thursday that construction seemed to have taken place during the past five months on four support superstructures of the stand, located on a barge, and possibly in the area of the forward hull.

Imagery from Sept. 21 showed a portal crane on the east side had been rotated, and work was being done on the barge, though the nature of the work could not be determined from the imagery.

“Clearly visible in all images is the central ring that is used to support a missile launch tube during testing,” wrote 38 North. “During a test, support cables are connected from the center and top of the launch tube to the four support towers.”

Among several possibilities, North Korea might be trying to expand its submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) development program to the west coast, or salvage the second barge, which was first identified last April, for parts to maintain the originally acquired barge based at the Sinpo south shipyard, which has been used since 2014.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

A war in the Korean peninsula could cost thousands of US and Korean lives daily, we only stand to gain from talks https://t.co/H3G8btCXlZ

— William J. Perry (@SecDef19) October 1, 2017

The Russians are at it again:

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea.

The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination.  (…….)

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that US Cyber Command has been carrying out denial of service attacks against North Korean hackers affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The attacks attempt to overwhelm their computers and the Internet connection with traffic making them slow or impossible to use.

The US cyber attack was due to end on Saturday, reported the Post. That means the new Russian connection went online just after the US Cyber Command attack ended.  [38 North]

You can read more at the link.

I will give economist Mr. Harry Broadman the author of the below article credit for being creative.  However, for his idea to work the US would have to be willing to accept goods made by near slave labor and the enrichment of a regime that will continue military preparations to conquer South Korea:

At the risk of being cast as a dreamer, for the sake of argument I’ll posit an objective that has concrete, recognizable features for which in the long run one might dare to aim: a U.S.-North-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (USNSK-FTA).  Since the current U.S. administration has called the existing U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS-FTA) a ‘bad deal’ and has already signaled to Seoul that Washington will re-negotiate the agreement, maybe President Trump should completely catch Kim Jong-un off-guard and invite him to the negotiating FTA table?

This will sound very far-fetched to most. But compared to the current dangerous stalemate with the threatened use of nuclear weapons, maybe it’s not so nutty.  [Forbes]

You can read more at the link.

field of dreams, starring Kim Jong Un pic.twitter.com/290IPADuMI

— Oliver Hotham (@OliverHotham) October 2, 2017

It is pretty amazing that the Egyptians had the nerve to accept $300 million in military aid from the United States and then turn around purchase $23 million in contraband arms from the North Koreans:

Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.

Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun’s final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.

A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.  [Washington Post]

I recommend reading the whole thing at the link since it is a long, but interesting read about North Korea’s history of selling illicit weapons.