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.
North Korea’s women’s football team is welcomed with elaborate fanfare in Pyongyang on Oct. 25, 2016, after winning the 2016 FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup. The North’s Korean Central News Agency, which released this photo, said they were greeted at the airport by senior officials from the government and the ruling party. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
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
Members of the North’s General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea present an electric locomotive they made to mark the seventh congress of the organization on Oct. 23, 2016, in Pyongyang. The country’s key media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency, which released this photo said the workers “briskly conducted the do-good-thing movement” to make the locomotive. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
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.
Here is an interesting article that speculates on whether North Korea would have invaded South Korea back in 1983 if the assassination attempt on President Chun Doo-hwan was successful?:
On October 9, 1983, a bomb exploded at the Martyr’s Mausoleum in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. As part of an official visit to the country, then-Republic of Korea President Chun Doo-hwan had been scheduled to visit the mausoleum to pay respects to Aung San, one of the founders of Burma. The results were devastating – 21 dead, 46 injured. Among the dead were prominent members of the South Korean government, including the deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Fortunately, the South Korean president survived.
Chun Doo-hwan was a career Republic of Korea Army officer who came to power under contentious circumstances. His predecessor was Park Chung-hee, another Army officer and father of the current South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26, 1979. During an unclear political situation, Chun and military forces loyal to him executed a successful coup on December 12, 1979. Afterwards, Chun established martial law, squashed dissent, and ruled South Korea through 1987 as a military dictatorship, until the democracy movement brought the country its first truly free elections.
In part, President Chun owed his life to his American advisers. Assassination attempts and terrorism on the part of North Korea was a real threat at the time and concern for the president’s safety prompted the Americans to suggest Chun’s flight route be placed further away from the coasts of China and Vietnam. This caused a delay in his schedule, forcing him to arrive later than the rest of his entourage. North Korean agents confused the arrival of the South Korean ambassador with that of the president, resulting in a premature detonation. Had President Chun ignored the advice of his foreign advisers and maintained the original schedule, it is very likely he would have been present at the time of the explosion and would have been killed or maimed.
The possible implications of Chun’s assassination attempt in Rangoon would not be fully known, however, until over a decade later. Kang Myung-do, son-in-law of then-North Korean Premier Kang Song-san, defected to the South in 1994. As he changed allegiances, he brought with him stories. What a story he had to share about the Rangoon bombing.
Kang told the late professor and writer Don Oberdorfer, who was conducting research for a book, that North Korea had been anticipating civil unrest on the scale of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which was pacified through the brute force of the South Korean military. The “massacre,” as it has been described, was a day of infamy for South Korea, and resulted in well over a hundred dead and thousands injured. Kang specifically noted that discharges from the North Korean military had been “slowed or stopped” in preparation for what might occur.
It does not take much knowledge or imagination to reasonably assume that North Korea may very well have intended to invade the South in the event of mass civil unrest. With a nation reeling from its second presidential assassination in four years, the South Korean government in crisis, and the military with its hands full in bringing order to chaos, there would probably be few scenarios better for Pyongyang to exploit in its eternal quest to reunite the peninsula. [National Interest]
You can read the rest at the link, but I think even if Chun was killed that the North Koreans would not have invaded unless they were given support by China. The US has the nuclear trump card that can be played to defeat any North Korean invasion. Without the support of the Chinese nuclear deterrent I don’t see how they could have won a conflict on the peninsula. It seems the assassination was more for trying to create massive internal unrest within South Korea that could eventually lead to a more Pyongyang friendly government. Maybe one day when the Kim regime finally falls their national archives will shed light on what their true intentions were.
