This photo, captured from China’s top social networking service Weibo on July 22, 2016, shows a North Korean Air Koryo jet bound for Beijing from Pyongyang parked on the tarmac of an airport in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang after making an emergency landing there due to a fire. (Yonhap)
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (2nd from L) watches a soldier holding a 1-meter-long drone during a recent visit to an army science and technology museum, in this photo released by a North Korean TV station on July 18, 2016. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
This looks to me to just be a psychological operation being carried out by North Korea in the wake of the THAAD decision:
North Korea has resumed the broadcasting of encrypted numbers, a method used in the past to send messages to spies operating in South Korea, a government source said Tuesday.
The source said that propaganda radio station Radio Pyongyang aired a 12-minute shortwave segment last week during which a female announcer read out numbers on what seemed to be from a book. The broadcast started in the early hours of Friday morning and marks the first time Seoul picked up on such communication from the North in 16 years.
The North halted all such broadcasting after the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000.
The encrypted number system, a relic of the Cold War espionage age, requires the sender and the receiver to have access to the same book and other types of reference materials so orders can be handed down by mentioning a page and the position of a word on that. This was a favored method employed by the reclusive country to contact and give orders to spies that infiltrated the South.
The coded radio broadcast began at 00:45 a.m. with a female announcer saying, “starting now, I will give review work to No. 27 exploration agents.”
The announcer then said, “on page 459 number 35, on page 913 number 55, on page 135 number 86, on page 257 number 2,” followed by more numbers.
South Korean intelligence authorities are reportedly scrambling to find out why Pyongyang resumed this type of communication, particularly in the digital era when it could have simply given out orders via the internet.
The revelation has put the Seoul government on alert over possible provocations that can be committed by the North’s agents living in the South. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but if North Korea was giving orders to anyone it would probably be the leftist instigators pushing lies about the THAAD radar.
I think the Musudan tests had more to do with being able to show the US they can target Guam and build Kim Jong-un profile domestically than any concerns about THAAD:
In this video image released by North Korea on July 1, 2016, a Musudan missile heads towards a U.S. military base in Guam. (Yonhap)
North Korea’s recent firing of an intermediate-range ballistic missile at a high angle appears to be intended to push South Korea to accept the deployment of an advanced U.S. anti-missile system here and cause a rift in Seoul’s relations with Beijing, a North Korean expert said Tuesday.
Hong Woo-taek, a research fellow at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), said, “Pyongyang might have sought to exploit the tension between South Korea and China over the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system issue to strengthen its hitherto weakened ties with Beijing.”
“But China is not foolish enough to alienate itself from South Korea to take sides with North Korea. Pyongyang won’t be able to achieve what it intended by firing the Musudan missile at a high angle last month,” Hong said in his recent report, titled “North Korea’s Intentions and THAAD.”
On June 22, the North fired two Musudan missiles, with one flying some 400 kilometers and reaching an altitude exceeding 1,000 km. Although the Musudan did not fly very far, some experts said the great height it achieved may mean the missile is capable of ranges up to about 3,000 km and could theoretically strike key military bases in the U.S. territory of Guam. The high angle at which the missile flew after takeoff also means it could be used to attack South Korea. [Yonhap]
Sadly if Nintendo does put Pokemons in North Korea this will probably cause a tourism boom for them which means more money for the Kim regime. I can just picture Koryo Tours offering Pokemon Go packages to North Korea:
A whirlwind of memes and jokes about “Pokemon Go” are spiraling here because Nintendo’s location-based hunting game is known to be available in North Korea.
Memes include North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, ordering his cyberforces to distribute rare pokemons in northern parts of the inter-Korean border so game-addicted South Koreans will cross the heavily armed demarcation line to catch them.
They also include Kim pointing at a huge pink fish, with the quote: “Just caught Magikarp,” a game character.
There are rumors that rare, high-scoring pokemons are hidden in the truce village of Panmunjom. Some netizens claim the game maker has hidden “Mewtwo,” one of the strongest pokemons in the early series, in Punggye-ri, North Korea’s underground nuclear test site.
Others say a “Dragonite” is at the summit of Mt. Baekdu, the tallest mountain on the Korean Peninsula, on the North Korea-China border.
There is even talk of a legendary pokemon under Kim’s palace in Pyongyang. [Korea Times]
