Posted on 09/30/2001 9:35:12 PM PDT by CommiesOut
The Iran Brief is an independent monthly newsletter devoted to strategy and trade, established in December 1994 as a tool for policy-makers and business leaders in their dealings with Iran. Prior to launching The Iran Brief, Kenneth Timmerman served on the professional staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and was the editor of Middle East Defense News (Mednews) in Paris from 1987-1993.
My name is Kenneth Timmerman, and I publish a monthly investigative newsletter called The Iran Brief. I have written extensively on Iranian foreign terrorist networks in Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, and have done in-depth research on Iranian programs of weapons of mass destruction, including a study that was published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1992. I have also traveled widely in the Middle East and Europe, where in fact I was posted until 1993 when I returned to Washington to work on proliferation and arms control issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee during the previous Congress.
The U.S. dollar has long been the most widely accepted currency in the Middle East. Israel came close to adopting it as official tender during its hyper-inflation crisis in the mid-1980s; Lebanon and Syria use it as unofficial tender for government to government transactions. I can't tell you with any certainty whether I have ever handled a supernote. But I can say this: the moneychangers in the Old City of Jerusalem, on Hamra Street in Beirut, and in the Damascus souk scrutinized the $100 bills I presented them on trips last year with an attention I had never experienced before. Either I have become more suspicious-looking in middle-age, or else we are talking about a problem which has become so widespread that even these non-institutional currency traders are aware of it, and are attempting to take their own precautions against losing money to fraud. More
The wiseguy regime
North Korea has embarked on a global crime spree
BY DAVID E. KAPLAN ......... http://www2.dynamite.com.au/garran/nkor19990215usnwr.htm
Something about the two North Korean diplomats passing through Egypt didn't seem quite right. The pair, based in Syria, had arrived only a day earlier from Ethiopia and already were high-tailing it out of Cairo. Suspicious, an Egyptian customs official insisted on checking their six suitcases. He found quite a stash: 506,000 tablets of Rohypnol, a sedative known as the "date-rape drug."
That episode last Julythe largest seizure of Rohypnol on recordis just one in a long string of drug incidents, counterfeiting cases, and other alleged crimes involving North Korean officials. Isolated, beset by famine, and desperate for hard currency, North Korea has in effect turned into a vast criminal enterprise, U.S. experts say. "It's the mafia masquerading as a government," contends James Przystup of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Says another international crime analyst: "If North Korea were not a nation, you could indict it as a continuing criminal enterprise."
Cases of North Korean officials engaged in smuggling and drug trafficking began to surface in the 1970s, but law enforcement analysts have noted a disturbing jump in the past five years. Using data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Japanese and South Korean police, and foreign press reports, U.S. News has compiled a record of criminal complaints against North Korean diplomats in 16 countries since 1994. Interviews with law enforcement officials, intelligence analysts, and North Korean defectors suggest that the regime is now dramatically expanding its narcotics production and that much of the criminal activity is controlled at the highest levels of government.
How much of the profiteering goes to prop up the world's last Stalinist stateand how much lines the pockets of corrupt officialsis impossible to know. But it is clear that the worldwide network of North Korean embassies, coupled with the use of diplomatic pouches and immunity, offers the ideal cover for a criminal enterprise. "We've rarely seen a state use organized crime in this way," says Phil Williams, a University of Pittsburgh professor and editor of the journal Transnational Organized Crime. "This is a criminal state not because it's been captured by criminals but because the state has taken over crime." Among the evidence:
Authorities in at least nine countries have nabbed North Korean diplomats with a virtual pharmacy of illegal drugs: opium, heroin, cocaine, hashish. Investigators have traced orders for 50 tons of ephedrinethe base for methamphetamineto North Korean front companies; that quantity is 20 times as much as the nation's legitimate needs.
North Korean officials have been caught distributing counterfeit $100 bills in Cambodia, Russia, Macao, and Mongolia. The regime is believed to produce some of the world's best bogus currency with the same model press used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
North Korean officials in countries from Romania to Zambia are accused of using embassies and front companies to smuggle a mind-boggling array of goods, including untaxed cigarettes, bootleg CDs, fake antiques, and endangered species parts. North Koreans also have been tied to kidnappings and terrorism.
Behind much of this criminal activity lies North Korea's desperate need for cash. With the end of Soviet patronage, and with Koreans in Japan sending less money home, North Korea has lost two key sources of hard currency. Drug dealing and smuggling offer a lucrative alternative and are believed to bring into the nation's crippled economy more than $100 million each year. Just one North Korean methamphetamine shipment, seized in August by Japanese officials, had a street value of $170 million. By comparison, North Korea's legitimate exports plunged last year to a mere $520 million, while the nation spends an estimated $200 million annually on its nuclear program.
Some analysts suspect that drug profits may, in fact, be going into that program. Since 1994, Washington has pursued a policy of engagement, offering billions of dollars in Western aid if North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons development and missile exports. But the policy has produced a frustrating stalemate, and U.S. intelligence officials say new satellite photos indicate the North Koreans are rapidly expanding a suspected underground nuclear site. Meanwhile, the North Korean Armythe world's fifth largestremains a potent threat to South Korea and Japan. "I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea," CIA Director George Tenet told Congress last week.
Congressional report. Concern over North Korea's illicit activity is bound to be fueled by a Congressional Research Service report due this week. The study, U.S. News has learned, cites at least 30 incidents that tie North Korea to drug trafficking. The CRS report suggests not only that drug profits could be funding the nuclear program but that U.S. food aid to the regimeover $77 million worth this yearmay be needed in part because farm acreage is used to grow poppies for opium.
North Korea made its entry into the narcotics trade in the 1970s by purchasing drugs for resale, according to a U.S. intelligence report. At the time, the country had defaulted on international loans and, as now, was in dire need of cash. In 1976, four Scandinavian countries kicked out 17 North Korean diplomats after claiming to have found evidence that they were illegally selling narcotics, cigarettes, and alcohol. Among the officials were two ambassadors and the entire staff of the North Korean Embassy in Norway. (Diplomats, when caught, are rarely prosecuted.)
By the mid-1980s, North Korean farmers began cultivating opium poppies, allegedly under orders from leader Kim Il Sung. The processed opium and heroin were then sold overseas. With the cutoff of Soviet aid in the 1990s, Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong Il, ordered a major expansion of the drugs-for-export program, U.S. officials say. Based on data from defectors and other intelligence sources, U.S. and South Korean narcotics analysts believe that up to 17,000 acres now produce at least 44 tons of opium annually. If true, that would approach the output of Colombia, the largest supplier of heroin to the United States.
Despite repeated requests, North Korean officials declined an interview with U.S. News. In the past, however, North Korean spokesmen have branded accusations of drug dealing and other crimes as "smear campaigns" orchestrated by South Korea. The nation's opium production, they say, is strictly for medicinal purposes and is being stockpiled for use in war. Moreover, some drug control officials remain skeptical that North Korea is a major drug producer, among them Herbert Schaepe, secretary of the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna. "If those production figures are correct, we would see seizures everywhere," he says. "But we just haven't seen the evidence." U.S. law enforcement officials counter that they are seeing large seizures and that the growing number of smuggling incidentsas well as mounting testimony by defectorscannot be explained away as propaganda from Seoul. More conclusive evidence could come from U.S. spy satellites; one satellite was recently tasked to photograph North Korea's opium fields, intelligence sources say, but the day was cloudy and officials have been unable to get the satellite retasked.
Defectors say that drug trafficking is, indeed, a state-run industry. One defector interviewed by U.S. News, Bae In Su, says he worked for three years as a driver for the Communist Party's Foreign Currency Earnings Department, ferrying opium and heroin to port for export. At least twice a month, Bae says, he would deliver a van full of opiumpacked by the kilogram in plastic bagsto Japanese ships or to a local pharmaceutical plant that refined it into heroin. The entire process, he adds, was controlled by high-ranking party officials. "They talked about opium being gold," Bae says. Another defector, pharmacist Ho Chang Gol, has claimed that the government ran more than 10 poppy farms to export opium.
Given the tight control wielded by North Korea's security apparatus, U.S. analysts say that such large-scale production of illegal drugs could not exist without sponsorship by authorities in Pyongyang, the capital. Intelligence reports say that the trade is handled by Office 39, a party organ under the direct control of Kim Jong Il, which oversees production and then doles out the drugs to trading companies and diplomatic posts. U.S. officials believe the profits are funneled into a private slush fund controlled by Kim and used to hand out favors, bankroll intelligence operations, and buy military hardware.
The North Koreans have not targeted their drugs at the U.S. market, although at times their shipments have ended up here. One of Hong Kong's most notorious drug lords, Lai King-man, started out peddling heroin from North Korea, says Catherine Palmer, a former assistant U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted Lai in 1990. Palmer believes that 100 to 200 pounds were smuggled into the United States and that most of it ended up on the streets of New York.
Mexico to Moscow. Recent arrests suggest that the North Koreans are now exploring European markets. One year ago, Russian officials arrested two North Korean diplomats for smuggling 77 pounds of cocaineenough to fetch $4 million on the streetfrom Mexico City to Moscow. In their pockets were round-trip tickets to Frankfurt. And last October, German police investigated the deputy ambassador at the embassy in Berlin for ties to a heroin-and-weapons-smuggling ring. But hardest hit are North Korea's neighbors. In the early 1990s, Russian officials noticed opium being sold by North Korean loggers in Siberia. The sellers, they found, dissolved opium and morphine into "medicines" with names like Roots of the White Bell and peddled them in local markets. But it took a 1994 sting operation to uncover the full scope of North Korean official involvement. Russian undercover cops agreed to buy nearly 18 pounds of heroin from two dealers who turned out to be North Korean state security agents. The deal was meant as a first installment for over 2 tons of the drugand the Koreans boasted that nearly 8 tons were available.
Still, the drug of the future for North Korea is likely to be methamphetamine. The Koreans are moving quickly into industrial-scale production of "meth," the drug of choice in much of East Asia, say law enforcement officials. U.N. drug control officials are tracking 50 tons of ephedrine base allegedly ordered by North Korea in the past year. The drug is used as a cold remedy, but the nation's legitimate annual needs are 2.5 tons. "They must have a lot of stuffy noses," quips one drug control agent.
The target for this appears to be Japan, where the nation's 500,000 users pay handsomely for high-quality crystal meth. Most of Japan's speed in recent years has come from China, but Tokyo cops got a surprise in April 1997, in a small port in southern Japan. There a lone customs inspector wondered about the 12 large cans of honey that crew members hand-carried from a North Korean freighter. It seemed strange, the inspector thought, that North Korea was exporting food in the midst of a famine. A check found the cans crammed with 130 pounds of meth. Then, last August, Japanese police traced a 660-pound meth shipment, worth $335 million on the street, to a North Korean boat disguised as a Japanese vessel. Investigators have tied both cases to the yakuzaJapanese crime syndicatesmany of whose members are ethnic Korean. Japanese police are alarmed: In two years the North Koreans have come to supply nearly 20 percent of Japan's multibillion-dollar meth market.
North Korean-printed U.S. dollars are also showing up with troubling frequency: Authorities have seized Pyongyang's bad bills in at least nine countries, from Mongolia to Germany. Last April, for instance, a North Korean trade attaché in Vladivostok, Russia, was caught passing $30,000 in fake hundreds. In 1994, police in Macao traced $600,000 of the bogus bills to a North Korean trading company. Any doubts of official complicity were erased in 1996, when Yoshimi Tanaka, a former Japanese Red Army member wanted for hijacking, was arrested in Cambodia and tied to $200,000 in counterfeit money. Tanaka held a North Korean diplomatic passport, traveled in a North Korean Embassy car, and was accompanied by North Korean officials.
"Supernotes." The Korean $100 bills have been dubbed "supernotes"; they are so good they helped push the United States to issue redesigned currency in 1996. The old-style bills are cranked out on a $10 million intaglio press similar to those employed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, officials say. North Korean defectors claim the notes come from a high-security plant in Pyongyang. Kim Jeong Min, a former top North Korean intelligence official, told U.S. News that he had been ordered to find the paper used to print U.S. currency but couldn't. "Instead, I obtained many $1 notes and bleached the ink out of them," he says. "The size of the bill was what mattered, not the denomination."
South Korea's intelligence agency estimates that the North turns out some $15 million in counterfeit U.S. money each year; American officials believe that figure is high. But even that amount would not constitute a threat to the stability of the greenback ($480 billion in U.S. currency is circulated worldwide).
Defector Kim says his career was not limited to counterfeiting. He boasts that before he left in 1988 he smuggled gems and Western currency out of Africa. Cramming French francs, U.S. dollars, and South African diamonds into his suitcases, he ventured overseas as often as five times a month during the 1980s. Protected by diplomatic immunity, Kim claims he cleared a profit of $80 million during that time, both for the regime and for himself. "I was immune from any laws," he says.
Authorities in numerous countries have stopped North Korean diplomats from smuggling vehicles, alcohol, fake antiques, electronic goods, weapons, and more. Other reports deeply implicate officials in the endangered-species trade. Since 1996, at least six North Korean diplomats have been forced to leave Africa after attempts to smuggle elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. Such efforts seem partly driven by the dismal funding of North Korea's embassies. Lacking cash, North Korea closed at least 14 embassies last year and reportedly told those remaining to become "self-sufficient." Still other diplomatic smuggling incidents involve cigarettes, allegedly sold tax free on the black market, and pirated CDs. Two diplomats crossing into Romania from Bulgaria last year were found to have crammed 12,000 bootleg CDs in the trunk of their car. Truly inventive at times, North Koreans even counterfeit name-brand cigarettes, which contain their own cheap tobacco. In 1995, Taiwanese authorities seized 20 ship containers of counterfeit cigarette packaging bound for North Korea. It was enough to make 2 million fake cartons of bestselling Japanese and British brands.
North Korea's criminal reach extends beyond smuggling and counterfeiting, U.S. officials say. Japan has accused North Korea of kidnapping at least 19 of its citizens so that the regime's spies could learn Japanese and assume their victims' identities. The nation also appears on the State Department's short list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Its agents are suspected of the bombing of a 1987 South Korean flight and a 1983 bombing that killed South Korean officials in Burma.
Some policy makers argue that the best strategy is to isolate North Korea and wait for it to fall. But the regime has proved surprisingly resilient, and the key levers of powerthe security forces and the Communist Partyremain under the firm control of the reclusive Kim Jong Il. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and other allies argue that lifting U.S. sanctions and further engaging the regime is the best way. Whatever the course ahead, at least the time has passed when North Korea's criminality could be ignored by policy makers. "It wasn't even on the radarscope," says one surprised U.S. analyst. "It's a classic case of hear no evil, see no evil, respond to no evil."
With Steven Butler in Seoul and Mark Madden
http://members.tripodasia.com.sg/Newsthai/week2600.html
Tokyo Yoshimi Tanaka, the aging Red Army terrorist, finally arrived back in Japan to face charges of hijacking. Tanaka was held for more than two years in Thailand, primarily for trial on counterfeiting charges. Now 51, Tanaka was allegedly involved with a North Korean money-making gang in Cambodia. In 1970, he and others hijacked a Japan Air Lines hijacking which wound up in Pyongyang.
BY CHRISTIAN CARYL
ISTANBUL--Every morning thousands of traders from the countries of the former Soviet bloc descend on the Aksaray district of this ancient Turkish seaport. Soon its narrow streets, where signs in Russian outnumber those in Turkish, are filled with visitors buying wholesale goods for resale to consumers back home: jewelry, eyeglasses, plumbing fixtures, and, most of all, clothing. "You want it in black?" asks the Russian-speaking owner of a store specializing in leather coats. "Come back tomorrow by 5 p.m. and we'll have it in black." Then he names the price: $150 per coat--in American cash, please.
While Istanbul's money-changers can handle everything from Romanian lei to Kazakh tenge, the greenback reigns supreme. And that is true around the globe. Few Americans may realize it, but more U.S. currency is in circulation outside the United States than inside. Of the $450 billion in bills and coins now lining people's wallets, cash registers, bank vaults, and mattresses, about two thirds--or $300 billion--is abroad.
That percentage is rising. The end of the cold war opened the former Soviet bloc to American currency, and restrictions on currency trading have been eliminated in much of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Joseph Botta, who tracks U.S. cash for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, says that the amount of U.S. currency abroad has grown $15 billion to $20 billion a year for the past five years.
Big bills only, please. Roughly 80 percent of the American cash abroad is in the form of $100 bills. That contrasts sharply with cash at home, which circulates mainly in $20 bills (the denomination favored for use in automated teller machines). Says Botta: "The higher denominations are very popular outside the U.S., and that reflects what people there are using the currency for"--not small, daily purchases but savings and commercial transactions. In many countries, the local currency is ravaged by inflation or residents do not trust the banks.
The popularity of the dollar overseas benefits the United States in ways that go far beyond mere pride or ease of shopping for American tourists. From the point of view of the Federal Reserve Board, the $300 billion circulating abroad is like an interest-free loan to the U.S. government. Foreign producers have accepted the paper money in return for real goods and services. As long as the paper stays overseas, the United States does not have to redeem it for other goods or services, and it does not swell America's domestic money supply or contribute to inflation. The Fed estimates the annual savings at $15 billion to $20 billion--the bill that taxpayers would otherwise have to foot for the government's interest payments on $300 billion (a benefit that economists call seigniorage, a medieval French term for the right of a lord to coin money).
Competition may be coming, though. On May 2, the European Union formally will announce which countries have qualified to join the European Monetary Union, a single currency system that will begin in 1999 and that is expected to transform business in Europe. The new currency, called the euro, will make its physical appearance on Jan. 1, 2002. By July 1 of that year, all the participating countries must withdraw their old national bank notes and coins from circulation.
If the euro truly replaces the German mark, French franc, and British pound, the dollar may meet its match. But for the moment, the buck seems unstoppable. To get an idea of its global reach, one need only visit the sorting facilities of one of the big commercial banks that trade in U.S. currency. The hundreds of thousands of bills sorted every day at UBS in Zurich come from all over the world. The U.S. dollar is legal tender in Panama and Liberia, and countries from Zimbabwe to Turkey demand payment for entry visas in American cash. In Cuba, Fidel Castro's government has staved off deeper reforms by allowing the emergence of a dollar-based economy parallel to the stagnating socialist system. Albanians trade for dollars in an open-air market next to their own Central Bank. When a condominium changes hands in Buenos Aires, it is not unusual to pay with shopping bags of $100 bills. Buyer and seller then spend the day counting the bills with the help of a specially hired bank teller. The two sides enter the serial numbers of the bills on preprinted sheets that can be checked later in the case of a counterfeit.
The popularity of the U.S. bank note, says Peter Bakstansky of the Federal Reserve, is "a vote of confidence in the monetary, fiscal, and economic system" of the United States. And the Fed is willing to go a very long way to maintain that confidence: In the spring of 1996, when the United States redesigned the $100 bill to thwart counterfeiters, Treasury officials undertook a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to reassure Russians that the estimated $20 billion of old bills they possessed would still be legal tender. Many Russian consumers, unnerved by their own government's tradition of confiscatory monetary reform, nevertheless rushed to change old dollar bills into new ones--sometimes paying a 2 percent commission to rapacious banks. (Saddam Hussein ran the same scam on his citizens by telling them that old $100 bills would be replaced by new ones, and Iraq's state banks took hefty fees as Iraqis rushed to exchange their notes.) In all, the U.S. government's publicity campaign for the new $100 bills took Treasury officials to 18 countries. One of the last on the list: Vietnam, where greenbacks are especially popular.
Russia's love affair with the dollar dates back decades. Writer Yevgeni Popov points out that many Soviets survived the turbulent years of the 1920s thanks to dollars sent by relatives in America. In the later years of the Soviet Union, he says, "the regime treated people who held dollars as if they were in the possession of drugs. Nowadays, when a Russian holds the same dollars that could have got him thrown in jail a few years ago, he feels freer." Russians still tell jokes that reflect their fondness for dollars (known as bucksy, or "cabbage"). In one, a Russian who has just returned from a trip to the States shows off the dollar bills he's brought back. "How about that," marvels a friend. "They look just like ours."
Supernote. But this windfall for the U.S. Treasury poses some risks. "No other country in the world has these large amounts of currency circulating outside of its borders," Botta notes, and one of the main concerns is that foreign counterfeiters may slip their wares into the stream. Some of the counterfeiting is state sponsored--a form of economic terrorism. When mobs stormed the headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi, in 1990, they found a laboratory for printing dollars. Nearly perfect counterfeits, dubbed the "supernote," also were manufactured on an industrial scale in the early 1990s somewhere in the Middle East, perhaps the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. By February 1996 the Secret Service had confiscated $10 million of the notes. Fake bills also have turned up in Tehran, and suspected Iranian involvement in counterfeiting has led to heated diplomatic exchanges. More recently North Korea has been suspected of flooding East Asia with high-quality $100 bills dubbed "Super K's." When Thai authorities arrested the leader of a counterfeiting gang two years ago, he turned out to be a former Japanese Red Army terrorist named Yoshimi Tanaka, who had dropped out of sight after hijacking a plane to North Korea in 1970. Colombian drug cartels also have been prolific sources of funny money.
It is almost impossible for U.S. authorities to keep track of where U.S. currency is circulating. Shipments of less than $10,000 do not have to be reported to the Federal Reserve. As recently as 1996, the Secret Service--the first line of defense against a counterfeit threat that now stems primarily from overseas--had a mere 20 officials stationed abroad. Congress, in April 1996, ordered the Secret Service and U.S. monetary officials to set up a joint program to keep closer tabs on greenbacks abroad, but so far it has delivered few concrete results. The challenge facing U.S. currency sleuths is perhaps best exemplified by a story told by Vincent Morabito, a development worker who has spent many years in the former Soviet Union. In 1993 he handed over a $5 bill to pay for two bottles of beer in a hard-currency store in Latvia. "The two dollar bills they gave me in change looked and felt sort of odd," he says. "But it was only when I took them out of my wallet the next morning that I realized they were two silver certificates dating from 1933."
With Kevin Whitelaw
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:bOTWuMWe-Ck:www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980427/27cash.htm+%22yoshimi+tanaka%22+news+and+world+report&hl=en
24 July, Bangkok
Defendant Shougo Kodama (54), has been sentenced by the Chonbuli regional court, located in Central Thai, on the 23rd to two years and six months imprisonment. He was arrested and prosecuted under suspicion of being an accomplice to Yoshimi Tanaka (48) in the counterfeit US dollar bill scandal. The trial for the case has been underway for Tanaka , an ex-Red Army Faction member who took part in the hijacking of a Japan Airlines plane, the Yodogo.
Kodama was previously prosecuted in January of last year as an accomplice to Yoshimi Tanaka. The two are believed to have illegally exchanged 90 bills of counterfeit US 100 dollar bills (total 9,000 US dollars), with the aid of a Thai national in Batya.
Kodama, who returned to Japan from Cambodia, before the counterfeit scandal occurred, operated a trading firm together with Tanaka in Phnom Penh. Although he was arrested last year in February in Bangkok, he was released, due to lack of incriminating evidence. After that, an arrest warrant was issued once again, whereupon he was arrested while in Bangkok city.
A special investigative unit was dispatched from the US to directly take charge of the case. The team has been carrying out investigations with cooperation from authorities of countries connected with this case.
Tanaka was arrested last year in March and sent to Thai, while on his way back to North Korea from Phnom Penh via Vietnam. In April of the same year, he was prosecuted together with five Thai nationals, who are, along with Tanaka, being tried at Chonbuli. The prosecution submitted testimony from Kodama that he had received forged bills from Tanaka. The prosecution are confident that the statement will serve well in proving Tanaka guilty.
Pyongyang does not limit its operations to South Korea. North Korea has also been known to send agents to attempt to infiltrate Japan.(84) These infiltrators probably establish liaison with the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan and spy on Japan's coastal defenses and U.S. and Japanese defense installations. There are many reports of drug trafficking by North Korean agents involved with organized criminal gangs in Japan.(85) In March 1999, two North Korean "fishing trawlers" entered Japanese territorial waters. The "fishing trawlers" probably carried North Korean infiltration agents destined for Japan. The ships eventually led a small armada of Japanese coastal guard and naval ships on a chase through the Japanese waters before fleeing into a North Korean port. This incident led to the decision by the Japanese government to authorize the use of force to chase the North Korean vessels from its waters.(86)
D. Is Pyongyang involved in state-sponsored international crime?
North Korea produces and traffics in narcotics, and counterfeits and distributes U.S. currency.
North Korea Advisory Group Report to The Speaker U.S. House of Representatives November 1999
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The highest treason is inside our borders. Osama-baby's boys or maybe somebody else's boys look like a usefull tool to destroy this country.
Who is a Master Mind behind this monstrous treason?
Several European judicial and intelligence sources have complained privately to me of their efforts to elicit help from the U.S. Secret Service in tracking down the laundering networks for the supernotes in Europe.
One network several intelligence services were tracking was apparently set up by the Syrian businessman Monzer al Qassar, who has been called "the godfather of terrorism" because of his links to Abu Nidal and other Palestinian terrorist groups.
The Spanish authorities arrested Monzer al Qassar on June 2, 1992 on charges relating to the Achille Lauro terrorist attack, jailing him for two years. As they were preparing to release him for lack of evidence, the Spanish judge was called to Washington. The Secret Service was seeking his cooperation in a new investigation tying Monzer al Qassar to the supernotes. Monzer's brother Ghassan al Qassar, who was expelled from Argentina on a variety of charges including drug smuggling and money-laundering, was believed to be one of the main contacts for obtaining the counterfeit notes. Ghassan, in turn, was in contact with an Iraqi Consul in Vienna, Austria, who was also believed to be passing the supernotes to procure technology on the black market for Iraq's weapons programs. The bills have turned up all over Europe, but especially in Spain and Austria; and I am told that Interpol is increasingly frustrated at the lack of cooperation they have received from the Secret Service.
After an initial meeting in Washington with the Spanish judge in July 1994, the Secret Service went to Spain to pursue its own leads. According to my sources, the Spanish judge has complained that he is "still waiting" for the Secret Service to inform him of the result of its investigation tying Monzer al Qassar to the supernotes. His investigation into supernote laundering networks - which Spanish intelligence sources say are widespread in Spain - has been shelved because of the lack of cooperation from the Secret Service.
Are our Intelligence Services traitorous (and why) or someone tries to paint them traitors? Or maybe they are not OUR Services anymore?
NEWS FROM KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY OF DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)
Isn't It Time To Investigate Our "Secret Agencies"?
Pyongyang, May 11 (KCNA) -- Kim Yong Nam, President of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK, separately met and had friendly conversations with Thomas E. Leavey, director general of the Universal Postal Union, and Sean Garland, chairman of the Workers' Party of Ireland, at the Mansudae Assembly Hall today. Saying that the establishment of diplomatic relations between many European countries and the DPRK proves the validity and vitality of the foreign policy of the DPRK government, Sean Garland noted that the early May DPRK visit of the top-level delegation of the European union commanded welcome from many countries.
Russia, Iraq in $40bn deal
Baghdad - Iraq said on Sunday that Russian companies had won deals worth US$40 billion to execute scores of future oil and infrastructure projects.
It was not immediately clear if any of the projects could go ahead before the United Nations lifts tough trade sanctions imposed on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammed Saleh, quoted by the official Iraqi news agency INA, said Russian companies would carry out 72 projects, mostly in the oil sector, under a long-term protocol.
"Iraq and Russia have agreed on a long-term economic co-operation programme under which Russian companies will implement projects worth $40 billion in Iraq," Saleh was quoted as telling a visiting Russian delegation.
He said 17 of the projects were in oil and gas, 15 in industry, 14 in transport and communications, 11 in agriculture and irrigation, six in petrochemicals, six in electricity and three in health. He did not say when work would start.
UN sanctions bar foreign companies from investing in Iraq's oil sector and from selling it equipment outside the framework of an oil-for-food deal with the United Nations.
The deal allows Iraq to sell oil to buy food, medicine and humanitarian goods under strict United Nations monitoring.
Iraq has given Russian firms priority in winning business under the oil-for-food deal as a reward for Moscow's rejection of a US-British proposal to revamp the 11-year-old sanctions.
Moscow had threatened to use a veto against a US-British so-called "smart sanctions" resolution in June, prompting London and Washington to shelve it and allowing the oil-for-food programme to be extended for five months unchanged.
Saleh said Russia had won $4.4 billion of contracts with Iraq since the oil-for-food deal began in December 1996.
Russian companies are already the largest lifters of Iraqi crude. While Western oil majors are eyeing Iraq's reserves - the second largest in the world - Russian firms, armed with cash from high oil prices and Moscow's friendship with Baghdad, are jostling for a toehold before foreign rivals move in.
Source:REUTERS
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