To: Zviadist; Black Jade
North Korea uses counterfeit currency to support terrorism. For instance, it provides diplomatic protection and asylum to Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army faction hijacker who, while under North Korean diplomatic protection, was arrested by Cambodian authorities in 1996. Tanaka had 1,238 counterfeit U.S. $100 bills and a North Korean diplomatic passport in his possession at the time of his arrest.(83) Despite such incidents, the DPRK has asserted that it condemns all forms of terrorism.
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
The Koreas
PYONGYANG WATCH
By Bradley Martin
Asia Times Online
The cushy life of a hijacker
One of nine Japanese Red Army guerrillas who hijacked a Japan Airlines jumbo jet in March 1970 and flew to North Korea, Yoshimi Tanaka ran afoul of the law again in 1996. He was arrested on the Cambodia-Vietnam border and whisked to Thailand to face charges that he'd been part of a plot there to cash counterfeit $100 bills, the hard-to-detect "Super-K" forgeries produced by North Korea's ruling party. Recently he seems to have beaten those charges. But already he has spent almost three and a half years in a Thai jail, and even after his final acquittal in Thailand what he has to look forward to is extradition to Japan and another jail cell there. No wonder, then, that he told an interviewer for the Japanese weekly Gendai: "I now recollect my life in Pyongyang with a warm heart." Maybe even North Korea with its grievous food shortages could have a nostalgic appeal to a jailbird.
But wait. It's not just the comparison with jail life. The way Tanaka tells it, it seems he and his Japanese wife and three daughters actually had a cushy life in Pyongyang before 1994 - the year he headed to Cambodia as, he says, a trader. "In Pyongyang I could obtain various Japanese foodstuffs," he told interviewer Yasushi Watanabe. "I could get coffee, Japanese-made beer and also tobaccos such as Marlboro Light cigarettes." Using the formula phrase that North Koreans are taught from nursery school to repeat interminably, Tanaka added that the state "procured all necessities for living with a parental care, and there was no inconvenience at all for me."
But then, making clear he was not just propagandizing, he dropped a bit more information that made it clear why his Pyongyang life had been so satisfying: his circumstances there obviously were far, far above those of ordinary North Koreans. Tanaka told his interviewer he had lived amid greenery in a quiet section of Pyongyang, along the Taedong River. About 20 North Koreans were assigned by the state to work at the residences of the Japanese Red Army members and some Ecuadorean guerrillas who lived next door. The helpers "were there to manage the waterworks and boilers, transport coal and propane gas, secure foods and daily necessities and repair our Benz cars."
Benz cars, indeed. The interviewer, Watanabe, took that as his cue to ask: "You seem to have enjoyed a higher living standard than those of ordinary citizens . . . " Tanaka acknowledged that some people had disparaged the ex-guerrillas' circumstances as "life within a palace." But he himself had no complaint on that score. "I think the president" - the late Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994 - "simply wanted to treat us as foreigners." Anyhow, living in an affluent residential area that was something of a cocoon, isolated from most North Koreans, Tanaka "did not know what the ordinary life in the republic was. So I cannot tell whether I lived a luxurious life or not." He added: "As to the issue of hunger, as well, I really do not know about it."
His comments ring a bell. Some foreign analysts have theorized that Kim Il-sung's similarly splendid isolation in real palaces - combined with the efforts of underlings to report only good news and expose him to Potemkin villages that oozed fake prosperity - kept the Great Leader himself from realizing the full extent of his people's plight until close to the time of his death (if he ever did catch on). Since 1994, though, conditions have worsened so drastically that Kim's son and heir, Kim Jong-il, could hardly be unaware that his people have been starving in large numbers.
Fun and games
North Korea and South Korea are both sending teams to the Second World Military Games in Zagreb, Croatia, this week. If those competitions in shooting, taekwondo and skydiving, etc., were a substitute for real war, the citizenry of Seoul would be well advised to start fleeing south now to evade the conquering Northern hordes. In the previous Rome games in 1995 North Korea finished fifth, and it's tipped to repeat that ranking this time. South Korea, on the other hand, ranked only 17th in Rome and hopes to improve to 10th in Zagreb.
Even 10th or 17th is not too shabby, of course, and both sides' rankings demonstrate the intense competitiveness of Koreans - a trait that hijacker Tanaka mentions in his Gendai interview. "I was brought up amid fierce school entrance examinations in Japan, and so I think I have a strong competitive spirit," he says. "But you can't beat the Koreans in this respect." North Koreans living in Tanaka's residential area in Pyongyang held athletic meetings in the spring and autumn. Dividing themselves into two teams, the Sunflowers and the Azaleas, for a hurdle race, they went all out to win. That included breaking the rules. A ladder was placed flat on the course and runners were supposed to jump through the gaps between the rungs. Instead they simply bypassed the ladder and headed for the goal line.
Five years on, the Dear Leader's still there
July 8 was the fifth anniversary of Kim Il-sung's death, and the date came and went with Kim Jong-il still in charge in Pyongyang. That's not what many foreign analysts had expected at the time the country was thrown into mourning for its Great Leader. The junior Kim, a mere shadow of his imposing dad, wouldn't last long, they figured, variously estimating his likely tenure at anywhere from a few months to five years.
The Seoul magazine Weekly Chosun for its July 22 issue assembled a panel of experts to ponder how the Dear Leader, as Kim Jong-il used to be known, had managed to keep his regime alive. (He's now the Great Leader, by the way, but uses a different word for great than his father did.) One of the specialists, former vice minister for unification Song Yong-tae, summed up the winning formula by pointing to the younger Kim's artful wooing of the military and his success in winning outside economic assistance.
A high-level defector from the North, former Kim Il-sung University professor Cho Myong-ch'ol, elaborated on the matter of the military. North Korean officials had studied the collapse of communism in Europe and seen that ideological "contamination" of the military had been partly responsible. Keeping control over the soldiers thus became a key goal, long before the elder Kim's death. Some 70 to 80 officers, mostly those who had been trained in the Soviet Union, were purged in 1991, Cho said. They were suspected of having been infected with the sort of thinking that prevailed in Moscow.
The South Korean military briefly went on alert on July 16 in response to a rumor of a military coup in North Korea. But there was nothing going on but a military drill, the Korea Times reported. False alarm, as usual. Can the Kim Jong-il regime then go on indefinitely? "Some people say chances are slim for a mutiny on board, but the ship may sink due to an erosion-caused hole," observed Kim Hyon-ho, director of the Research Center for Korean Reunification and moderator of Weekly Chosun's panel.
Tanaka, the Japanese hijacker, wasn't on the magazine's panel. But in his Gendai interview he enthusiastically refuted the notion that Kim Jong-il is a lightweight. The younger Kim is as capable as his father, Tanaka argued. "Look at his diplomatic bargaining with America on the nuclear issue. He holds himself without budging an inch. On the contrary, it is America that is gasping for breath."
Give until the bank goes bust
Keeping the Kim Jong-il regime alive has required large infusions of foreign exchange to finance the imports needed to keep the military strong and relatively well fed and to make sure elite civilians, from Kim Jong-il right on down to ex-Japanese Red Army guerrillas, can keep on living the high life. In addition to counterfeiting schemes such as the one of which Tanaka was alleged to be a part, party-sponsored drug smuggling reportedly has been a major source of forex.
And then there is the community of pro-Pyongyang Koreans resident in Japan, who in many cases have achieved some financial success in businesses such as pachinko (pinball) parlors - and who typically have relatives in North Korea (read de facto hostages of the regime, in many cases). Frequently Pyongyang has prevailed upon such people for contributions to the motherland.
Some of their contributions, it turns out, have been not only involuntary but unknown to the contributors. Officials of a credit union affiliated with the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan - Chongnyon in Korean - are suspected of having made sweetheart loans to Chongnyon and some of its regional and local subdivisions, the Japanese weekly Toyo Keizai reported in its July 12 issue. The magazine questions whether some of that loan money then went to Pyongyang as contributions to the regime. In at least one case, Toyo Keizai reports, a credit union official who was also a Chongnyon biggie simply embezzled a depositor's funds and sent them to Pyongyang.
No wonder, if this is true, that 13 branches of the credit union have gone broke, along with a trading company affiliated with North Korea that was into the credit union for huge loans to finance its shipments to Pyongyang. Toyo Keizai worries that the government's deposit insurance money - instead of helping ordinary Korean resident depositors who used the failed credit union branches - could go straight through the successor financial institutions and out to Pyongyang, as de facto subsidies of Kim Jong-il by Japan's taxpayers.
Who's the man at Chongnyon?
The Seoul daily Joongang Ilbo reported July 22 that Ho Chong-man, "responsible vice-chairman" of Chongnyon, was passed over for a promotion to first vice-chairman last year because of his prominent role in the association's messy financial affairs. The paper says the 67-year-old Ho had been eclipsed by So Man-sul, 72, who got the first vice-chairmanship instead of Ho. And the paper passes on a rumor that Ho has been purged.
Well, maybe Joongang Ilbo's Tokyo correspondent is on to something. But Ho didn't show any outward signs of being a purge candidate as recently as Chongnyon's reception in Tokyo in honor of Kim Jong-il's Feb. 16 birthday this year. As has been usual on such occasions in recent years, it was Ho who held court, talking through an interpreter with diplomats and foreign journalists who approached him. And he was still referred to as "responsible vice chairman" that night, some nine months after he supposedly had taken a fall.
(Asia Times Online) http://www.atimes.com/koreas/AH03Dg01.html
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