Free Republic

Siegfried Hecker, sitting in a cold conference room, was asked by his North Korean hosts if he would like to see their "product." "Yes," Dr. Hecker replied. "Do you mean plutonium?" Hecker, former director of the U.S. weapons lab at Los Alamos and familiar with the hazardous properties of plutonium, was surprised when two technicians carried a small red metal box into the room. Inside was a white wooden box containing two glass jars -- they looked like marmalade jars -- one containing a piece of plutonium metal, the other plutonium powder. He later asked if he could hold the...

North Korea’s armed forces are capable of carrying out 13 kinds of viral and bacterial attack, the South Korean Government said yesterday in one of the most detailed assessments of the dictatorship’s biological weapons arsenal. In a submission to the South Korean National Assembly, the Defence Minister also said that the North had 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, believed to include mustard gas, phosgene and sarin. Among its biological agents are cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery. Despite the alarming assessment, Kim Tae Young also said that his country’s armed forces had the capacity pre-emptively to destroy...

Senior North Korean espionage official 'may have fled to Britain after defecting' By Julian Ryall, tokyo 3 MAY 2018 • 4:51AM North Korea has launched an international manhunt for one of its most senior counter-espionage officers, who disappeared in late February and is believed to have defected, possibly to Britain, according to a media report in South Korea. The official has been identified as a Mr Kang, a colonel in his 50s with the Ministry of State Security and responsible for monitoring dissident and espionage efforts in Russia, China and south-east Asia. He disappeared from the Zhongpu International Hotel in...

Liberal billionaire George Soros threatened President Donald Trump and suggested he wouldn't be around much longer last month, according to the Daily Wire. During a speech at the end of January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Democratic kingpin suggested "dark forces" were involved, and would make Trump disappear by 2020. "Clearly I consider the Trump administration a danger to the world," Soros said. "But I regard it as a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020 or even sooner." Soros, still upset he donated more than $30 million to Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential campaign,...

A State Department contractor charged with leaking top-secret information about North Korea to Fox News entered a guilty plea Friday and agreed to serve a 13-month prison term.During an 80-minute hearing at U.S. District Court, Stephen Kim pled guilty to a single felony count of disclosing national defense information to an unauthorized person, Fox News reporter James Rosen.Kim admitted providing Rosen with the contents of a top-secret intelligence report on North Korean intentions to carry out nuclear tests. The contractor acknowledged that he and Rosen stepped out of their offices at State Department headquarters for a short meeting nearby on...

Attorney General Eric Holder says he has one regret: his department's court order for Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails labeling him a criminal "co-conspirator." The outgoing attorney general, who recently announced his retirement, addressed the controversial episode during the "Washington Ideas Forum" on Wednesday. Asked what decision he wishes he could do over, Holder said: "I think about the subpoena to the Fox reporter, Rosen." Holder was referring to a 2010 search warrant application seeking Rosen's emails. The Justice Department at the time was investigating who leaked information contained in a series of reports by Rosen in 2009 about...

An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

Solomon reports part of concern about the information being unsecured on Clinton’s home server is that it could have been hacked by the North Koreans–who would then know more about U.S. spying capabilities. Solomon reports the information was likely summarized from a secure site and sent in unclassified systems up the chain to Clinton. “One of the most serious potential breaches of national security identified so far by the intelligence community inside Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private emails involves the relaying of classified information concerning the movement of North Korean nuclear assets, which was obtained from spy satellites. “Multiple intelligence sources...

WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration announced to the world that it was planning to pursue a new Asia/Pacific-oriented national security strategy. Since then, North Korea has countered with a strategy of its own. In December, Pyongyang successfully launched a multistage intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a warhead-sized payload to the U.S. mainland. On Feb. 12, the North Koreans tested an improved-design nuclear weapon. After the test, Pyongyang announced that despite tightened United Nations sanctions that theoretically went into force last month, its latest nuclear test bolstered its defenses against U.S. "hostility." In a lengthy broadcast on the...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The White House announced yesterday that its inquiry into intelligence failures would include Libya, North Korea, and Iran in addition to Iraq, sparking quick criticism that the panel will be a long-delayed and watered-down examination of the intelligence that the Bush administration cited to justify the war in Iraq.</p>

Vice-president Dick Cheney stepped up America's war of words with North Korea yesterday by calling it a police state run by an irresponsible leader indifferent to the fate of his malnourished people.His words came just 48 hours after the Pentagon announced that it was sending 15 F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter-bombers to South Korea, a US ally, for an undetermined period. The aircraft crews, trained to seek out targets with precision weapons, needed to familiarise themselves with the Korean terrain, the air force said. Speaking to CNN in an interview broadcast last night, Mr Cheney described North Korea's leader, Kim Jong...