OFK Exclusive: N. Korea to Charge Crafty Yodok Inmates With Running International Counterfeiting Ring

The U.S. has said the question of North Korea’s frozen accounts in the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia could be resolved early if North Korea punishes counterfeiters of U.S. dollars and destroys their equipment.  [link]

Firing squads and bloody handshakes to follow, and my sources tell me there may  even be a ceremonial steamrolling of the HP Laserjet that was  the center of this dastardly plan.  I dare you to  figure out where the  satire ends and the “news” begins:

Ever since it froze the accounts, the U.S. was adamant that the North Korean regime must be held to account for the forgeries and rejected any face-saving solution whereby the North would punish nominal culprits as if they had acted independently — the very option it is proposing now.

Yes, they really are serious — as are your diplomatic representatives — in recommending the adoption of  a theory that in the world’s most controlled society, rogue elements carried out an elaborate international  racket over the course of 20 years, including all of the following:

*   Making a contract with the sole supplier of a patented color-shifting ink, in this case, black-to-magenta, from the ink’s only  manufacturer.  In Switzerland.

*   Meticulously designing and carving  printing plates in sharper detail than the originals.

*   Obtaining expensive intaglio printing presses (which few if any developing countries use).

*   Reverse-engineering and manufacturing tons of colon-linen paper to match that used for printing U.S. currency;

*   Building an entire printing plant –yes, an entire printing plant —  for applying that special ink to those special plates, using that special press, onto that special paper, not in a remote abandoned warehouse or an abandoned mine, but at Printing House 62, an extension of North Korea’s national mint complex at Pyongsong, near Pyongyang;

*   Exporting large quantities of that currency from North Korea, without the knowledge of North Korean authorities, despite the fact that it is illegal for North Koreans to possess U.S. currency.

I reckon that not a single reader believes that anyone in North Korea possesses that degree of extra-authoritarian sophistication (at least, that seems to be the general consensus here).  More, I suspect, will simply ask, “Why not permit us all to have our little fictions to remove a greater obstacle to peace?”  Leave aside the fact that this peace kills more people and causes more suffering  than most wars.  If I believed that entertaining such a fiction offered any more  realistic prospect of bringing us to peace than, say, the pretense  that North Korea isn’t in the uranium enrichment business, it might merit serious thought.   But of course,  it’s neither American instransigence nor even North Korean incorrigibility that bars  us from  the  face-saving exit that our great South Korean blood allies have so persistently demanded.  They could have simply  traded the North Koreans’ dollar plates for the necessary components to print a few tons of these:

Win, win.  Another chance for peace!

For decades, our North Korea policy has been built upon the creative pursuit of fictitous addresses for  each fleeting  meeting of the minds.  All have led back to where we’ve been stuck all along:  across variously shaped tables from an interlocutor who knows that no violation of basic standards of law or humanity will go unrewarded.  Just as you can’t denuclearize a country that won’t admit that it broke its last three  agreements* and created a uranium enrichment program  — and then shared  its  poison fruit with A.Q. Khan and Khaddafy —  we will not see the end of North Korea’s global crime wave without  some admission of guilt or acceptance of its conviction.  Convictions, sadly, are in short supply in this city.

Still, I have a few questions about how Peace in Our Time  will work in practice: 

–   Will we verify that the North Koreans have indeed destroyed the presses, ink, and plates, or were we planning on taking their word for it?

–   Would we insist on interviewing these “rogue elements,” or would it suffice to see any scapegoat in striped pajamas tied to a post and splattered off the face of Hell on Earth?

–   What sort of compensation would we pay the North Koreans for yielding up their unique privilege of printing our money?  One is entitled to wonder what it would cost us to get them out of their other rackets:  growing and dealing dope, counterfeiting cigarettes, abducting other countries’ citizens, trading in rhino horn, and trafficking in WMD’s? 

Last August, after years of neo-Clintonite  dithering, this Administration had finally  found the testicular fortitude to weaken this regime by attacking its financial lifelines without firing a single metallic projectile, and probably without doing significant  further harm to the victims of Kim Jong Il’s famine.  The available evidence had suggested that the threads holding this entire Gordian Knot together were rotting and brittle.  Will we now  throw away all of the  leverage that we  might have used to  shed fundamental transparency  on North Korea’s crimes, both great and petty?  Or will we again have to pray that North Korea will  do us the favor of being  too stupid to take this deal and run like a thief?

*   I refer to the Inter-Korean Denuclearization Agreement, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Agreed Framework.