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June 30, 2009

Plan B Watch

A year ago, who would have suspected that we’d be celebrating the replacement of a liberal accommodationist named George W. Bush with a hard line neocon named Barack Obama, who would finally show signs of grasping not just the reality of North Korea’s bad faith, but some of the very best tools for breaking it?  Christine Ahn’s misery (and Selig Harrison’s, and Leon Sigal’s) is my pleasure: The Treasury Department’s 2005 blacklisting of Macau’s Banco Delta Asia, which held a...
Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Washington Views
June 29, 2009

Obama Forms Team Plan B

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama is forming an inter-agency team, much like the Illicit Activities Initiative that David Asher headed in G.W. Bush’s first term, to coordinate sanctions against North Korea: The White House is forming an interagency team to coordinate sanctions efforts against North Korea with other nations, senior administration officials said yesterday.  The team will be led by Philip S. Goldberg, a former ambassador to Bolivia who is slated to leave for China in the...
Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
June 28, 2009

A North Korean Connection to Those Counterfeit Bonds?

It’s very short on specifics, but it’s the first published report affirmatively linking those fake bonds to North Korea: An Italian newspaper reports a recent mysterious case involving US$134.5 billion worth of counterfeit bonds has a North Korea connection. Earlier this month two Japanese nationals were caught in Italy allegedly trying to smuggle the bonds into Switzerland. Il Messaggero says the fake bonds may have been manufactured in North Korea since the two men are North Korean agents and are...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
June 18, 2009

Breaking News: Treasury Issues Money Laundering Alert Against North Korea

This is going to be a big deal.  By the time I have time to update this post, the world financial system will have started purging itself of its links to North Korea.  More later. Update:   Call it Plan B light, and quite possibly a prelude to better things, but this by itself will have a significant effect. Why, you ask?  After all, this alert doesn’t freeze anything.  It’s merely a warning: The U.N. Security Council’s adoption of specific...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Sanctions
June 17, 2009

Take the Money and Run

Like I said:  the North Koreans snore though all those threats from Perry, Gingrich, and Eagleburger, but Stuart Levey scares the bejeezus out of them: North Korea is rushing to withdraw money from its overseas bank accounts after the United Nations imposed financial and other sanctions for its nuclear test, a report said. South Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, quoting sources in Beijing, said the North had begun withdrawing funds from accounts in Macau and elsewhere for fear they would be...
Categories Japan/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 10, 2009

S. Korea and Japan Join Sanctions Effort Against North Korea

Kyodo News and Yonhap are reporting that we’re close to announcing a deal on sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.  I’m hopeful that the length of the negotiation means that we’ve insisted on something reasonably tough on paper; less so that the Chinese and the Russians will cooperate in practice.  I tend to view claims that China has lost patience with North Korea at last as so much Chinese disinformation, meant to mask China’s premeditated enabling of North Korea’s misdeeds...
Categories "United" Nations/China/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 5, 2009

Obama Gears Up for “Plan B;” John Kerry Blocks Terror Re-Listing

I really don’t know what to make of this.  A young, inexperienced president, one whom the North Koreans arguably endorsed, comes into office showing every sign of being easier meat than Lance Bass in Riker’s Island.  The North Koreans, true to Joe Biden’s prophetic gaffe, and with their exquisite sensitivity to American weakness, don’t even let the man get inaugurated before they begin the noisy repudiation of every agreed framework, U.N. resolution, and armistice they can stuff into a shredder....
Categories "United" Nations/China/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
June 3, 2009

Must Read: New Details Leaked on North Korea’s Counterfeiting

Say it with me: thank goodness Christopher Hill got the North Koreans promise never, ever to counterfeit our currency ever again — cross my heart and hope to be executed before a crowd of bused-in schoolchildren! A North Korean general who is a confidant of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, has been identified by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies as a key figure in the covert production and distribution of high-quality counterfeit $100 bills called supernotes, according to documents and...
Categories Counterfeiting/Kremlinology/Media Criticism/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 25, 2009

Stuart Levey Renominated

Yes, it’s a perfectly excellent nomination by the Obama Administration for Treasury. No, I’m serious. Stuart Levey, the Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, played the key role in snipping North Korea’s financial lifelines in 2005 and 2006, starting with Macau’s Banco Delta Asia. Treasury’s effort ended when North Korea blinked and made a bunch of false promises to Chris Hill just to stop the pain, and Chris Hill duly made it stop. But no single U.S. government official...
Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics
January 26, 2009

Eberstadt: What Went Wrong

So over the weekend, I finally had a chance to read Nicholas Eberstadt’s fine summary of the Bush Administration’s eight years of drift and indecision on North Korea (hat tip to Robert Koehler). It’s hard to pick a favorite passage, but this one certainly struck a chord: In the absence of a coherent policy, though, the imperative of “success” in talks with North Korea suddenly took on a life of its own for the Bush team. (After all, there was...
Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics/Washington Views
April 17, 2008

Must Read: Sung-Yoon Lee on the Bush-Lee Summit

If anyone ever asks what we should do about North Korea from this day forward, I think I’ll just refer them to this: Empower the office of the US special envoy for human rights in North Korea so that the special envoy can fulfill his mandate as per Section 107 of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 unfettered by Washington politics. Make full use of the $20 million appropriated for 2008 to provide assistance to North Koreans outside...
Categories An Alliance?/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea
April 7, 2008

China Steps Up Efforts to Undermine U.S. and U.N. Sanctions Against N. Korea

The single most important provision of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, for which China cast a disingenuous “yes” vote, is the provision that requires member states to “ensure” that funds flowing into North Korea are not used for its WMD programs. Similarly, Resolution 1695 requires states to “exercise vigilance” against efforts to fund U.N. sanctions. Now, in the wake of U.S. Treasury sanctions that have put the North Korean regime under unprecedented pressure to meet its disarmament obligations, China is...
Categories China/China & Korea/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
April 2, 2008

Treasury: North Korea Still Counterfeiting, Still a Financial Pariah

The State Department and Bill Richardson  may harbor illusions to the contrary, but Stuart Levey, Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence may be only man in Washington with real influence  over Pyongyang.  Yesterday, Levey  appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to testify.  A reader (thank you) forwarded me a copy of his testimony, and I excerpt the North Korea portion for you here.  The key points  here are that (a) North Korea continues to be an international financial...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Crime
January 25, 2008

Kevin G. Hall’s Counterfeit Journalism (Updated)

[Update 28 Jan 08:   I’m going to keep flogging this story until I’ve corrected the record.  A reader (thank you)  directs me to this Bloomberg story by none other than Bradley K. Martin and Hideko Takayama.  This one is second only to Steven Mihm’s  for  the quality of its  investigative reporting.  If you’ve read Martin’s book, you’ll  already know  that he’s no neocon collapsist, to say the least.    Takayama and Martin interviewed Yoshihide Matsumura, “whose Matsumura Technology Co....
Categories Counterfeiting/Media Criticism/Money Laundering
January 22, 2008

Plan B: How to Disarm Kim Jong Il Without Bombing Him

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    — Albert Einstein Plan A, gentle diplomacy,  has  again  failed to disarm Kim Jong Il.  Whenever this happens (every time it’s tried) advocates of doing the same thing over and over again fall back on The False Choice, whether expressly or by implication:  it’s  their way or war.  They know better, of course, which technically makes this a lie.   And usually, this lie  stands uncorrected: “People...
Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks
December 30, 2007

Ralph Cossa is wrong; Pressure on North Korea worked, when applied

Generally, I agree with  Robert Koehler  that Lee Myung Bak’s landslide victory was anything but a mandate for a better, more moral North Korea policy.  It will put  less irrational people in charge, but the policy will not be the improvement that Nicholas Eberstadt hopes for unless Kim Jong Il gets seriously on the wrong side of  Lee Myung-Bak’s temper. Why?   First, the election was all about money.  Second, Lee Myung Bak is all about money.  Third, South Korean voters  …...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics/Money Laundering
September 11, 2007

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards:  to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas.  That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system.  That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say  that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed  a dozen  years ago.  What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when...
Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics
July 13, 2007

Law Enforcement Will Be Compromised, Part 2

Law enforcement will not be compromised. ““ Chris Hill, Feb. 27, 2007   [Update:   Welcome Wall Street Journal readers.]   The latest refutation of this whopper of diplomatic mendacity is an extensive new investigative report on North Korea’s criminal enterprises from Time  (thanks to a reader for forwarding).  The report suggests that our State Department’s incomprehensible  decision to return $25 million  of Kim Jong Il’s criminally derived funds,  now under GAO investigation as a possible violation of our own...
Categories Appeasement/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks