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Category: Terrorism (NK)

March 16, 2017

N. Korea, Lazarus & SWIFT: Are the white hats closing in? (Update: SWIFT cuts off remaining N. Korean banks)

In the last month, major news stories about North Korea have bombarded my batting cage faster than I’ve been able to swing at them. I’d wondered when I’d have a chance to cover Katy Burne’s detailed story in the Wall Street Journal about the empty half of the SWIFT glass ” that despite its recent decision to disconnect three U.N.-designated North Korean banks, it’s still messaging for banks that are sanctioned by the Treasury Department, but not by the U.N.:...
Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law
March 7, 2017

Malaysia holds the upper hand in its hostage dispute with North Korea

Three weeks ago, Malaysia was one of North Korea’s most important trading partners — a haven, hub, and way station for its arms trafficking, money laundering, and slave labor. Money has long been the limiting reagent in Pyongyang’s experiment with phobocracy. It’s now clear that Kim Jong-un will soon pay a heavy financial and diplomatic price for the badly botched murder of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam with a persistent nerve agent in a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur last month....
Categories Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)
February 24, 2017

N. Korea just killed a guy with one of the WMDs that caused us to invade Iraq … in a crowded airport terminal, in a friendly nation.

Last night, Malaysian police revealed that Kim Jong-nam’s killers murdered him with VX, the deadliest of the nerve agents. I had hypothesized before that the killers almost certainly acted on orders from His Porcine Majesty. Saddam Hussein’s suspected possession of stockpiles of VX was at the core of our justification for invading Iraq. This time, the case doesn’t rely on grainy satellite photos or shadowy, unnamed sources. (And this time, an invasion is also the wrong answer to the problem;...
Categories Anju Links/Southeast Asia/Terrorism (NK)
February 15, 2017

The man who wouldn’t be king: the short, happy life of Kim Jong-nam

Kim Jong Nam, the estranged older half-brother of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, was killed in an attack at Kuala Lumpur airport, Malaysian police confirmed on Tuesday, in an apparent assassination. The 46-year-old was assaulted by a woman who covered his face with a cloth laced with liquid as he was waiting for a flight to Macau, said Fadzil Ahmat, a Malaysian police official. He was confirmed dead after being taken to hospital. [Financial Times] The kindest way to...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/Terrorism (NK)
February 6, 2017

The Commerce Department should review PUST’s export licenses for North Korea

Last week, several news outlets reported that representatives of PUST, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, are in the United States, seeking support to expand their curriculum in North Korea. PUST didn’t say what kind of support it seeks, but recent reports suggest that PUST has lost donors and had to slash its budget. PUST is probably looking for money. Donors, however, would be wise to keep their checkbooks closed until the Commerce Department and a U.N. Panel of...
Categories Cyberwar/Engagement/Technology
January 19, 2017

Why North Korea will go back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism this year

As I write, Yonhap is reporting that North Korea may be fueling up two ICBMs for a test. Meanwhile, in Washington, Texas Republican Ted Poe has already shaped one part of the likely response to that. Poe isn’t one to back down from a fight — not with leukemia, and not with North Korea. He’s back at the helm of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, where one of his first acts this year was to reintroduce a...
Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
December 10, 2016

Hacked again

For the last several weeks, North Korea-watchers in Washington have been warning each other about suspicious attachments and spoof messages. I was starting to feel ignored, envious, and unimportant until Friday, when a friend warned me that my site was blocked by his office’s anti-malware software. I don’t have the sophisticated defenses that big institutions do, but fortunately, I have an excellent hosting service. The last time this happened, they recommended a subscription service that cleans up malware injects. Between the hosting service...
Categories Blogs & Blogging/Cyberwar
September 6, 2016

N. Korea calls for murder of S. Korean President, State Dep’t still doesn’t think it sponsors terrorism

“When he eventually came to power, there was no book which deserved more careful study from the rulers, political and military, of the Allied powers. All was there”¦.” – Winston Churchill, on Mein Kampf History, which is diplomacy in the past tense, is littered with examples of despots who made their intentions clear, but whom journalists and diplomats in free nations have blindly refused to take at their word. So it was that in the late 1930s, the journalist and future...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
August 31, 2016

N. Korea’s biggest a**hole shoots Vice-Premier, sends second-biggest a**hole to weed the fields

Here at OFK, stories about kremlinology are usually page two material. Too often, we’ll read reports that some official or minor celebrity has been executed, only to read a year later that the target has risen like Lazarus from the KCNA crypt. As a general rule, the closer a story about North Korea is to the center of the power structure, the less I tend to believe it. Which is why I didn’t even tweet the report yesterday that His Porcine...
Categories Cyberwar/Kremlinology/Terrorism (NK)
June 17, 2016

House Committee marks up bill calling for N. Korea’s re-listing as a terror sponsor

Last month, when it was introduced, I wrote about H.R. 5208, the House bill that would require the Secretary of State to acknowledge some of the extensive evidence — including final U.S. federal court judgments — of North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism, and to go on the record as to whether North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee took the next step on H.R. 5208, approving it in a committee markup....
Categories Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
June 13, 2016

Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we...
Categories Censorship/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
June 2, 2016

Congress asked for a real report on North Korean terrorism. The State Department hit CTRL-V and called it good.

As regular readers of this site have heard a few times by now, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and despite overwhelming evidence, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” A few years ago, a less inquisitive Congress might actually have bought that, but in recent years, as North Korea’s sponsorship...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
May 31, 2016

How much have sanctions affected PUST? Not enough, apparently.

Chan-Mo Park, the Chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, or PUST, and a U.S. citizen, is blaming South Korean bilateral sanctions for his difficulties recruiting new academic talent. He told VOA on Wednesday, “We want to recruit South Korean professors, but the May 24 measure blocks it.” He was referring to trade and exchange sanctions South Korea made against North Korea on May 24, 2010. The sanctions came after South Korea accused the North of sinking one...
Categories Cyberwar
May 15, 2016

New bipartisan bill raises pressure on State Dep’t to list N. Korea as a terror sponsor

As readers of this site know, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” That position is spurious. The evidence of North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism is overwhelming. It includes shipments of arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, multiple attempts...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
May 3, 2016

Who killed Pastor Han Chung-ryeol?

Since 1993, Pastor Han Chung-ryeol, an ethnic Korean citizen of China, had operated a church with 300 members at the foot of Mount Changbai, which the Koreans call Mount Paektu, on the Chinese side of the border. NK News reports that Pastor Han was last seen leaving his church at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. He was found on the side of the Mountain at 8:00 that evening, “with knife and axe wounds in his neck.” Someone murdered Pastor Han, and not without...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
February 24, 2016

North Korea threatens to nuke everyone

North Korea on Tuesday strongly denounced the upcoming joint military exercise between Seoul and Washington, warning a “pre-emptive strike” against any attempt to collapse the Kim Jong-un regime. South Korea and the United States plan to conduct their largest-ever military drill next month at a time of heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula following Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test and long-range missile launch. In response, the North Korean military said it will use all possible measures to counter any attempts to...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
February 18, 2016

Arsenal of Terror, 2d Ed.: N. Korea reportedly orders assassination of prominent defector

I wondered what evidence the South Koreans had to back this up. Police have strengthened security for a North Korean defector who serves as a ranking official at a South Korean state-run think tank after the North ordered his assassination, a source said Friday. Since mid-January, police have beefed up the guard over Ko Young-hwan, vice president of the Institute for National Security Strategy, as North Korea is believed to have issued an order to kill him according to a...
Categories Terrorism (NK)
January 27, 2016

Meet the assassin/killer/hacker/terrorist Kim Jong-un just put in charge of relations with S. Korea

With all recent movement on sanctions legislation in the House and Senate, I’ve skimmed over the developments in North Korean Kremlinology, reports about which often read like the dossiers in a lost, bad-acid fueled manuscript for a “High Castle” sequel. If you believe that personnel is policy, however, Kim Jong-un’s choice of a replacement for Kim Yang-gon, who ran Pyongyang’s so-called United Front Department until he died in a car-maybe-not-accident recently, is a dark omen about Kim Jong-un’s policy instincts. The...
Categories Cyberwar/North-South/Terrorism (NK)