Another day, another PR disaster for North Korea. Yesterday, we failed to learn the fate of Megumi Yokota, kidnapped in 1977 at age 13; DNA tests proved that the remains Pyongyang handed over and said were Megumi’s weren’t. North Korea also gave President Koizumi a set of remains it claimed belonged to Kaoru Matsuki, who was kidnapped in 1980 at the age of 26. North Korea claimed that Kaoru was killed in a car accident in 1986. DNA tests released...

Turkey has deported the two North Korean dope-dealing diplomats back to Bulgaria.

Score a point for the Marmot. This report suggests that foreign news stories describing Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law as a more palatable successor led Kim to purge him. If true–and even this report casts it as speculation–it raises immediate suspicions of a cunning disinformation campaign intended to split the North Korean leadership. If so, good work.

I tend to treat the six-way talks as the irrelevancy they have proved to be. Odds are, if you’re reading this blog, you mostly agree. One hears honesty from a diplomat about as often as Soviet citizens read balanced reporting in Pravda. The analogy carries a step further; diplomacy, Pravda, and other carefully-crafted lies contain revealing omissions and nuances. A reference to party officials’ “mistakes” forecast their one-way ride to the Lubyanka just as surely as shifts in diplomatic positions...

OK, it’s not Bernie Kerik. I’m pretty disappointed to hear it, and I’m also deathly afraid that the next pick will be some cautious, squeaky clean politico too scared to bust heads.

Mr. Harrison published this bitter little diatribe today: Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons. I have to stop for a moment to wonder how far the name “Selig Harrison” got this guy. If my name were, say, Allistair J. Cockburn III, I’d probably be Undersecretary of...

Mr. Harrison published this bitter little diatribe today: Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons. I have to stop for a moment to wonder how far the name “Selig Harrison” got this guy. If my name were, say, Allistair J. Cockburn III, I’d probably be Undersecretary of...

Another day, another PR disaster for North Korea. Yesterday, we failed to learn the fate of Megumi Yokota, kidnapped in 1977 at age 13; DNA tests proved that the remains Pyongyang handed over and said were Megumi’s weren’t. North Korea also gave President Koizumi a set of remains it claimed belonged to Kaoru Matsuki, who was kidnapped in 1980 at the age of 26. North Korea claimed that Kaoru was killed in a car accident in 1986. DNA tests released...

Reading the Chosun‘s Washington correspondent’s columns is usually a lot like knitting a sweater out of concertina wire, but this time, he has enough to say on Roh’s appeasement offensive and the direction of U.S. policy to merit reading: The first point that needs to be clarified is that the collapse of North Korea and a regime change are by no means one and the same thing. Collapse signifies ruination on a national, economic and administrative scale, while regime change...

The Chosun quotes a senior Chinese academic as stating that defections of senior North Korean generals and officials are accelerating. The report contains few specifics, so consider it at face value.

Where could such a theory–“impenetrably dense” as it may be–have a better proving ground than a nation governed with all of the meritocratic efficiency of Maoism and the compassion of a Mandarin landlord. The Chinese people are awakening to the Communist Party’s transformation from jailer and executioner to jailer, executioner, and exploiter, with party bosses often ending up with controlling interests in the state-owned enterprises in their districts. Those bosses, without accountability to either voters or unions, are free to...

Two more North Korean diplomats have been caught smuggling drugs–this time from Bulgaria to Turkey. It’s a sad commentary that time in a Turkish prison might be a better fate than being sent home.

Reading the Chosun‘s Washington correspondent’s columns is usually a lot like knitting a sweater out of concertina wire, but this time, he has enough to say on Roh’s appeasement offensive and the direction of U.S. policy to merit reading: The first point that needs to be clarified is that the collapse of North Korea and a regime change are by no means one and the same thing. Collapse signifies ruination on a national, economic and administrative scale, while regime change...

The Chosun quotes a senior Chinese academic as stating that defections of senior North Korean generals and officials are accelerating. The report contains few specifics, so consider it at face value.

Where could such a theory–“impenetrably dense” as it may be–have a better proving ground than a nation governed with all of the meritocratic efficiency of Maoism and the compassion of a Mandarin landlord. The Chinese people are awakening to the Communist Party’s transformation from jailer and executioner to jailer, executioner, and exploiter, with party bosses often ending up with controlling interests in the state-owned enterprises in their districts. Those bosses, without accountability to either voters or unions, are free to...

Where could such a theory–“impenetrably dense” as it may be–have a better proving ground than a nation governed with all of the meritocratic efficiency of Maoism and the compassion of a Mandarin landlord. The Chinese people are awakening to the Communist Party’s transformation from jailer and executioner to jailer, executioner, and exploiter, with party bosses often ending up with controlling interests in the state-owned enterprises in their districts. Those bosses, without accountability to either voters or unions, are free to...

Two more North Korean diplomats have been caught smuggling drugs–this time from Bulgaria to Turkey. It’s a sad commentary that time in a Turkish prison might be a better fate than being sent home.

Specifically, GNP reps have accused an Uri rep of secretly joining the (North) Korean Workers’ Party. Nothing I saw here looked like especially compelling evidence, although if this were true, I’d be about as shocked as Claude Raines discovering gambling in that Moroccan casino.