October 10, 2013

Review: Treasury’s War, by Juan Zarate

Let me begin with an apology for the lack of posting lately. While tossing a football around with some friends, I took a direct head-on hit to that finger you need for typing words that contain the letters “l” or an “o,” which turn out to be less dispensable than you might think. The time I didn’t spend typing, I spent reading instead: [clicking the image takes you to Amazon] If you want to understand why the Banco Delta Asia...
Categories Axis of Evil/Books & Films/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
October 3, 2013

Sanctions are working in Iran. They’ll work better against North Korea, and here’s why.

Drag a modest grant check through DuPont Circle and you’ll accumulate at least ten pundits, several dozen grad students, and a multitude of assorted kooks who would willingly write you an academic paper entitled, “Why Sanctions Never Worked.” And that’s true, except for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, Nauru, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, and only if you limit the argument to trade sanctions and exclude other tools of economic pressure, like coordinated divestment, third-party financial sanctions like those in Section...
Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 2, 2013

Open Sources, October 2, 2013

~          1          ~ THREE CHEERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: Ever since Blaine Harden, Chico Harlan, and Max Fisher have covered the story, the Post‘s North Korea coverage has been leagues beyond that of any competitor, especially The New York Times. What’s really commendable is that the Post‘s editorial board draws the necessary conclusions from what its journalists are reporting: A COMMON illusion held by dictators is that they need only to shut the borders, turn...
Categories Anju Links
October 1, 2013

I can’t wait to read this one: “Treasury’s War,” by Juan Zarate

I wonder if Amazon can deliver this while I still have an unexpected windfall of leisure time: Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, plays the role of the bureaucrat. He joined the Treasury Department just weeks before the 2001 attacks to aid the agency’s enforcement wing. [….] Treasury launched its most ambitious assault with this new weapon on a tiny bank in Macau. That bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), caught the department’s attention in...
Categories Books & Films/Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 27, 2013

RAND’s study of N. Korea collapse should be required reading at State, USFK

This week, the World Bank recently analyzed a series of governance indicators to conclude that the North Korean regime is stabilizing. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees. Bruce Bennett of RAND has just published an indispensable, readable, and plausibly terrifying new study of the regime’s stability, and he reaches a very different conclusion. To Bennett, a violent and chaotic collapse looks increasingly likely as North Korea tries to consolidate succession to its third hereditary ruler. (Thanks to a reader for forwarding). Bennett lays out a...
Categories Reconstruction/Regime Change
September 25, 2013

N. Korea threatens S. Korean media over Ri Sol Ju sex tape report

As Kim Jong Un’s reign approaches its second anniversary, it’s becoming more difficult to draw the line between truth and parody. Radio Australia offers some tantalizing details about that dubious-sounding, thinly sourced report that a North Korea executed a group of entertainers for making sex tapes: Asahi said the rare execution of state performers, including a singer rumoured to be Kim’s ex-girlfriend, had been ordered to squash rumours of Ri’s decadent lifestyle while she was an entertainer. It said police had secretly recorded conversations...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Terrorism (NK)
September 24, 2013

Cartmanland, the Country: Kim Jong Un inspects Pyongyang’s new 3-D cinema

The expression was “bread and circuses,” not “bread or circuses”: Marshal Kim Jong Un, first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, first chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, visited … Wait! Let me guess. A steel mill? An artillery battery? A model collective farm that raises alpaca wool for export? A troupe of precious toddlers who were taken from their mothers at birth and trained to somersault through...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Un
September 23, 2013

What’s that? Our fucking plan for North Korea, you ask? It’s called “H.R. 1771”

Update 2, 9/24: So now that I’ve noticed that I was reacting quite strongly to a seven year-old post, recently retweeted by another blogger–but still, sheesh–let me offer my apologies to Mr. Lewis for the tone of my reaction, and my compliments to Robert Gallucci for at least conceding that the old policy didn’t work. Original Post:  You know, Jeffrey, you ask that question with a boldness that seems to presume the absence of a ready answer. If reading the...
Categories U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
September 23, 2013

AP Pyongyang outsources National Geographic reporting to objective journalist

It’s telling that when the AP wants to exhibit its work to the readers of National Geographic, it teams David Guttenfelder’s photos with Tim Sullivan’s reporting (which has usually been good) instead of Jean Lee’s (which hasn’t). The result is better reporting: But hearing the truth is challenging while loudspeakers blast songs of praise for Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. When the government allows foreigners inside, it presents them with a delicately crafted illusion of how the regime wants the...
Categories Anju Links
September 23, 2013

Open Sources, September 23, 2013

~          1          ~ SO, CHARM OFFENSIVE’S OVER, I TAKE IT? Pyongyang sends Chuseok greetings: Just two days ago, one of the South Koreans selected for the reunion passed away. Three others said they couldn’t make it because of deteriorating health, the South’s unification ministry said. For those healthy enough, like Park Tae-bong, 85, this reunion was supposed to be a chance to piece together decades of missing family history. He was set...
Categories Anju Links
September 21, 2013

Democracies don’t shoot their own people for trying to leave

The ROK Army has given its explanation for why its soldiers shot a would-be South-to-North defector, and that explanation is completely unsatisfactory: Asked if the soldiers’ response was excessive, Brigadier General Cho Jong-sul at the briefing said: “It was legitimate. In a combat area like this, anyone who ignores our soldiers’ repeated warnings and tries to run away to North Korea will get shot.” The ministry said Mr. Nam was carrying a South Korean passport, which showed that he had...
Categories Democracy/ROK Military
September 21, 2013

Kaesong investors beware: Treasury issues new warning about N. Korea money laundering risk

Precisely what North Koreans do with earnings from Kaesong, I think, is something that we are concerned about.” – David Cohen, Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Just as Kaesong begins the process of reopening, and as the South Korean government seeks to “internationalize” investment there, the Treasury Department has issued a new warning about money laundering risks emanating from North Korea. The warning echoes longstanding concerns by the global Financial Action Task Force. Every potential investor in...
Categories Money Laundering/North-South/Sanctions/Sunshine
September 20, 2013

Let them drink beer: Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, where Orwell meets South Park

This week, the U.N. gave the North Korean government another million dollars for flood disaster aid to North Korea. Last month, the U.N. World Food Program appealed for $98 million to feed hungry North Koreans. Earlier this year, European NGOs blamed international sanctions for their difficulties paying for their operations in North Korea. And yet somehow, Kim Jong Un has found plenty of grain for brewing beer: North Korea completed construction of a brand new brewery in Haeju city that has up-to-date production facilities, the communist...
Categories Kim Jong Un/NK Economics
September 19, 2013

Open Sources, September 19, 2013

~          1          ~ QUICK! TO THE VANKMOBILE! I hate to break it to “Jonathan Smith,” but no, South Korea is not known as the “PRK,” which I assume is supposed to stand for the “Peoples’ Republic of Korea.” Smith has set up a web site intended to reassure readers that their travels in North Korea will be perfectly safe (Ken Bae and Park Wang-Ja were not available for comment). His choice of a Q&A format–along...
Categories Anju Links
September 18, 2013

U.N. Commissioner: N. Korean atrocities unlike any since the Khmer Rouge, Nazis

Reader Chris Beaumont* emailed me yesterday to draw my attention to the web site of the U.N. Commission on Inquiry on human rights abuses in North Korea. On this page, you can find links to videos of all of the Commission’s hearings in Seoul (English and Korean) and Tokyo (English and Japanese). I haven’t had time to review the complete record, but in this one, Shin Dong Hyok testifies about Camp 14 with the aid of Google Earth imagery. There...
Categories Anju Links
September 16, 2013

ROK Army shoots, kills man attempting to swim to N. Korea

I’ll withhold my criticism until I know a few more facts, but I can’t immediately understand why South Korean troops had to shoot and kill a South Korean man who was swimming the Imjin toward North Korea. This would not be the first South-to-North defection, but I don’t know why one the loss of one more nut or fugitive would be a great loss to the South. If the South doesn’t address the appropriateness of the use of force, it will weaken calls...
Categories Defectors/North-South/ROK Military
September 16, 2013

Releases and higher mortality shrink North Korea’s prison camp population

The newest update on Camps 18 and 22 from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) continues to draw news coverage, most recently in the form of this grim report by Chico Harlan of The Washington Post. Harlan reports that the camps’ population is now likely between 80,000 and 120,000, much lower than the previous estimate of 200,000. Part of this decline reflects a correction of previous overestimates of the population. I’d mentioned here and here, for example, my...
Categories The Camps