UPDATE: To all those coming in from Roger Simon’s blog, welcome to The Marmot’s Hole, where it’s Korea twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
North Korea’s state-run (OK, redundant) news agency issued a denial today (English piece through Chosun Ilbo) that portraits of Kim Jong-il have been taken down in North Korea:
North Korea officially denied Saturday that portraits of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il had been taken down in public sites across the country.
In reaction to reports by Western media that portraits of the nation’s leader had been removed, the state’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said these were based on rumor not fact. There were no past or future plans to touch the venerable portraits, it said, adding that such speculation was part of a strategy of psychological warfare conducted against the North by hostile forces including the United States.
OK, nothing unusual there — no, we couldn’t even imagine taking the Dear Leader’s portraits down, and yes, it’s all a big conspiracy by the U.S. imperialists, Japanese militarists and running dog South Korean lackeys. All that was missing was the threat to pay the evil doers back 1000 fold or something like that. What does make it unusual however — and the Chosun Ilbo points this out — is that on Nov. 20, the Choson Sinbo — the mouthpiece of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan — ran a dispatch from Pyongyang claiming that the portraits were in fact taken down in international venues, complete with quotes from an official from the People’s Palace of Culture explaining how the removals were carried out on orders from Kim Jong-il himself and a touching tale of the younger Kim’s undying fidelity to his late dad.
Needless to say, this is slightly odd.
In fact, it’s odd enough to bolster a suspicion that I’ve had over the last couple of days, namely, all the portrait/Dear Leader omission/anti-Kim Jong-il movement/missing badges/assassination rumor/Chinese-backed coup stories coming out over the last couple of weeks are no accident. At the risk of echoing the KCNA, I think we might be witnessing an offensive information (or disinformation) campaign directing at the North Koreans.
As some of you might recall, in June of 2003, word got out that Rumsfeld and Co. had ordered the Pentagon to draw up an entirely new approach for conflict with North Korea. The result was reportedly OPLAN 5030, which according to GlobalSecurity.org, went a little something like this:
Critics of the plans provisions claim that it blurs the line between war and peace. Under the draft plan, US Forces Korea would conduct pre-conflict maneuvers to draw down North Korea’s limited military resources. This might place such stress on the North’s military that it might provoke a military coup against the country’s leader, Kim Jong Il.
According to Auster and Whitelaw, options available under OPLAN 5030 include flying RC-135 surveillance aircraft closer to North Korean airspace, provoking the DPRK to wear out scrambled interceptor aircraft and burn up jet fuel. Under another gambit, US commanders might stage a surprise or short-notice military exercises, provoking North Korean forces to disperse to [or from] bunkers. This could disclose details of DPRK war plans, and deplete reserse of food, water, and other materiel.
All very nasty, but there was more:
The initial draft of 5030 included a variety of operations not included in traditional operational war plans, such as disrupting financial networks and strategic disinformation activities. Indeed, the entire OPLAN 5030 story might be part of such offensive information operations, creating a bewildering wilderness of mirrors for the historically paranoid North [emphasis mine].
I can’t help but think back to “The Explosion.” You remember, right? The reportedly massive explosion that took place in Kim Hong-jik County (scroll down) along the Sino-Korean border that was said to have produced a mushroom cloud and had a lot of people thinking a missile battery, arms depot or munitions factory had gone up in smoke. Turned out to be nothing in the end, and so many of the “confirmed facts” that were getting printed ended up being complete and utter horseshit, but the Western and South Korean press had fun with it while it lasted, and it did produce some very confused North Korean responses that seemed to suggest they were as clueless as to what was happening as everyone else.
In this case, we got the portrait story breaking, and then all the spin doctoring, followed up by even more stories of very odd goings on in the land of Juche. An astronomical amount of other stories, actually, and can’t help but wonder whether this might be by design. I ran the idea by guest blogger Hamel a little earlier, and he pointed out that the removal of the portrait from the People’s Palace of Culture was an incontrovertible fact — there are pictures to prove it. Fair enough. But that still leaves us with a large pile of other stories — mostly of dubious credibility — all getting leaked at once. You also have the North Koreans issuing contradictory explanations in less than a weak, which might be simply Orwellian “We’re at war with Eurasia and have always been at war with Eurasia,” or it could mean — like they were with The Explosion — that they are genuinely confused by all that’s being reported about their little gangster kingdom. Would make even more sense if you figure that Kim Jong-il and the rest of the North Korean leadership, who seem to be a smart enough to realize that accurate information management is probably not a virtue of the North Korean system, most likely rely on the NYT, BBC and Chosun Ilbo for their news, and therefore would be particularly susceptible to a disinformation campaign of the nature we may or may not be witnessing.
Of course, this is all simply conjecture, and I put it out there mostly to get feedback from readers who might have their own theories on what is going on.
11 Comments
Interesting, but too complicated and doesn’t account for the facts, as your pal Hamel has pointed out. You are correct about there being confusion, but that may be because things are confused.
I pointed out to Marmot last night something which I think is significant, but clearly he does not: if you look at the photos from May and August of the interior of the People’s Palace of Culture, you will notice something interesting about the portraits. It is not as if the KJI portrait is just missing, or has been taken down for clearning/reframing/replacing with a news, fatter portrait of KJI. You will see that the KIS portrait has been taken down and re-hung in the exact centre of the wall. This is sigificant becaue it shows that the KJI is apparently gone for good - otherwise why go to the trouble of rehanging the KIS portrait on a new nail in a more aesthetically pleasing central location.
Marmot mocked this and said that he likes to centre the pictures in his house too (as I look around the bare walls of our house I realise it would be nice to have some), but that this is not political. True, but Marmot’s house is not in North Korea. There, everything is politics - especially aesthetics and appearances.
Re: conflicting reports out of NoKo: we see the ‘crossed lines’ (as Joongang Daly called it) of the portraits still up/portraits down coming out of different arms of the Pyongyang media. I have to think back to 2002 when Kim Myung Chul, biographer of KJI and director of the Center for Korean-American Peace, was on Australian and other media claiming that NK had over 100 nukes ready, and that they had tested them through Pakistan (thanks, AQ Khan), and these things were weaponised and ready to hit “American mainland”. All this while the Norks were still hedging their bets and saying other things.
Marmot’s theory about a PsyWar campaign agains the Norks is interesting, but we must remember that:
1) the portraits story is incontrovertible, and was broken by Russian newsagency TASS before anyone else picked up on it, and it was confirmed by diplomats in Pyongyang
2) the badges story, for all its questionable value, was broken by the Sork ministry for (anti) Unification! hardly a bastion of CIA/pro-Americanism there.
Other elements - the rumours that were spread around the stock markets on Thursday and the story about 10,000 Chinese troops hunkering down on the Chinese border - may be part of a PsyWar campaign, but equally well may not be.
Plus, let’s not forget that there is a precedent for portrait removal in other personality cult states: take a look at what happened in Turkmenistan earlier this year.
I don’t see how such a disinformation campaign on the portraits would be good psych-ops, because the international press doesn’t reach inside North Korea to that great an extent. I don’t see how the portrait story would hurt North Korea’s position with the key nations it needs to keep it alive either. Fake stories of mass atrocities against its own people, yes……taking down portraits….no. Such a story might create problems inside North Korea if the North Koreans ever heard about it on a large scale….but I don’t see that happening.
I started saying about a year ago I thought the best plan the US could develop that gives the best option to seeing the North Korea problem solved was to use psych-ops on a large scale.
I’m thinking about sneaking in thousands of handheld mini-DVD players with “propaganda” DVDs — which for North Korea would be as simple as just about any non-fiction footage that showed the real world outside Korea.
I remember watching a special on the end of the Cold War. This Russian buisnessman said he had been a firm believer in Communism. Then, he went to England on buisness in the late 1980s when exchange was taking place. He said he brought back a video camera and VHS tapes he’d shot
North Korean Rumors
A “disinformation conspiracy” against the DPRK sounds like fun, but it violates the guidelines of Occam’s Razor.
I think that, at best, there seems to be whole lot of confusion going on in North Korea, but I doubt that the source is primarily ext…
Interesting conjecture, but I echo Hamel’s objection. The North Korean government, always baffling in its intentions, has become even more perplexing over the past couple of years. Take their statements on nuclear weapons. “Yes, we have them.” “No, we never said that we have them.” “We’re have the right to have them.” Perhaps they’ve begun to confuse themselves. Given the disinformation from above and misinformation from below that pervades dictatorial systems, with their closed, hierarchical structures, we shouldn’t be too surprised when they’re misinformed about themselves.
Jeffery Hodges
“…I can?€™t help but think back to ?€œThe Explosion…turned out to be nothing in the end.”
I guess I missed whatever source you’re citing here. You mean there never was any explosion and it was a totally fictional account?
BTW, your link about this, above (…reportedly massive explosion that took place in Kim Hong-jik County along the Sino-Korean border…) just takes me back to the beginning of this same thread.
Sorry, Paul — you need to scroll down. It’s an archive of my posts on Kim Hyong-jik County, so this post is included (as it mentions the afore cited county). I’ve added a reminder in the original post.
Was there an explosion in Kim Hyong-jik County? Probably not. There may have been an explosion in Samsu County, supposedly for dam construction, but even that story was all blured. Actually, you won’t find a post where I go, “This is all bullshit,” and I’ll tell you why, because I remember the night quite vividly. I had spent a considerable amount of time trying to process all the info that was coming in, and I started getting increasing frustrated with all the nameless sources and conflicting reports of “confirmed facts” (like about things like seismic data). Nothing really solid was coming in, no one could find witnesses on the other side of the border who reported seeing a mushroom cloud or anything really unusual. It was clear that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about. Just to give you one particularly blatant example, this was from AP:
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A large explosion occurred in the northern part of North Korea, sending a huge mushroom cloud into the air on an important anniversary of the communist regime, a South Korean news agency reported Sunday.
The Yonhap news agency, citing an unidentified source in Beijing, said the explosion happened Thursday in Yanggang province near the border with China. The explosion in Kim Hyong Jik county blasted a crater big enough to be noticed by a satellite, the source said.
“We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5 to 4 kilometers (about 2-2 1/2 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion,” Yonhap quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul as saying.
“A crater big enough to be noticed by a satellite?” Unnamed sources in Seoul and Beijing?
Anyway, I trashed the post I was working on when it became clear the story was, in fact, a non-story. In the end, satellites couldn’t detect anything unusual, the cloud was chalked up as most likely a natural phenomenon, and if there was an explosion, it probably took place at the dam construction site in Samsu County. You can take a look at the full rundown of events (scroll down) at GlobalSecurity.org.
reminds of of when US forces took Iraq. They eventually foud out that Saddams bluster was just that. That there was little real threat and/or organization.
I’m not saying Kimmy isn’t threatening BUT this could reflect serious structural defects in the communication and decision making process in the regime.
I’m all for hammering the DPRK with any means necessary, to keep them off balance rather than belligerent and overconfident. I have no affirmitive reason to believe there’s a psy-ops offensive, though your argument is certainly suggestive. Say for a moment that there is, though. What’s to keep that photo from having been altered? Presumably the CIA has Photoshop, not to mention airbrushes. Any idea what its provenance is, beyond the Joong-Ang Ilbo and Chosun? Are there multiple copies of Chosun out there with the picture? Or just the one in the possession of Joong-Ang Ilbo?
I tend to be dubious, but asking such questions is big fun.
To Bill Walsh:
according to the caption in the Joongang, the pictures are from NKs own propaganda magazines. This can be easily checked at the (anti)Unifcation Ministry’s own library and resource centre.
What’s more, I have spoken to people who have been there recently and can testify to - at the very least - the fact that the portrait of KJI at the People’s Palace of Culture is down (at least in the main conference hall). So I have no doubts at all about that. But one aid worker I spoke to said that all portraits in the field (outside Pyongyang) are up - nothing is untoward there. When one diplomat asked for an explanation, they were met with mixed responses, from “No comment,” to “you are mistaken; there never was a portrait there.”
Confusion? I’ll say.
Marmot, Roger Simon has linked to your psy-ops post: