Marmot’s Note: Read the following with extreme skepticism.
The right-wing Korean Internet newspaper The Independent, quoting a terrorism expert in Seoul familiar with the inner workings of North Korea, reported that North Korea has been deploying military personnel to left-wing nations in Central and South America who are preparing to infiltrate the U.S. across the U.S.-Mexico border and lauch biological attacks on the U.S.
The expert said that since the Cold War, North Korea has been sending military advisors to countries like Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Brazil. He said these personnel have recently been preparing to infiltrate the States in large numbers through its border with Mexico in order to carry out biological terrorist attacks. He said the possibility of the North carrying out such attacks was high.
He said North Korea was pursuing a strategy of putting together and leading a coalition of anti-American Third World nations while teaming up with Al-Qaeda to “cut up U.S. imperialism” through terrorist attacks in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The North seeks to use to the fullest recent anti-American sentiment in Latin America.
The report said the U.S. was aware of these moves and taking precautions against them.
He also said that fearing retribution following the collapse of the North Korean regime, North Korean agents in South Korea might launch “pre-emptive” terrorist attacks to paralize Korea’s communication and subway system.
The original story, BTW, is from another conservative Internet paper, News and People.
Personally, it sounds like bullshit coming from a shady source, but it makes entertaining reading, I guess. And I guess anything is possible.
12 Comments
Infiltration via Mexico?€? while I don?€™t believe it will happen, assuming that is what NK wants to do I suppose it could be done with reasonable ease. The border is pretty porous so if they were to try, some of them I am sure would succeed. I am sure NK would have to understand full well that any such attack would be the end of the NK regime and for that reason, I don?€™t think it would happen. NKs goal is not to defeat the US but to secure the future existence of NK and to avoid fighting. I am not a Bruce Cummings fan but I think that it is fairly safe to assume that if their purpose was really to attack the US, they would have already made their move.
[...] Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 11:35 pm by Jason The Marmot says: Proceed with extreme skepticism The right-win [...]
“a terrorism expert” who is “familiar with the inner workings of North Korea”?
Yes, “anything is possible.”
I don’t think any ajumma is going to let a little subway bombing get in their way….
I know a guy in Seoul who’s familiar with the inner workings of NK, but he sure ain’t talking to the Southies…
Now, seriously, you see the NK operatives cross El Rio with the wetbacks, get nabbed by a Border patrol? That would make Bush gloat so hard, he’d prolly snarf another pretzel down his nasal cavities…
Before everyone dismiss this as preposterous, think of this: most people couldn’t believe that North Korea kidnapped Japanese from Japan to teach North Korean spies, Japanese language. Who would have thought that?
Read this article from NY Times. We need more editorials like this from outside of Korea to pressure S.Korea. Any meaningful movement to help the North Koreans will have to come from outside because S.Korea is incapable of overcoming its delusions. I’ll post this here because some people may not want to register to read it.
Dancing With the Dictator
By JASPER BECKER
Published: June 9, 2005
Beijing
THERE are hopes that President Bush’s meeting tomorrow with President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, coming on the heels of the latest North Korean overture on restarting nuclear-weapons negotiations, may lead to a breakthrough. However, anyone who expects the South to help us put pressure on the North hasn’t been paying much attention to what has happened between the two countries over the last five years.
Since South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae Jung, met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il in 2000 (and pocketed a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts), Seoul has gone to remarkable lengths to gain the North’s trust. Unsurprisingly, the only real changes under this Sunshine Policy have occurred in South Korea. And efforts by President Roh, who was elected in 2002, to engage Kim Jong Il have led him to plunge his own nation into North Korea’s world of lies.
For example, Seoul no longer sees any evidence of North Korea’s crimes: the government tries to keep South Korean newscasts from showing a smuggled tape of the public execution of “criminals” by the North that has been broadcast in Japan and elsewhere; reports that China is shipping refugees back to North Korea are denied by the Roh government; the North’s testing of chemical weapons on live prisoners goes largely unmentioned; and even Pyongyang’s apparent preparations for nuclear weapons tests are played down.
South Korea, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, has abstained for the last three years from voting to condemn the North for its abuses. The South’s latest national defense white paper even indicates that Seoul no longer considers the North to be its “main enemy” - which implies that the presence of American forces on the peninsula is no longer necessary.
Because Seoul chooses to regard the North as a friendly neighbor, it no longer wants to help North Koreans fleeing the regime - even though its Constitution declares that these refugees have the legal right to become citizens of South Korea. There have been press reports that Seoul has been pressuring China to prevent North Korean escapees from seeking asylum in South Korea’s embassy and consulates in China (there are at least 100,000 North Koreans hiding in China).
Last year, when 468 North Korean refugees who had taken refuge in Vietnam were flown into South Korea, Seoul’s minister in charge of reunification declared that “we disapprove of mass defections” and promised there would not be another large-scale movement of refugees. In December, the ministry cut the “resettlement” grant program for escaped Northerners by two-thirds and announced that henceforth there would be far greater scrutiny of asylum-seekers (on the questionable grounds that these refugees might be spies).
President Roh has defended this approach by more or less throwing up his hands. He refuses to give even moral support to dissidents in the North, claiming that Kim Jong Il would ruthlessly crush any protests. For Mr. Roh, there is no chance his “partner for peace” will fall from power; in fact, he makes clear that he would not wish the regime to crumble any time soon.
So, what has President Roh received for all this appeasement? The South still has to keep paying in hard cash for any political or economic contacts to take place - it even has to bribe the North to take part in tae kwon do competitions. No reunions among families who have been divided since the armistice of 1953 have taken place in the last year; the previous rounds of reunions received a lot of positive news media coverage around the world but consisted of only brief encounters involving a small number of elderly people wanting to meet loved ones before they die. And, of course, the entire world has to put up with Pyongyang’s nuclear shell game.
Many of those pushing the Sunshine Policy came of age while trying to force South Korea’s postwar dictators to step down; they believe that the North can follow their model, in which economic gains paved the way for democracy. But forcing North Koreans to remain under Kim Jong Il’s rule and hoping that he will make gradual reforms is unlikely to bear fruit.
North Korea undertook some economic changes in 2002, but they actually left the people worse off. A United Nations World Food Program report last month noted that the market price of rice in North Korea has nearly tripled and that of maize has quadrupled in the last year. And of course it is the government, with its monopoly on commodities, that reaps the profits from high prices.
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Kim Jong Il has conned the South’s big businesses as well as its government, luring them in with offers of exclusive concessions. For example, in 2000 the automaker Hyundai gave the North $500 million in exchange for a promise that it would be awarded all the major civil engineering projects Pyongyang would undertake after it received an influx of foreign aid. Hyundai has yet to realize any profit from the deal and its chairman, who faced criminal charges stemming from his dealings with the North, killed himself in 2003.
WHY does Seoul pay so dearly to prop up the criminal regime? It has claimed that if North Korea were to collapse, it would cost $1.7 trillion to rebuild it, a sum that would cripple the South’s treasury. But this figure seems preposterous. Given its population of about 23 million people, the North would need an emergency influx of only about $1 billion a year to pay for food, medicines and fuel until it got back on its feet. South Korea, with its trillion-dollar gross domestic product, could easily afford this.
Nor is Seoul necessarily correct to assume that the collapse of the North would lead to an exodus of desperate people to the South. After ridding themselves of the criminal regime, wouldn’t those in the North be just as likely to stay in their homes than to flee south as paupers? The huge need for capital investment in the North would probably create an economic boom, just as it has done in China over the last 25 years. With Mr. Kim gone, South Korean conglomerates and international agencies like the World Bank would be eager to invest in new power stations and factories. Unification is more likely to provide a boost to the South Korean economy than to damage it.
But beyond the economic factors, we must consider the moral ones. South Korea is seeking to keep a tyrant in power against the wishes of his own people. At 63, Kim Jong Il has spent a lifetime in a paranoid and claustrophobic dictatorship. If he were going to become a reformer, we would surely know it by now. And even if against all odds he undertook reforms, he is still personally responsible for a manmade famine that has killed 3 million people over the last decade. Would Pol Pot have been given a second chance if he had vowed to open Cambodia’s markets?
Rather than coddling Kim Jong Il and paying him nuclear blackmail, we should be working to arraign him before an international criminal tribunal, just as we did with the murdering leaders of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Yes, it is highly unlikely we would ever get him before such a court, but simply making the symbolic effort might get leaders in China, Japan, South Korea and the West to envision just how attractive a post-Kim era would be for everyone.
Kimbob — I read Becker’s column at work today, and I might be gently fisking some of it tonight. Not that he didn’t make some good points, of course. And I’m no fan of Roh’s NK policies, as noted many times on this blog.
Kimbob wrote:Before everyone dismiss this as preposterous, think of this: most people couldn?€™t believe that North Korea kidnapped Japanese from Japan to teach North Korean spies, Japanese language. Who would have thought that?When did they not believe this? Certainly before North Korea admitted it, most people I knew believed it.
Anyway, this is apples and oranges: training Japanese-savvy or English-savvy spies would be useful for finding out what moves Japan or the US might be making against it. But sending bio-terrorists to the US? This would not make any sense, unless one wanted the US to know that such bio-terrorists were in the country and prepared to launch an attack in the event of an attack on North Korea.
But for that to work as a deterrent, the US would have to know about it, and if the US knew about it, it would invite the attack the bio-terrorists’ presence is supposed to deter.
I think Kush is close to the mark. The North has been rattling its sabre for years saying they are ready for an attack.
I honestly think they have something up their sleeve. While this may or may not be it, I would put little past them in their push for revenge/glory.
This news has a strange synchronicity to it in that I just finished reading some science fiction: “Ninth Day of Creation” by Leonard Crane about bio-warfare envolving Mexico, China, Japan and Korea. In his book, Chinese subs actually sink quite a few US warships during an invasion of Taiwan, which is very likely.
Bio-warfare is actually easier and cheaper to wage, according to scientists, but once that genie is let out of the bottle, it is out globally and is too frightening for any sane person to contemplate since it means genocide.
“I am sure NK would have to understand full well that any such attack would be the end of the NK regime and for that reason, I don?€™t think it would happen.”
I don’t think a definitive answer can be given on this point. Nation’s don’t always believe what seems obvious to others. They also don’t make good decisions all the time.
Can I imagine a justification for the Mexico option?
Maybe Pyongyang believes it can cause massive confusion in the US through a couple of 9/11 sized attacks, and if it times with these attacks a full scale invasion of South Korea (using some chemical weapons too), it might be able to defeat the South before the US can pull itself together. Or, that it can convince the US to not get involved in Korean War II by showing it NK can take out a biological attack in the US and do it again even if the US goes to war with the North to destory it. Something like this, “Hey DC, you might destory me, but I’ll still have people in the United States who can carry out even worse biologial and even NUCLEAR attacks when I’m dead!!”
North Korea would not need the ability to use a suitcase nuke or even more teams in the US to make such a claim effective — once they have demonstrated the ability through an attack.
Think of it this way, applying the logic of “they surely know we’d kill them,” how do we explain Afghanistan and 9/11?
Also, it is pretty much accepted that North Korea most likely has small pox in storage. Like with the nukes, it isn’t clear if Pyongyang can put the small pox into use, but given what we know about the devastation of small pox before the vaccine, and given the fact after these decades have past, the world is now ripe for small pox infection…….who is to say if North Korea believes it can deploy small pox as a biological agent targeted for mainland American society……it would not get into its thick head the idea it could unleash small pox into the US and with the resulting national disaster and preoccupation, it could move against South Korea?
I’m not suggesting any of this would work — that the US would not remain capable beyond any doubt of taking North Korea out and responding to whatever crisis North Korea might unleash in the mainland —
but, I don’t take it for granted North Korea has weighed all options and believes all of them clearly won’t work…..
And think about this —-
There is at least one reason South Korea dreads the idea of strategic flexiblity or withdrawal of USFK. They fear that with no “tripwire” in place, the American people might convince the US government (if it needs convincing at all) that it is too costly to enter Korean War II if it happens to break out. That once the US is free, it will think twice and a third time before pumping troops back into a Korea at war.
Perhaps the North is watching what is going on in the US-SK alliance and believes USFK’s time is marked, and it is putting into place an extra deterent to US returning if war breaks out.
Or, perhaps North Korea simply wants another deterent in place period.
It makes perfect sense for North Korea to put operatives inside South Korea. If war breaks out, these people will move to disrupt US and SK military bases and lines of communication and traffic.
Why not do the same in the US? Putting pieces in place doesn’t have to mean Pyongyang is going to be an Al Quida — that it is setting things in place to definately launch an attack. It could set pieces in place “just in case.”
“It makes perfect sense for North Korea to put operatives inside South Korea. If war breaks out, these people will move to disrupt US and SK military bases and lines of communication and traffic.”
When the war breaks out??? Heck, the operatives are doing a fine job already! One of their finest is to use S.Korea’s strong point - the internet to spread disinformation, and create/exploit the chasm between S.Korea and the US. Someday, this fact will come out with the collapse of North Korea.