The Department of the Treasury said in a statement that it “today designated Korea Daesong Bank and Korea Daesong General Trading Corporation pursuant to Executive Order 13551 for being owned or controlled by Office 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party.”
“As a result of today’s action, any assets of the designated entities that are within U.S. jurisdiction are frozen and U.S. persons are prohibited from conducting financial or commercial transactions with these entities,” the statement said. [….]
“Korea Daesong Bank and Korea Daesong General Trading Corporation are key components of Office 39’s financial network supporting North Korea’s illicit and dangerous activities,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey in a statement. “Treasury will continue to use its authorities to target and disrupt the financial networks of entities involved in North Korean proliferation and other illicit activities.”
A U.S.-based think-tank, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), had said in a report last month that North Korea had used China either directly or indirectly, as a transshipment point, to procure items for enrichment.
“Most believe that China views North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as destabilizing to the region,” the report said. “Nonetheless, China is not applying enough resources to detect and stop North Korea’s illicit nuclear trade.”
ISIS stressed there was no evidence that Beijing was “secretly approving or willfully ignoring exports” to its neighbor to strengthen the North’s nuclear weapons program.
Mark Fitzpatrick, proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said he believed Chinese private firms and individuals, rather than state authorities, may have assisted Pyongyang.
“Chinese middlemen, undoubtedly, are a major part of North Korea’s procurement network,” he said.
Yes, I believe it’s known as “plausible deniability.”
Shen Dingli has become my favorite poster child for showing just what a bunch of maleficent assholes run China today, and in the aftermath of the Yeonpyeong shelling, he does not disappoint:
Shen Dingli, a security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, was more direct in laying the blame on Seoul. “South Korea provoked the Yeonpyeong conflict first,” he said. “The area where this incident happened is South Korean territory from a ‘South Korean perspective’. But it is a disputed area from the ‘North Korean perspective’. North Korea warned South Korea to stop the drills, but South Korea went ahead. And then the incident happened.
“It’s South Korean provocation and North Korean over-reaction. South Korea’s artillery killed fish. North Korean artillery killed civilians. If China should blame the party at fault, it should criticize both Koreas,” Shen said.
People, fish, same-same! I wonder if the stultified rags that Shen reads reported that the North Korean artillery almost hit an elementary school.
You remember Shen, of course. He’s the one who was flashing the green light just before North Korea’s first nuclear test. Remember that when you read Wikileaks cables, or characterizations of Wikileaks cables, reporting that Chinese officials say the North shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, or that this time North Korea went too far, or that one day at end of a receding horizon, the Koreas should eventually reunify. Hell, I’m sure they say a lot of things to our diplomats. I’m sure they say a lot of things to North Korean diplomats, too. I’m willing to bet those are very different things. I’d also bet that they’re said by different people, who may even hold slightly different views. But as a barometer of China’s actual behavior — as opposed to its cocktail conversation or what its editorials may offer tea-leaf-readers abroad — you can’t do better than Shen Dingli.
John McCain: “I think it’s time we talked about regime change in North Korea, and I do not mean military action, but I do believe that this is a very unstable regime.”
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Adm. Mike Mullen: “I am one who believes we shouldn’t be rewarding bad behavior here.” Until last week, I was hearing distinct signs that the State Department was losing patience with “strategic patience.” Now, all of the pressure — backed by a very conservative new House of Representatives that will soon come to town — is pushing in the direction of more sanctions. I’m even seeing new-found interest in subverting the regime within policy circles. I can’t quite measure how South Koreans are going to react to this, but the Washington reaction isn’t going to be what Kim Jong Il must have hoped for.
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It’s only shocking because of the source, but here’s a condemnation of the shelling of Yeonpyeong and a good photo essay … from the Hankyoreh. No, really! Careful, guys. You might get purged for being reactionary splittists.
In addition to his attempt to justify the shelling of his own constituents, Incheon Mayor Song Young-Gil is now failing miserably at providing for his new refugee population. I’m still wrapping my head around this. For the first time since the end of the Korean War, South Korea has war refugees again.
When you see all of those missiles paraded down the square in Pyongyang, do you ever ask yourself who paid for those missiles? Here are the people who paid for them. As you watch this, remember that Rimjingang’s brave guerrilla cameramen risked their lives to show you the truth.
These are the expendable people of North Korea, the ones who don’t have a place in the propaganda parades, the ones who don’t get to eat the food aid that the regime either refuses or steals from them. I’d be surprised if that woman were still alive today.
One day, these people are going to hold their oppressors accountable. The more I see, the more convinced I become that we should teach them how, and then arm them. North Korea needs a revolution, and no peaceful revolution can possibly succeed in such a place. When governments become destroyers of humanity, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them. I see no other way.
A big hat tip to reader Theresa for this one, and she found the video here.
Update: This seems like a good place to promote LiNK’s “9 Lives Campaign,” which is raising money to support North Korean refugees.
After years of backing food aid and other help for the North despite a series of provocations that included two nuclear tests, many South Koreans now say they feel betrayed and angry. “I think we should respond strongly toward North Korea for once instead of being dragged by them,” said Cho Jong-gu, 44, a salesman in Seoul. “This time, it wasn’t just the soldiers. The North mercilessly hurt the civilians.”
That is not to say that he or other South Koreans will really push for a South Korean strike; people south of the border are well aware that the North could devastate Seoul with its weapons. But the sentiments reflect a change of mood in a country where people have willed themselves to believe that their brotherly ties to the North would override the ideological chasm between the impoverished Communist North and the thriving capitalist South.
The attack seemed to challenge one of the underlying assumptions of a decade of inter-Korean rapprochement, which had slowed but not stopped under President Lee Myung-bak: that two nations’ shared Koreanness trumped political differences, making a return to cold war-era hostilities not only undesirable but also impossible. “I never thought they would attack us people of the same race,” said Hong Jae-soon, 55, a homemaker who fled Yeonpyeong with most of the island’s other 1,350 residents after the attack.
If this report is accurate, it suggests that sympathy for North Korea may shift from being a relatively insignificant factor in a politician’s electability to a political liability. It may mean that Lee Myung Bak will have political cover to do what he should have done years ago and close Kaesong for good (Kaesong’s business model always depended on attracting foreign investment, and North Korea pretty much foreclosed any chance of that with some belligerent meddling starting in late 2008). It could also mean the end of inter-Korean food and fertilizer aid, which was never sufficiently monitored to prevent it from being diverted to the military and those inhabiting the top tier of the North’s political caste system. The end of South Korea’s remaining aid to the North would represent a very significant policy shift. It would also be, in my view, a more appropriate response than military action, something that feels better to call for in the abstract than after the next shells start falling. Until now, South Korean voters weren’t ready to cut up Kim Jong Il’s credit card. Has that changed?
I’m not so sure. First, and provided the North Koreans don’t do something else stupid first, it’s probably too early to tell how much of this anger will dissipate in the coming weeks (the Chosun Ilbo reports that the North may test fire one of its new medium range missiles next). Second, I still don’t see much polling data to back up an anecdotal report from a place that’s uncomfortably close to where the shells landed. This is where I need your help.
There are certainly a lot of interesting things I learn by living and listening in Washington, but one thing I really can’t assess from here is how much truth there is to reports like this. One of my big regrets is that my job and my family have made it difficult to spent much time in Korea since my DEROS date, which means that everything I read and hear about political attitudes in South Korea is based on my increasingly outdated view of an unusually fluid electorate. Just from reading the papers and watching the polls, I’d have thought that attitudes in the South had moderated and stabilized substantially, but then came Mad Cow, which caused me to question all of my conclusions and realize that many of the sentiments of 2002 still lay latent. I have the general sense that gradually, and notwithstanding the conspiracy theories, the reality of the Cheonan Incident has taken hold, and that the North’s pretty-much-undeniable atrocity at Yeonpyeong will buttress that conclusion and shift the consensus on North Korea away from “they wouldn’t” and toward “how could they?” But how much, and for how long?
Another general sense I have is that many South Koreans probably leaned toward viewing USFK as an unnecessary evil in 2002, but that most probably see us as a necessary evil now. Beyond this, there are still two political extremes that remain mostly static. And all of what I’ve just described is subject to dramatic shifts based on things whose significance might completely escape most Americans. But this is the guesswork of someone who doesn’t live in Korea anymore. Maybe you know better. If you do live in Korea, and especially if you’re a Korean speaker, I’d like to hear your assessment of the mood on the street right now.
Funny how that works: China doesn’t want to restrain North Korea from attacking South Korea, but hates it when the U.S. Navy shows up on its front door. The Wall Street Journal passes along a sampling of Chinese reactions to the shelling of Yeonpyeong. Well-connected people I’ve spoken to seem convinced that there’s a segment within Chinese academia and government that really has had it with North Korea, but I doubt China will ever restrain North Korea without being subjected to much more pressure than we’ve been willing to consider so far. The people who run China are enjoying North Korea’s shenanigans too much.
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The Independent reports that North Korean workers in Russia have been recalled as North Korea “prepares for war.”
A mass exodus of North Korean workers from the Far East of Russia is under way, according to reports coming out of the region. As the two Koreas edged towards the brink of war this week, it appears that the workers in Russia have been called back to aid potential military operations.
Vladnews agency, based in Vladivostok, reported that North Korean workers had left the town of Nakhodka en masse shortly after the escalation of tension on the Korean peninsula earlier this week. “Traders have left the kiosks and markets, workers have abandoned building sites, and North Korean secret service employees working in the region have joined them and left,” the agency reported.
Well, maybe, though an equally if not more plausible reason is a recent spike in defections among those workers.
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With all due respect to Lee Ha Won, I don’t think it follows that “getting serious” about North Korea policy necessary means having a full-time envoy to a country that isn’t prepared to negotiate seriously. Chris Hill was a full-time envoy. Look where that got us. I’d say that “getting serious” means giving the North Koreans and the Chinese reasons to finally take us seriously and negotiate in good faith for once.
I can certainly understand the sentiments of the ROK Marine Commandant: “We will pay back North Korea 100 times, 1,000 times for atrociously killing and wounding our soldiers, who were the pride of the Marines,” Marine Corps. commander Yoo Nak-jun said in an eulogy.” I never recommend f**king with the Marines.
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OK, it’s not North Korea related — well, maybe not North Korea related — but this story about how how the Stuxnet Worm shut gummed up the Iranian nuclear program, destroyed sensitive equipment, and probably caused Iran to shoot some of its own scientists may be the most fascinating, scariest thing I’ve read all week.
Admittedly, I’ve certainly imagined everything Hill described, but not all at the same time. Alas, only my imaginings about the building, the door, and the uranium ever came completely true. As for the remainder, the prospects seem rather bleak.
At Hill’s urging, North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, to reward it for its progress toward nuclear disarmament and for promising to be nicer.
You have to admit that it was pretty diabolical of Lee Myung Bak to have planted those human shields in their own villages and homes years before he was even inaugurated. In fact, the two civilians who were actually killed were construction workers on the ROK Marine post, but the given the North’s shelling of civilian neighborhoods, it’s lucky there weren’t a lot more “human shields” killed:
The North really does have a special gift for adding insult to injury. Still, just try to fathom the reaction to this if there had been no North Korean shelling, and a single American shell had gone astray instead.
Separately, the North is also making veiled threats against the U.S. carrier battle group that’s now headed for the Yellow Sea:
“If the U.S. brings its carrier to the West Sea of Korea at last, no one can predict the ensuing consequences,” the report said, using the Korean name for the Yellow Sea.
You know, given what the North has shown itself to be capable recently, I wouldn’t dismiss this as an empty threat. I think the danger of a severe escalation is more grave than even most Washington insiders tend to believe. What if the North tried to torpedo one of our ships? Or actually did? Do you suppose we’re really prepared to respond with a conventional attack? I say this because I see the North’s recent behavior as indicative of economic and political desperation. It may mean, among other things, that Plan B is working, the harvest has failed again, and that the North Korean people detest Kim Jong Eun. Whoever is running North Korea today seems convinced that a limited conventional war is the only thing that can save their grip on power. Especially under these circumstances, I’m not a big believer in shows of conventional force as a response to an actual attack. They put U.S. forces at risk, but their deterrent and punitive effect is questionable. Instead, I prefer the direction President Lee is headed:
The South Korean government plans to retaliate with words as ammunition, believing a military strike would be frowned upon by the international community. Now-former Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said on Wednesday at a National Assembly hearing that “a psychological war is ongoing, and we will continue that war but I cannot detail how that will take place.” The newly launched plan for propaganda will likely be in the form of fliers, which a government source said “are already printed.”
The fliers will be flown into North Korean territory on giant balloons, a tactic that civilian groups have used in the past to send propaganda fliers, usually to tell North Koreans about life in South Korea and appeal to them to leave their country. “[North Korea] will have no idea whether it came from civil groups or the government,” a South Korean government official yesterday told JoongAng Ilbo.
Yeah, at least until it was reported in the Joongang Ilbo and attributed to a government source. This idea is a step up from putting big sign boards along the DMZ. It’s hard to say how many minds can be changed by leaflets, but it may well force a significant redeployment of North Korean army units to collect all of that subversive litter. As a tool of persuasion, however, it has far less potential than the idea of giving the North Korean people cheap international and domestic cell phone service. Let’s hope this is just a first step. Propaganda is never more effective than when it comes from someone you know and believe.
Update: The Joongang Ilbo provides this map of the locations shelled. I ask you, what military purpose could possibly have justified shelling a health center, an inn, or the “History Museum of Croaker?”
Update: Watch this CNN correspondent try to dramatize the “danger” of being caught between the riot police and a bunch of pissed-off right-wing ajjoshis. In most cases, South Korean protests are ritualistic street theater where the risk of injury is no greater than your average pillow fight. At times, however, people do show up with bamboo poles, iron pipes, rocks, and the occasional home-made flamethrower.
The head bands say, “Restore our honor.” Hat tip to a reader.
It’s still hard for me to gauge the general South Korean reaction to this. A large minority demands military escalation today, but their support would waver it if the North upped the ante again. In most places, the Silent Majority fears dramatic policy changes and the perception of government overreach. There is a radical minority of South Koreans, of course, who will excuse everything the North does. Some will grow up, and some won’t, but that has little to do with reality and everything to do with emotion. For most South Koreans, coming to grips with the pathology of North Korea will be a gradual process, and may take longer than the North’s descent into Götterdämmerung.
I don’t know about you, but when North Korea decided to shell South Korean homes and kill South Korean civilians in South Korean territory, my balance of risks shifted. We’ve always known that if U.S. and South Korean forces attack North Korea, North Korea would respond by trying to kill as many American and South Korean civilians as possible. Estimates that this would result in hundreds of thousands of casualties are probably worst-case scenarios, but a toll of several thousand Koreans and several hundred Americans seems probable. The fact that North Korea has used thermobaric weapons against a civilian population is proof that they’re willing to use indiscriminate force, although it’s oddly comforting in another sense. I’d have expected “the poor man’s atom bomb” to cause far more casualties.
In the past, most of those who’ve called for strikes against North Korea sounded like people who’ve never lived in or particularly cared about South Korea, and who hadn’t thought through the likely consequences of things it felt good to call for. But now, there are thoughtful, well-considered arguments that a quick strike against North Korea’s artillery and missiles might actually be necessary to deter more provocations and save lives. This isn’t a view I’m prepared to support — in part because of the fear of civilian casualties on both sides, and also because I still question whether involvement in a North-South war really advances or protects America’s vital interests, especially when so few Americans correctly estimate just how ambivalent the South Korean people themselves are about the North’s aggression against them. Yet North Korea is emerging as one of the greatest threats to the security of the United States because of its proliferation potential. Every instrument of our global power has failed to suppress that threat so far, including military deterrence, interdiction and containment, and of course, decades of diplomacy.
Today, the idea of a lightning campaign of preemptive air strikes is no longer a view I’m ready to summarily dismiss, but it’s not an idea anyone should support without knowing the answers to a few questions that aren’t available without the right security clearance and a retrospectoscope.
Artillery emplacements in cliffs overlooking the inter-Korean maritime boundary, via the Chosun Ilbo
First, how quickly we could silence all 10,000 of those artillery emplacements? And how many of their missiles could we take out before they were launched? The experience of SCUD-hunting in Gulf War I doesn’t encourage me, and North Korea’s extensive system of tunnels would probably conceal many of those missiles for an eternity. Since North Korea probably would fire at least some of those missiles, how confident are we that the PAC-3 Patriot batteries will stop all of them? Is the answer “very?” Because they’ll probably carry chemical or biological warheads.
North Korean artillery emplacements
Would North Korea activate its substantial Fifth Column in the South, or its Special Forces, to carry out terrorist or WMD attacks? Would its air force launch suicidal air raids, using obsolete aircraft operating from underground hangars and runways, in a modern analogue to the kamikaze attacks that proved so effective in World War II? If we were successful in meeting each of these challenges, what about North Korea’s best cross-DMZ delivery systems — the tunnels? How are we ever going to know which blue Bongo truck came from the warehouse with the exit ramp?
Downtown Seoul
Given those risks, isn’t it still wiser to exhaust other alternatives first? Given that the North Korean regime wouldn’t last a year without Chinese money, have we really reached the limits of our capacity to pressure China to force the Kims’ disarmament and abdication? In addition to sending the carrier group, can we finally get serious about sanctioning the Chinese companies and banks that do business with North Korea? Opponents of sanctions have recently suggested that North Korea’s aggression means that sanctions have failed, something they curiously failed to conclude about two agreed frameworks during the two decades when they clearly did fail. I reach the opposite conclusion. North Korea’s willingness to take greater risks now may be a sign of its rising desperation to restore its extortionate relationship with South Korea and the United States.
Our diplomatic options against China aren’t exhausted, either. What if an unnamed, high-level U.S. diplomat were to tell David Sanger of the New York Times that the United States has decided to support the sovereign right of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to have nuclear weapons? Why couldn’t a senior Pentagon official convene a meeting of the defense ministers of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to discuss the creation of an integrated missile defense system, or even a regional defense alliance?
Finally, we have not even begun to discuss asymmetric military options. Even ten years ago, the North Korean people would not have been prepared to oppose their government, even if given some reasonable hope of success, but I believe that has changed. For anyone willing to consider the risk of a direct strike against North Korea’s military — and this includes President Lee Myung Bak, who speaks of it openly now — why is it too provocative to talk about training, equipping, and arming a few of those 20,000 North Korean refugees now living in the South to wreak chaos along the most remote and rugged parts of the borderlands between North Korea and China? Can anyone explain to me why it’s out of bounds for the United States and South Korea to arm a North Korean opposition, yet it’s not out of bounds for China arm the janjaweed? Or to blithely underwrite a regime that commits mass murder against its own people, exports nuclear technology to Syria, and which sinks the ships and shells the homes of its southern neighbor? Of course, building an insurgent infrastructure would take time, but if North Korea continues to escalate its provocations, it’s long past time to begin building the capacity to directly pressure the regime.
South Korean artillery on Yeonpyeong Island, via the Chosun Ilbo
Is there some way we can reduce North Korea as a threat to the South and to the United States without the messiness of OPLAN 5027, and without turning North Korea into the next Outer Koguryo Semi-Autonomous Zone? Why not first try giving the North Korean people the guns they’ll need to take care of that part on their own? Would places like Chongjin or Hamhung really be worse to live in if they were more like Mogadishu, Kandahar, or East Saint Louis (sorry)? And wouldn’t the threat of exactly that be a more effective way to get the cooperation of the Chinese government than simply continuing our groveling appeals to its beneficent nature?
I don’t suggest that this approach is completely free of the same risks, but it has the advantage of being more incremental. This makes it far more useful as a tool of diplomacy, should people finally decide they need to negotiate with us in good faith. It also presents less of a risk of escalation to full-scale war. Kim Jong Il doesn’t have long to live and doesn’t care if anyone else does either. When he sees a lot of bombs falling on the weapons he built and emplaced so painstakingly and at the cost of so many lives, he’ll conclude that OPLAN 5027 has been activated, and he’ll see his immediate choices as being to use those weapons or lose them. Far better that he face something that doesn’t look like Götterdämmerung to him. Better yet, the beginnings of civil unrest in his rear would force the North Korean army to divert some of its best infantry to the interior and the north of the country, where they’re less of a threat to Seoul. This might also upset the force structure that’s built into North Korea’s military doctrine, since mechanized forces can’t operate effectively without infantry to protect them. Until now, China has seen North Korea as a cost-free way to plague and pressure American presidens. Far better, too, that China should face the choice of unrest on its doorstep or intervening in North Korea to fight a demoralizing and costly war of occupation, rather than that America should face the same thing in a far more distant place.
Today, it looks like North Korea has launched a low-intensity conflict on its own terms, a conflict that continues to escalate as its provocations go unanswered and shielded by China. If we can no longer escape conflict on some level, let’s at least fight asymmetrically, play to the weaknesses of our enemies rather than their strengths, and spare as many American and Korean lives as we still can.
The casual, and largely unsupported references to Seoul’s potential flattening punctuates the notion that Kim Jong Il is holding a city hostage. It recasts a complex strategic vulnerability as a cartoon: an entire city facing a perpetual firing squad. It also ignores physical laws, and the realities of modern warfare.
Barring the use of nuclear weapons or large-scale bombing runs, destroying a city requires an extended campaign of shelling and demolition, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since WWII. When the Chechen capital of Grozny was all-but-destroyed by Russian forces in 1999, it was the result of months of artillery and missile bombardments, as well as air strikes. There’s no doubt that North Korea’s massive deployment of artillery, and potential deployment of roughly 300 ballistic missiles, could wreak havoc on Seoul and its population. What’s clear, however, is that a sudden barrage of shells and missiles would only mark the beginning of a battle for the city, not an apocalyptic fait accomplit.
The point about Grozny is an excellent one. I’d add that it took weeks of sustained and unimpeded aerial and artillery bombardment to drive Djokar Dudaev’s forces out of his “Presidential Palace,” the former Communist Party Headquarters. Even then, most of the building’s structure remained intact until the Russians demolished it. We tend to think of Dresden, Hamburg, Stalingrad, or Berlin when we think of what artillery does to cities, but those were actually the effects of sustained saturation bombing from the air, using in excess of 1,000 heavy bombers per raid, loaded with incendiary bombs that started firestorms in cities built of brick and wood. Today’s reinforced concrete structures would not suffer the same type of catastrophic damage when hit with artillery, particularly if counter-battery fire and air strikes limited the duration of the North Korean barrage.
But again, this isn’t to deny that a second Korean War would be a horror. It’s just that I’m more afraid of what North Korea’s chem, bio, and terrorist capabilities could do to Seoul than its artillery. If war does come, a lot of us are going to be in for quite a shock when we see how many South Koreans would actively assist the North Koreans. I tend to see both the threat and the best response in more asymmetric terms.
Watch my good friend Sung Yoon Lee, appearing on the PBS News Hour, speaking in edited paragraphs. I can hardly write an edited paragraph. In my native language. How does he do that?
Oh, and some guy named Victor Cha was there, too. Cha and Lee seem to agree that North Korea’s recent brazenness is related to the succession, and inventing some cred for Kim Jong Eun, which also sounds plausible to me even if I don’t think Jong Eun has any real power. Lee is quoted in the New York Times as speculating that all of this may be leading up to making a big event of January 8th, the birthday of our new porcine prince. The thing is, the North Korean people seem to loathe Jong Eun so much that at the end of this succession process, he’s probably going to end up being much more useful as fall guy than as a figurehead. In fact, it’s occurred to me that that’s exactly where this whole succession process could be headed.
My regret here is that Prof. Lee was just getting to the interesting part at the end. It’s tragic he didn’t get 30 more seconds to elaborate before a national audience.
Posted by Joshua on November 25, 2010 at 9:01 am · Filed under WMD
You know, if I’d realized that Mike Chinoy, former CNN correspondent and author of “Meltdown,” was reading all those things I was writing about him, I might not have been so mean. Why was I not informed?
Dear Joshua,
I am a regular reader of OneFreeKorea, which I have always found interesting and thought-provoking, despite the darts you regularly send my way. I have not responded to your frequent criticisms, but under the current circumstances, and given your derogatory comments in your Nov. 22 post, I thought it would be helpful to try to clarify some of the points you raise in your sweeping critique of my work on “Meltdown.”
First, you seem to forget that my book is a work of reporting, not a “venting” of opinion. The episodes described, as well as the judgments and assessments I tried to make, were based on interviews with scores of people on all sides of the debates over North Korea policy in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo, and Beijing, as well as insights gleaned from more than a dozen reporting trips to Pyongyang while I was a correspondent for. CNN. I didn’t begin the project with a preconceived view. I simply tried to recount the history as I uncovered it from my research.
Your suggestion that I somehow “missed” the story of North Korea’s effort to acquire a uranium enrichment capability is simply not true, as any careful reading of “Meltdown” will show. Read chapter 5, called “The Scrub,” for example. It recounts in great detail the intelligence findings on what the North was trying to do as regards uranium.
Of equal importance is what I note on the first page of chapter 6:
“But many questions remained. How advanced was the program? Had a production facility actually been constructed? How many years would it take before bombs could be produced? Above all, what were Pyongyang’s motivation and its ultimate intentions in starting the acquisition effort? And here, the consensus that had been achieved on the procurement intelligence broke down. In interpreting the information and considering a policy response, the same ideological biases and political turf battles that had marked earlier debates over what to do with North Korea reemerged.”
This was the reality at the time. Serious people in Washington had real disagreements over what the information on uranium meant and what to do about it. I didn’t make up the fact that there were divisions in the government and intelligence community, nor twist the information I got through my reporting to fit a preconceived agenda.
On page 112, for example, I quote Robert Joseph, who was then at the NSC and advocated a tough line towards the North. When I asked him in an interview about the debate in the Bush administration over what Jim Kelly’s instructions should be for his October 2002 trip to Pyongyang, he said: “What are you going to do, ignore that they’re pursuing nuclear weapons through enriched uranium, which is in violation of the Agreed Framework and the NPT and the safeguards?”
On the same page, on the same issue, I quote Colin Powell, who told me that Joseph and other critics of engaging Pyongyang “wanted to use this [the uranium intelligence] as a flaming red star cluster into the sky that the North Koreans have cheated, abrogated the Agreed Framework, we always told you that was a bad idea.” I didn’t take sides. I was just reporting what they said — which clearly underscored the sharp divergence in views among administration policy-makers.
In relation to acquiring a uranium weapons capability, the questions about just what the North has been trying to do, has actually done, what kind of facility it might be able to build, when it might be operational, and what would be the best policy options for the U.S., have been controversial issues in Washington over the past decade. Even today, there are different assessments of how far along they are, as well as differences over what kind of policies would best address these very real concerns. The fact that the North has now shown a uranium facility to Siegfried Hecker answers some questions, but raises many more. And it in no way eliminates the questions, doubts, and internal debate over North Korea policy that I chronicle – accurately and fairly, trying to understand and recount the motivations and actions of all sides – in “Meltdown.”
You and I clearly have different views about how to deal with North Korea, although we are unquestionably on the same page in agreeing on its awfulness. And I can imagine how satisfying it is to launch jabs over the Internet at people whose opinions do not coincide with yours. But as bad as the North Korean system is, to paint my efforts at careful reporting and analysis of this situation in the black and white terms your regularly use is unworthy of the kind of intelligent and thoughtful discussion all of us who care about Korea’s future ought to be having.
Best regards,
Mike Chinoy
You know, Mr. Chinoy, nothing wrecks the ambiance of an ankle-biting blog post so much as a detailed, thoughtful, and classy response, so let me begin with a point of agreement. I think we can agree that the Bush Administration’s North Korea policy was a long, vacillating failure, even if we wanted the administration to vacillate in opposite directions. While I believe that you and I approach these topics with a desire to make objectively defensible arguments, we also approach these topics with strong beliefs, preconceptions, and biases. I suppose mine are more evident to you than they are to me, and I’ll leave that where it is.
Yes, we’ve always had and still have doubts about the specifics of North Korea’s uranium program, the number of centrifuges, and the level of enrichment. My post acknowledged that. Indeed, some of the most damning evidence of North Korea’s HEU program emerged after the publication of your book. We can argue about these minutiae until doomsday, but isn’t the broader debate pretty much over? In retrospect, can we agree that the most plausible interpretation of all of this evidence, culminating with what the North Koreans have just shown Dr. Hecker, is that North Korea has been working toward a uranium enrichment program all along? All of those centrifuges weren’t made just last year. Doesn’t this lead to the conclusion that North Korea has been dealing with us in bad faith? Three American presidents have now offered North Korea diplomatic outreach, aid, and relations in exchange for disarmament, and yet those outreaches have done little to slow North Korea’s progress toward a nuclear arsenal. Supporters of Agreed Framework I can fall back on citing some temporary freezes of the plutonium reactor, but it has never taken North Korea especially long to find an excuse to kick the IAEA monitors out. Can you really argue that we have anything to offer Kim Jong Il that he wants more than nuclear weapons, and if so, on what basis?
The thoughtfulness of your response ought to earn you much respect from my readers. You’d earn even more if you could concede, in retrospect, that the North Koreans were playing a double game with the HEU program, and probably for the duration of two agreed frameworks. It certainly looks that way today.
I’ve often said that in the eyes of many “progressive” South Koreans, it’s just not physically possible for North Korea to do wrong, and Incheon Mayor Song Young-Gil has done much to confirm our worst fears. A day after the North Koreans shelled Yeonpyeong Island — which, by the way, is undisputed South Korean territory — Song tweeted out that the attack was provoked by South Korean military exercises.
Song also uploaded some pictures and said that North Korea shelled a market on Yeonpyeong because it was a South Korean intelligence facility a decade ago. Apparently, certain reactionary Netizens interpreted Song’s comments as a justification of North Korea’s decision to shell Yeonpyeong and its choice of targets.
You don’t say.
[It’s OK, ma’am, he had it coming. AP photo.]
Anyway, after Song’s tweet generated controversy, he deleted it. Flushed it down the memory hole. Trotskied it.
Song was elected just last June, in a mid-term election that came less than three months after the sinking of the Cheonan. The Democratic Party pretty much ran the tables in that race, which came not even three months after the North Koreans sank the Cheonan, and when DP politicians were already circulating insane conspiracy theories that blamed pretty much everyone but the party found responsible by a multi-national investigation. Disturbing as it was not to see the DP hounded out of the political mainstream for its zany and frankly unpatriotic conduct, the DP did later take a beating in National Assembly elections, which are harder to write off as being the consequence of local issues.
[”Whoa. It says ‘Made in Kaesong.’” AP photo of DP leaders Sohn Hak-Kyu and “Comrade” Chung Dong-Young]
Oh, and did I mention that the good people of Yeonpyeong-Do are Mayor Song’s own constituents? It takes some poking around, but as it turns out, Yeonpyeong-Do is part of Ongjin County, which was merged into the municipality of Incheon in 1995.
[AFP, AP photos of legitimate military targets]
You really have to love a guy you can always count on to stick up for the people who got him where he is today. It’s times like this when I can only shake my head and wonder which Korean regime will collapse first. If the Pendulum Principle of Politics is correct, Song’s party will probably nominate South Korea’s next president. And when that person is actually elected — most likely while riding the wave of some incomprehensibly silly issue — we should really ask ourselves why we’re supposed to defend people who can’t even decide whether they should be defended.
Posted by Joshua on November 24, 2010 at 7:24 am · Filed under Anju Links
South Korea is now reporting two civilian deaths from North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island yesterday, raising the death toll to four. Given that the North fired 80 shells onto the island and destroyed 60 homes, it seems miraculous that more people didn’t die. Korean language reports (hat tip to my wife) are saying that kimchee may have saved lives. It’s kimchee-making season, which means that most of the civilians were down in the markets buying cabbage, garlic, and pepper paste, or else they were at the pier to meet a ferry that had just arrived from Incheon. Meanwhile, Yeonpyeong Island’s one and only fire truck found itself racing around the island, doing the best it could to put the many fires out.
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For a second day, South Koreans were banned from traveling to North Korea, including Kaesong, where about 700 hostages workers remain behind. I hope Lee Myung Bak will finally close the place down once and for all. Also, just how stupid do you really have to be to work at Kaesong these days?
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Charles Krauthammer, who correctly identifies China as the ultimate origin of our problems with North Korea, calls for the United States to help Japan and South Korea acquire nuclear weapons. Good. But he forgot to mention Taiwan. I had predicted before that this year would be a repeat of 1968 in which we would enter “a dangerous new phase,” with the difference being that the Soviets were willing to restrain North Korea, while China isn’t. Fairly or not, Barack Obama just doesn’t project the Mad Man image that deterrence sometimes requires. The Nobel Committee and the Workers’ Party of Korea both formed their impressions of President Obama based on empty rhetoric, but that rhetoric (to my great relief) hasn’t really matched his performance in office. I worry that perceptions like that can lead to miscalculations.
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It happens every time North Korea does something dangerously brutal or provocative — some idiot pundit or reporter infantilizes North Korea, suggesting that they’re somehow childlike, not responsible for their actions, or that they just want to be loved. It’s sickening, an insult to the growing list of this regime’s innocent victims.
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Proliferation expert Henry Sokolsi sounds a warning on North Korea’s uranium program. You know, I’ve always seen the question of military action as a balance between the risks of acting and the risks of not acting. I’m not privy to enough information about our intelligence and our capabilities to say whether we should launch a lightning strike against North Korea’s artillery and nuclear facilities, though I’d say my own balance has shifted in that direction. We’re now just one step away from North Korea shelling Uijongbu, Seokcho, or Camp Casey.
Since I served in Korea years ago, I’ve feared that North Korea would try a limited artillery strike as a way to raise the stakes. It looks like my fears have been realized:
South Korea says two marines have been killed and 16 others injured in a North Korean bombardment of a South Korean island near the countries’ disputed western sea border. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that it returned fire and scrambled fighter jets in response. It said the “inhumane” attack on civilian areas violated the 1953 armistice halting the Korean War. [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]
Since North Korea sank the South Korean warship Cheonan and killed 46 members of her crew, I’ve struggled with the question of restoring the deterrence that clearly hasn’t existed since then (and I wonder how the South’s Fifth Column will try to deny North Korea’s culpability this time, though you can be sure they will try). There has to come a point where a provocation draws a consequence, including a military consequence. By any reasonable standard, we reached that point last March, and we’ve reached it again today.
The thing is, though, it’s not really deterrence unless the consequence you threaten is something someone is afraid you’ll do, and a limited war may be just what the Kim Dynasty wants right now. The North Korean people are increasingly restive, and they’ve never been more economically independent. Nationalism may be the only message the regime can broadcast that the North Korean people are still listening to. The regime may be desperate to change the subject from how much everyone hates Kim Jong Eun to the topic of foreign enemies, thus to reconsolidate its fraying domestic control. So if we finally opt for a military response, it had better be something determined enough to really reduce the threat. That would mean taking out the “Y-sites” and other artillery emplacements, and as many of its short-to-medium range ballistic missiles as we can find.
Not ready for that? Then we’re back to dealing with the “root cause” of the problem — the regime itself. And that’s not going to provide us any quick gratification. As a deterrent, it’s not so easy to calibrate. (For new readers, I’ve written much more extensively about how to overthrow the Kim Dynasty here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)
Here’s a little something to consider, however — before the G-20 summit, South Korea threatened an all-out propaganda war if the North did anything to ruin it. Despite North Korea’s ongoing desire to terrorize and extort the South, the G-20 passed without incident. Was the South Korean threat the kind of deterrence that the military, including USFK, has ceased to be? It’s something to think about. (I continue to think the South Koreans are aren’t even talking about going about this the right way. Forget the silly signboards and music videos at the DMZ. The single most effective thing South Korea could do to weaken the regime’s control over the North Korean population is to broadcast a signal that would give ordinary North Koreans international and domestic cell phone service. Just let them talk, and hear . . . and trade, smuggle, grumble, plot, and conspire. I’ve done some research and spoken to a technical expert. This could actually be done from South Korean territory.)
Finally, China must be held jointly responsible for this incident. Its shielding of North Korea from the consequences of the Cheonan Incident emboldened and encouraged this provocation. China will want to do the same this time, and that will encourage the next escalation. Already, I see a shift in the thinking in D.C. on China. People who had inclined to seeing China as a “strategic partner” have come to see it as a slightly unethical rival. Those who held the latter view now see it as an enemy. The latter group is about to get bigger. It’s about time it did. We now find ourselves in need not only for a way to deter North Korea, but also a way to deter China.
Photos: Yonhap.
Update: When I want to know how South Koreans are going to react to something, I consult with my wife focus group, since she’s always been an uncannily accurate barometer of the Korean Street. Well, my focus group hasn’t sounded this much like John Bolton since Kim Dae Jung was President. If the Koreas aren’t at war the day after tomorrow, some of the fury will subside, but the anger at and distrust of North Korea will persist for a while.
At the end, you can hear absolute terror in the cries of the civilian population there.
We’ve also heard from President Lee Myung-Bak, a man with a disturbing tendency to mean what he says:
President Lee Myung-bak ordered his military Tuesday to punish North Korea for its artillery attacks “through action,” not just words, saying it is important to stop the communist regime from contemplating additional provocation. “The provocation this time can be regarded as an invasion of South Korean territory. In particular, indiscriminate attacks on civilians are a grave matter,” a stern-faced Lee said during a visit to the headquarters of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in central Seoul. [….]
“Reckless attacks on South Korean civilians are not tolerable, especially when South Korea is providing North Korea with humanitarian aid,” the president said. “As for such attacks on civilians, a response beyond the rule of engagement is necessary. Our military should show this through action rather than an administrative response” such as statements or talks, he added.
He did not rule out the possibility of follow-up attacks.
“Given that North Korea maintains an offensive posture, I think the Army, the Navy and the Air Force should unite and retaliate against (the North’s) provocation with multiple-fold firepower,” Lee said. “I think enormous retaliation is going to be necessary to make North Korea incapable of provoking us again.” [Yonhap]
A friendly reminder: we have 24,500 U.S. military personnel and tens of thousands of American civilians in South Korea.
Update 3: Here’s a statement from the White House:
Earlier today North Korea conducted an artillery attack against the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong. We are in close and continuing contact with our Korean allies. The United States strongly condemns this attack and calls on North Korea to halt its belligerent action and to fully abide by the terms of the Armistice Agreement. The United States is firmly committed to the defense of our ally, the Republic of Korea, and to the maintenance of regional peace and stability.
[W]hatever the reason for the revelation, which a seasoned American nuclear scientist called “stunning,” it provides a new set of worries for the Obama administration, which is sending its special envoy on North Korea for talks with officials in South Korea, Japan and China this week.
The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. It had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.
But until recently, it seemed that North Korea Expert Mike Chinoy spoke for the majority among this city’s media and foreign policy elite:
The book showed that US intelligence did discover in 2002-2003 a North Korea effort to acquire components that could be used for uranium enrichment but that it was only a procurement effort. There was no credible intelligence that North Koreans actually had a facility capable of making uranium based bombs. Yet, conservative hardliners bent on ending an “Agreed Framework” nuclear deal with North Korea forged under president Bill Clinton’s administration seized on the issue to force a confrontation, the book said.
As of the time of this writing, you could get a new hard cover copy of “Meltdown” on Amazon for $7.22, or a used one for $3.58, about the price of a venti half-caff soy latte.
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 on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.
And here is JCS Chairman and noted neocon ideologue, Admiral Mike Mullen:
“From my perspective, it’s North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we’ve had for years about their enriching uranium,” Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Pretty much. I won’t suspend respiration while I await the apologies honorable men would feel compelled to offer at a time like this. Of course, no one should ever owe an apology for rationally and objectively questioning the evidence for James Kelley’s fateful assertion, had they done nothing more than this. Instead, Harrison wrote a venomous and conspiratorial tract that was so toxic to rational policy deliberations that it drew a joint rebuke from Robert Gallucci and Mitchell Reiss (though it seems to have fired the enthusiasm of a certain class of journalists to seek Harrison out and quote him as an expert authority). Chinoy’s argument, coming much later, ran contrary to even more of the evidence that had since piled up. In retrospect, Chinoy must have felt cursed that his book went to print just as traces of highly enriched uranium turned up on North Korean aluminum samples, and later, on documents from Yongbyon.
Harrison and Chinoy may well get away without being asked how they could have been so wrong about this; after all, they aren’t policy-makers. But it would be perplexing to see other journalists quoting them as “experts” now. Perhaps they will try to salvage some of their credibility by arguing that North Korea’s now-unquestionable, large-scale uranium enrichment is something new, inspired only by the hard-line policies of Barack Obama and his neocon cabal (but not by George W. Bush’s Agreed Framework II, presumably). The problem with this argument is that the people with access to the classified intelligence tell us North Korea’s uranium enrichment program isn’t new:
Stephen Bosworth’s comments, following a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan, came as the United States and the North’s neighbors scrambled to deal with Pyongyang’s revelation to a visiting American nuclear scientist of a highly sophisticated, modern enrichment operation that had what the North says are 2,000 recently completed centrifuges.
“This is obviously a disappointing announcement. It is also another in a series of provocative moves” by North Korea, Bosworth said. “That being said, this is not a crisis. We are not surprised by this. We have been watching and analyzing the (North’s) aspirations to produce enriched uranium for some time.”
Kim also played down the facility, telling reporters: “It’s nothing new.”
They’re right. We could see from open sources that this hasn’t been news since the end of the Clinton Administration. I’m guessing that by the time Gary Samore weighed in here, those with access to the classified information may have known a few more things that are still unknown to open-source publications, but well enough known to the North Koreans that they concluded they had nothing to lose by giving Mr. Hecker this tour. What’s more, creating a false sense of crisis benefits no one but Kim Jong Il. Yet already, some who waited patiently for decades of diplomacy to produce no results at all are trying to do just that — create a sense of crisis, declaring this false crisis to be proof that sanctions have decisively failed after three whole months.
But of course, the open-source evidence of North Korea’s interest in acquiring a large-scale uranium-enrichment capability is extensive and dates back to the days of Agreed Framework I, notwithstanding the denials of pundits who desperately tried to discount that evidence because (a) they hated George W. Bush more than Kim Jong Il, or (b) because they wanted to deny that two agreed frameworks were demonstrable failures at disarming North Korea. We may have had doubts about the number and locations of centrifuges — all I know is what’s in open sources. But the real significance of North Korea’s revelation is that policymakers are liberated from having to rehash those tired old arguments, just as we should all be liberated from having to keep listening to those who made them in defiance of so much evidence. It’s time we came to accept that there’s nothing our diplomats can offer North Korea’s dictatorship that it wants more than it wants nukes.
Update: A good friend forwards this link to Hecker’s full report.
The New York Times, in a report bylined in Incheon, says that 
This delectable quote, attributed to 
You know, if I’d realized that Mike Chinoy, former CNN correspondent and author of “Meltdown,” was reading 
I’ve often said that in the eyes of many “progressive” South Koreans, it’s just not physically possible for North Korea to do wrong, and 
Since I served in Korea years ago, I’ve feared that North Korea would try a limited artillery strike as a way to raise the stakes. It looks like my fears have been realized:
