North Korea’s Kim Jong Un vanishes, then pops up. Now, the portly despot is out of sight again, and that raises the question: Who’s minding the store — the one that keeps him in booze and fancy wheels?
His little sister has stepped into his role as saber-rattler, even threatening a nuclear attack on the US. But those caught up in the palace intrigue really want to know if she’s also the one overseeing the money machine that keeps the mean machine running.
That would be the shadowy, notorious Office 39 in Pyongyang, the headquarters of an allegedly illicit global smuggling network designed to generate millions in hard currency that fatten the coffers of Kim and his family.
Without it, Pyongyang’s elite, hamstrung by UN and US sanctions that prevent them from doing above-board trading with the world, would have to do without any luxuries — not to mention nuclear weapons.
“Where do you think Kim gets his cognacs, Mercedes and Rolex watches?” David Maxwell, a retired US Army Special Forces colonel and North Korea expert, asked the Post. “All the money to buy that stuff comes from Office 39.”
Drug manufacturing and trafficking, counterfeiting, gold smuggling, arms dealing and slave labor are just a handful of the ultra-illegal activities that Office 39 has sponsored since Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-Il, launched it in 1974.
Kim, reportedly holed up in his coastal resort in Wonsan, is the nominal head of Office 39, which is housed in a faceless government building in the capital. Some speculate his sister, who is married to a top official in Office 39, could be starting to take control as well. Others insist the operation remains firmly in the hands of the septuagenarian executives that do much of the heavy lifting in Pyongyang.
“It’s like a bank for Kim Jong Un,” North Korean defector Jason Lee, 35, told the Post. Both Lee and his father worked as executives in Office 39, running shipping companies, before they fled Pyongyang for Seoul and then the US.
“But he’s gotten a little more careful in recent years about the illegal activity, Lee said. “It was getting too much attention and looking bad for the Party.”
Up until the early 2000s, North Korean diplomats working on behalf of Office 39 were the shameless bag men for the regime — and often still are, according to Sean King, an Asia specialist at Park Strategies in New York.
“The Kims are like an organized crime family masquerading as the leaders of a country,” King told the Post. “The diplomats were sent overseas with quotas of hard currency they’d have to send back, by any means necessary. North Korea’s embassies were organized like a multinational criminal enterprise.”
Many so-called diplomats crisscrossed the globe, carrying liquor, cigarettes, and drugs manufactured in North Korea or other contraband to embassies around the world. Office 39 staffers also made money for Kim by acting as freelance drug mules for other countries.
North Korea still maintains about 40 embassies, but the bigger money is made by exporting slave labor. In China and Russia’s Siberia territory, for example, North Korean men do labor like logging and are forced to give almost all their wages to the government.
The drug smuggling peaked in the early 2000s. In 2003, Australian police found $160 million of heroin offloaded onto a beach from the Pong Su, a North Korean cargo ship.
“North Korea may still be involved in narco-trafficking, but it’s not with the official sanction of the regime today,” Michael Madden, a North Korea scholar at 38 North, told The Post.
A glimpse into the workings of Office 39 came in 2017 when Ri Jong-Ho, a former top Office 39 official who defected in 2014, told a Japanese news outlet that the operation had five central groups manned by thousands of low-level employees — a few doing legitimate businesses but many not.
Ri told the Washington Post that he could get millions of US dollars to Pyongyang just by handing a bag of cash to a ship captain leaving a Chinese coastal city for the North Korean port of Nampo. Ri estimated he sent $10 million that way just in the first nine months of 2014.
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