Category: DPRK Government

Meet Kim Heung kwang, former member of North Korean thought police

Posted on by

By his third year working for Kim Jong-il’s thought police, Kim Heung-kwang says he could almost sense the presence of illegal data. Going door-to-door with the task force assigned to search out digital contraband in citizens’ homes, he remembers finding forbidden DVDs and players hidden under beds and in books with pages cut away to create hidden compartments.

Early on he found that when he knocked on doors, the guilty watchers would hurriedly hide their DVDs. So he learned to turn off the power to the entire building before making his house calls, trapping discs in their players. “I felt they were watching rotten, capitalist material and ruining the juche mentality,” Kim says, referring to the North Korean communist ideology. The short, bespectacled man, sitting in his austere Seoul office, smiles wearily and crosses his legs with a professorial air. “I felt justified to send these criminals away.”

The DVD owners would cry and plead. They’d beg on their knees and pull on the sleeves of his uniform, claiming they had just found the offending media lying in the street. Sometimes he accepted bribes and turned a blind eye. (“You could feel the outside of the envelope between your fingers and tell whether it was a lot of money,” he remembers.)

But most of the data criminals he caught, he reported. Many were sentenced to months or years in prison camps. Read more

How Kim Heung kwang got involved with the North Korean thought police

Posted on by
1

Kim Heung-kwang had earned membership in the all-powerful Communist Party through years of work helping to create North Korea’s own computers, including the Paektusan minicomputer, named for the mountain where Kim Jong-il was said to have been born. As a computer science professor at Hamhung University, he had even taught students who would go on to work for North Korea’s cyberwarfare brigade, Unit 121—the group suspected of the Sony breach—in the basics of networking and operation systems.

After black markets began to spread, Kim was reassigned in 2000 to a military division that went door-to-door to search for contraband media. “I loved it,” he says. “I had the power to go into homes and take these materials and no one could even question me.”

One of the perks of Kim’s position, of course, was nearly infinite access to the media he confiscated. He began to watch the contraband films and TV shows and even loaned out his collection to friends, who rewarded him with gifts like alcohol and meat.

In 2002, Kim was given a PC, part of what he describes as a secret aid shipment from South Korea. Its hard drive had been wiped. But using forensic recovery software, Kim was able to reassemble its deleted contents. They included 400 files: films, TV shows, and, most important to his intellectual sensibilities, ebooks.

“You can’t imagine how excited I was,” he says. “I had hit a gold mine.” Read more

North Korea’s short history of apologies

Posted on by

After the longest consecutive talks ever held between North and South Korea, the two sides came to an historic agreement last Tuesday defusing tensions that could have ignited a wider armed conflict.

The most significant aspect of the deal appeared to be that North Korea apologized for the mines planted in the southern section of the DMZ. That incident precipitated South Korea’s resumption of loudspeaker broadcasts, which it had ended in 2004.

North Korea has little history of apologies, analysts say.

[Christian Science Monitor]

Rival Koreas masters at pulling back from the brink

Posted on by

If history is any judge, the Koreas always seem to find a way to save face and avert the war that both sides have been threatening since 1953:

December 2010: North Korea backs off from an earlier threat of “catastrophic retaliation” after South Korea defiantly goes ahead with live-fire drills near the country’s disputed western sea boundary.

May 2010: North Korea threatens “all-out counterattacks” after Seoul moves to resume psychological warfare operations to punish the North over a torpedo attack that reportedly killed 46 South Korean sailors earlier in the year.

Early 2000s: In what has been called the “second North Korean nuclear crisis,” animosity soars after Washington says the North, after being confronted in 2002 by a U.S. envoy, admits privately that it has a secret nuclear fuel program, a violation of an earlier nuclear accord. North Korea denies this and, already angry at being lumped earlier by President George W. Bush into an “Axis of Evil,” says in early 2003 that it has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. South Korea, meanwhile, tries to better ties with the North under two liberal presidents, including Kim Dae-jung who is awarded the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace on the Korean Peninsula.

1992-94: The “first North Korean nuclear crisis” includes North Korean threats to withdraw from the NPT and Washington’s exploration of possible air strikes amid U.S. government estimates that the North is pursuing large-scale nuclear bomb fuel production. There’s also the North’s 1994 threat, for the first time, to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.”

1968: A team of 31 North Korean commandos slips undetected across the border and comes within striking distance of the Seoul palace of President Park Chung-hee, the dictator father of current President Park Geun-hye. Furious, Park establishes a secret commando team tasked with demolishing Kim Il Sung’s presidential mansion. Despite this drama, the rival Koreas eventually sign a major accord in 1972 to work toward peaceful reunification.

[AP]

North Korea and South Korea de-escalate tensions

Posted on by

North Korea and South Korea have reached an agreement to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s national security chief, Kim Kwan-jin, announced Tuesday.

South Korea will get the apology it demanded over recent military escalation by the North, and the South will stop broadcasting propaganda that infuriated the North.

North Korea says it “regrets” that South Korean soldiers were injured by landmines and lifts its “semi-state of war” under an agreement by the two countries, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

[CNN]

North Korean “dual tactic” of “war and peace strategies”

Posted on by

South Korea’s defense ministry said Sunday it had detected “unusual” North Korean submarine activity, telling NBC News the submarine movement was a sign that North Korea was using a “dual tactic” of “war and peace strategies” as envoys met in the Panmunjom truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border.

The nations entered a second day of talks on Sunday after the North entered a “quasi state of war” over South Korean propaganda being blasted across the border via loudspeaker.

A South Korean defense official said about 70 percent of the North’s submarines were not in their usual positions. However, it was not clear how many submarines that represented.

“We are detecting unusual movement from North Korean submarines, in that they have left their bases and also North Korea has doubled artillery power along the border,” said an official from Seoul’s Defense Ministry.

[NBC]

North Korean troops on “fully armed state of war”

Posted on by

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his troops onto a war footing after a Friday afternoon deadline passed. He is demanding Seoul halt anti-North propaganda broadcasts or face military action.

On Thursday, Kim Jong Un had convened an emergency meeting as the two Koreas exchanged fire. Then today North Korea’s state-run television KRT released still photographs of Kim and North Korean high ranking military officials at an emergency meeting of Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK).

During the emergency meeting, Kim put his troops on a “fully armed state of war” starting from 5 p.m. (0830GMT) on Friday and had declared a “quasi-state of war” in frontline areas, KRT added.

Such language is often used by North Korea in times of tension with the South.

[Reuters]

North and South Korea exchanges fire

Posted on by

In an escalation of the tense situation in the region, North and South Korea exchanged fire over their heavily fortified border Thursday, the South Korean Defense Ministry said.

South Korea detected a projectile, assumed to be a small rocket, that was fired toward the western province of Gyeonggi, a Defense Ministry official told CNN. The South Korean military responded by firing a few dozen shells at the area from which the North Korean projectile was fired, the official said.

The U.S. believes North Korea deliberately placed mines in the path of a South Korean patrol in the demilitarized zone between the two countries, sparking the exchanges, the official said. Tensions spiked on the Korean Peninsula after two South Korean soldiers were seriously wounded by landmines on August 4 in the demilitarized zone.

Seoul vowed a “harsh” response to the landmines and resumed blaring propaganda messages over the border from huge loudspeakers. The move infuriated North Korea, which called the broadcasting “a direct action of declaring a war.” Over the weekend, it warned of “indiscriminate strikes.”

[CNN]

Report of latest purge of senior North Korean official

Posted on by

South Korea said Wednesday it is closely monitoring the whereabouts of a ranking North Korean official dealing with inter-Korean affairs amid a local media report that he might have been purged.

Won Tong-yon, the vice head of the United Front Department of the Workers’ Party, is believed to have been purged and forced to undergo “revolutionary education,” a kind of punishment handed down to North Korean officials who commit wrongdoing, under which they must perform hard labor, according to a media report.

Won, a veteran official handling inter-Korean affairs, represented the North’s delegation during high-level talks with South Korea held in February 2014.

If confirmed, the case would be the latest in a series of purges and executions ordered by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is tightening his grip on power through a so-called reign of terror.

[Korea Herald]

North Korea’s latest threatened US attack

Posted on by

On Monday, South Korea and Washington launched an annual joint military drill that Pyongyang routinely describes as a rehearsal for an invasion. In response, North Korean officials have leveled serious threats against the United States. RT reports that a spokesman for North Korea’s National Defense Commission warned that it had weapons “unknown to the world” that made it an “invincible power,” while the state news agency KCNA warned that “if [the] United States wants their mainland to be safe” they should end the military exercises.

Why don’t we take threats from North Korea seriously? Part of it is a simple boy-who-cried-wolf situation. North Korea has threatened to attack the United States many, many times before. Here’s just a short list:

  • In May, Park Yong Chol, director of North Korea’s Institute for Research into National Reunification, told CNN that the North has the capability to strike the United States with a nuclear missile, and would do so if the U.S. “forced their hand.”
  • In February, officials warned that North Korea would cause the “final ruin of the US” with its “precision and diversified nuclear striking means.”
  • In 2014, following an alleged North Korean cyberattack on Sony Pictures, a North Korean official threatened attacks on  “the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland” if the United States retaliated.
  • In 2013, North Korea warned it could attack Guam, Hawaii and the U.S. mainland with rockets.
  • In 2009, North Korea announced that it had “tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary.”
  • In 2005, a North Korean official said that if war broke out, the country would “first of all strike all bases of US imperialist aggressors and turn them into a sea of fire.”
  • In 2002, following their inclusion in President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman warned that “the option to ‘strike’ impudently advocated by the U.S. is not its monopoly” and that North Korea could “mercilessly wipe out the aggressors.”

Most experts still argue that a North Korean nuclear strike remains extremely unlikely. “There is a near zero chance of a premeditated North Korean nuclear attack,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told NK News earlier this year, though Kimball added that a miscalculation by either side could pose a serious risk.

[Washington Post]