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North Korea: Hand in the cookie
jar
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - The
interception of a US$48 million heroin shipment in
Australia has given Washington an unexpected diplomatic
lever as it acts to neutralize North Korea's weapons of
mass destruction.
Special-forces troops boarded
the 4,000-ton trader Pong Su in treacherous seas off
Sydney last week, ending a dramatic 48-hour chase that
had involved a warship, police launches and helicopters.
Its alleged consignment, 50 kilograms of heroin, was
earlier found hidden in a car that was stopped in a
Victoria coastal resort by police, who had been alerted
after the body of a man was found on a nearby beach.
For US investigators, the trial of the captain
and 29 crew members will offer a long-awaited
opportunity to lift the covers off Pyongyang's secretive
trade in narcotics, weapons and other illicit
contraband.
Senior US terrorism and narcotics
advisor Raphael Perl said in Washington on the weekend
that the Pong Su shipment was part of a wider
trafficking network sanctioned by North Korea's
reclusive leadership. "No question about it. It is
standard practice for them to use trading companies for
shipping narcotics," he said.
While Pyongyang
has been implicated in narcotics trafficking for two
decades, the Australian seizure is one of the first to
involve a non-Asian country, and one of few that have
left a clear trail of North Korean complicity. The
vessel was registered on the Pacific island of Tuvalu,
but Pyongyang's embassy in Canberra has reportedly
admitted that the vessel is North Korean, as are its
captain and most of the crew.
Three men arrested
on land with the heroin were identified as Malaysian and
Singaporean, while police have not disclosed the
nationality of a fourth man found dead on a beach. He is
believed to have drowned while landing the heroin from a
small boat.
According to reports in diplomatic
circles, North Korean envoys were in direct radio
contact with the ship shortly before it was boarded, but
the crew ignored pleas that they cooperate with
Australian security forces.
"There is no
implication that the ship was being controlled from the
embassy, but [the radio contact] does seem to establish
the identity of the Pong Su and tie the shipment
directly to Pyongyang, as it is unlikely a vessel of
this size would be permitted to function without the
regime's sanction," said one diplomat.
Washington has long been criticized for playing
down the impact of smuggled contraband from the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), primarily
because these shipments were not thought to be directed
against US interests. In its latest country assessment,
released in February, the State Department reiterated
that "there is still no evidence that even a single
incident of trafficking from the DPRK has had any impact
on the US".
Most seizures have taken place
within a short distance of North Korea, and appear to be
an offshoot of Pyongyang's well-documented involvement
in Asian gambling industries and white-collar crimes.
Last year 79kg of heroin was recovered by
authorities in Taiwan, and a separate shipment of 150kg
of methamphetamines, the largest in recent years, was
apprehended in Japan.
In Seoul, a North Korean
defector revealed the existence of a 100-member
trafficking ring based in Pyongyang and admitted making
nine illicit border crossings into China since 1998,
each time bringing in 50kg of heroin. As with the
Australian seizure, it was unclear whether the
operations were being directed by Asian syndicates using
North Korean crewmen or had high-level involvement from
Pyongyang.
"Police interrogation of suspects
apprehended while trafficking in illicit drugs developed
credible reports of North Korean boats engaged in
transporting heroin and uniformed North Korean personnel
transferring drugs from North Korean vessels to
traffickers' boats," the State Department noted. "It
nevertheless remains possible that criminal elements, or
some rogue military organization in the DPRK, are
trafficking on their own, without formal state
direction."
This conclusion is disputed by
emigre groups, which contend that all North Korean
vessels operate as an official arm of the government,
while the families of crewmen are usually held under
house arrest to ensure they don't defect. Using
relatives as hostages is a practice that dates back to
the 1970s, when farmers were reportedly first coerced
into growing opium poppies in remote regions around the
Hambuk, Yanggang, Jagang and Kangwondo mountain ranges.
According to reports compiled by the South
Korean government, cultivation was stepped up
dramatically in the mid-1990s, when the collapse of the
Soviet Union severed Pyongyang's main source of foreign
exchange and precipitated a deep economic crisis. Seoul
claims, with backing from some independent US monitors,
that the farms are now operated by the state security
apparatus and manned by army units using political
prisoners as a slave labor.
Similar reports have
emerged from Russia's far eastern republics and China,
which are believed to be the main overland transit
countries for drugs smuggled to Japan and Taiwan.
Moscow revealed recently that two North Korean
"agents" had been imprisoned in 1994, shortly after the
Soviet demise, for trying to sell 2,000kg of heroin
worth $1.5 million to fund an upgrade of under-equipped
army units.
South Korea believes that raw opium
is refined at government pharmaceutical factories, along
with cocaine and methamphetamines, which were added to
the consignment list in the last decade.
Marketing is handled by the Foreign Economic
Commission, an agency under the control of the ruling
Communist Party that has 20 overseas branches operating
as the Daesung Sangsa trading company.
Based on
the South Korean estimates, about 40 tonnes of opium is
produced each year, with a street value of $50 million
to $100 million. Data on other drugs are hazy, but an
average of 400kg of chemicals are imported each year to
make methamphetamines. "Since only 1.5 [tonnes] per year
would be enough to make medicines like cough
suppressants and medicine for treating bronchial asthma
in North Korea, it is clear that the remaining quantity
is likely to be converted into 'meth' to be sold in
secret overseas through international drug smuggling
networks," Seoul alleged in a report issued last year.
A key question that may be answered by the
Australian seizure is whether the North Korean
operations have now gone international in partnership
with Asian trafficking rings - and are expanding into
other forms of contraband.
Australian
authorities, apparently acting on information from at
least one Pong Su crew member, have said the heroin was
not from North Korea, but originated in the so-called
Golden Triangle adjoining Thailand, Laos and Myanmar.
Coast guard officers in Japan are also believed
to have uncovered evidence of a link between North Korea
and mafia groups when they salvaged a ship last year
that had been scuttled by its crew just before they were
apprehended. The ship was almost identical to others
used in North Korean smuggling rings, and contained a
mobile phone with the stored numbers of known members of
Japan's Yakusa criminal underworld.
It is not just
heroin that Pyongyang is believed to have been
trafficking with its new partners in crime: Washington
is convinced that the narcotics routes also serve as a
conduit for shipments of arms and forged documents.
Intelligence agencies in the United States have
listed North Korea as the biggest global source of
ballistic missiles, in a trade that nets Pyongyang at
least $150 million a year from such unstable regimes as
Libya, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Yemen.
Washington may not have a smoking gun to
brandish in the demilitarization talks with Pyongyang,
but intelligence derived from the narcotics seizures
offers the next best thing.
"Find the drugs and
you also stand a good chance of finding whatever else
they have been doing," said the diplomat. "Narcotics and
gun-running are two sides of the same terrorist coin.
The difficulty is in proving that we are dealing with
state-sponsored terrorism and not just a rogue criminal
organization that is functioning on its own behalf."
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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