[Column] North Korea’s Paranoia and the Pentagon

Posted on : 2015-11-30 20:29 KST Modified on : 2015-11-30 20:29 KST
John Feffer
John Feffer

North Korea has always worried about infiltration. It views virtually every foreign visitor to the country as a potential spy. It keeps out most foreign correspondents. It carefully regulates the electronic devices a person brings into the country.

Charity workers are particularly suspect. During the height of the famine in the mid-1990s, North Korea restricted the movements of food-aid monitors and attempted to prevent Korean speakers from serving in those positions. Of course, North Korea’s anxieties were not confined to espionage. The government also worried about information going the other way as foreigners provided information about the outside world to ordinary citizens.

Still, some organizations managed to build up relationships of trust with the North Korean authorities. Humanitarian groups built windmills, greenhouses, and energy-efficient houses inside North Korea. German foundations organized workshops on the mechanics of a market economy. The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology brought in a number of computer and language teachers from outside to teach an elite group of students.

And now comes news, from The Intercept, that the Pentagon employed the head of a humanitarian organization to spy for it. The revelation confirms the worst fears of the North Korean authorities.

Of course, it wasn’t much of a spy operation. The organization, the faith-based Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG), was little known in humanitarian circles. Its leader, Kay Hiramine, had taken only three trips to North Korea. During that time, he allegedly delivered some bibles hidden in a shipment of winter clothing. He acted as the Pentagon’s eyes and ears in North Korea. And he had at his disposal a lot of Pentagon money, funneled through various shadowy conduits.

Intercept journalist Matthew Cole writes:

Because American intelligence has so few assets inside North Korea, much of Hiramine’s task was to find transportation routes to move military equipment — and potentially clandestine operatives — in and around the country. The Pentagon would eventually move sensors and small radio beacons through Hiramine’s transportation network, according to another former military official.

Since foreigners have restricted movement inside the country and it’s very difficult to smuggle equipment into North Korea without the government knowing about it, Hiramine and his colleagues probably didn’t move very much around. Since they made only three visits, they probably didn’t gather much information either. Indeed, Pentagon shut down the program in 2013 – presumably because its liabilities exceeded its utility.

The Pentagon’s operation, whatever its ultimate size, casts an embarrassing light on U.S. approaches to North Korea. It reveals the close coordination, during the George W. Bush years, of the military and the evangelical Christian community. The HISG affair was the initiative of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who rose to the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and never attempted to conceal his desire to use the U.S. military as an evangelizing force in the world.

The episode with HISG also suggests that Pyongyang is not simply being paranoid about the intentions of outsiders.

After all, the U.S. government has for years overtly funded efforts to undermine the government in Pyongyang – for instance, through the North Korea Human Rights Act – even as it has officially denied any desire for regime change. Organizations operating on the border with China, ostensibly working to help North Korea refugees, have also devoted considerable resources to smuggling Bibles into the country.

Foreigners have routinely hidden their real reasons for visiting the country. A BBC reporter pretended to be a Ph.D. student in order to accompany a London School of Economics delegation that went to North Korea in 2013. The writer Suki Kim concealed her motives when she taught at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology for two terms and then published a tell-almost-all account of the experience.

Finally, the meager results of the intelligence caper underscore how desperate the intelligence community really is. Even where the CIA and the Pentagon have considerable assets and have spent huge amounts of money, they are unable to make even the most elementary deductions about the way the world works.

For instance, Central Command employs 1,500 analysts, benefits from the global surveillance system the NSA deploys, and has boots on the ground throughout the Middle East. And yet they are constantly being “caught off-guard” by developments in the region, including the rapid rise of the Islamic State, the movements of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the disposition of forces inside Syria.

In North Korea, meanwhile, the CIA and the Pentagon have considerably less at their disposal – at least that anyone knows of. So, when North Korea is consistently described as “unpredictable,” perhaps this has more to do with the inability of the United States to predict North Korea’s actions rather than anything having to do with the consistently of Pyongyang’s policies.

The latest revelation of Pentagon misconduct won’t change North Korea’s attitude toward the United States. It has long suspected that Washington will use just about any means to acquire information, for instance through the monitoring procedures that would accompany any nuclear arms control agreement. The HISG episode only reinforces Pyongyang’s paranoia.

And, of course, the story casts a shadow on future humanitarian efforts inside North Korea. The vast majority of NGOs working with North Korea honestly want to help improve the living conditions of the citizens there. They are not informers for the U.S. intelligence agencies. But they will have to work that much harder to gain the trust of the government in Pyongyang.

Virtually all countries operate spy agencies. And North Korea has engaged in its own share of questionable activities. But the United States has made the inexcusable mistake of mixing the realms of espionage, humanitarianism, and Christian evangelism. Washington has repeatedly said that it wants Pyongyang to be more open to the world. Such missions, however, are going to produce the exact opposite results.

By John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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