North Korea
has become a gangster nation, pocketing $700 million to $1 billion
a year from counterfeiting of U.S. greenbacks, trafficking illicit
narcotics, smuggling contraband smokes and even peddling knockoff
Viagra, according to U.S. government estimates.
"North Korea
is the only government in the world today that can be identified
as being actively involved in directing crime as a central part
of its national economic strategy and foreign policy," says
David Asher, until recently a State Department adviser on Asia.
Pyongyang's
global criminal cabal — including Chinese gangs, Russian
mafia, Japanese yakuza and an IRA politico — produces a
tidy little slush fund for "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il,
which shamefully equals the country's legitimate export
income.
Pyongyang's infamous
Bureau No. 39 runs the crime-for-profit scheme — including
drug production, counterfeiting and smuggling — that uses
state trading firms, embassy diplomatic pouches and commercial
cargo.
The "payola"
keeps Kim Jong Il flush in cognac and caviar, and buys loyalty
from the military, security services and other elite. The income
also funds Pyongyang's embassies and buys gear for its nuclear/ballistic
missile programs.
The Congressional
Research Service notes that, since 1990, at least 50 drug seizures
in over 20 countries have involved North Korean diplomats and
trade officials. Most glaringly, North Korea's ship "Pong
Su" was seized off Australia in 2003 with 125 kilos of heroin
aboard.
According to defectors,
North Korea cultivates poppies on as much as 7,000 hectares. This
makes North Korea the world's No. 3 heroin producer behind Afghanistan
and Burma. (Japan, Russia, China and Europe are the leading customers.)
Methamphetamine is
also a choice North Korean export. Japanese police have traced
as much as 40 percent of the meth seized in Japan in recent years
to North Korean sources. (Pyongyang also sends "horse"
to China, South Korea and Taiwan.)
North Korea is also
the first government known to produce "Monopoly money"
since the Nazis. Indeed, it's the world's premier counterfeiter
of U.S. currency, especially the $100 bill. Known as the "supernote"
due to its primo quality, the Korean fake far surpasses the paper
that comes out of the Latin American and Eastern European crime
syndicates.
Since the
first "supernote" was discovered in Manila and Belgrade
in 1989, Pyongyang has printed at least 19 new versions to keep
up with U.S. Mint changes, the Washington Times recently
reported. Over the last 16 years, authorities have seized $45
million in supernotes.
Pyongyang works with
others, too. Last summer, a U.S.-Canada undercover op indicted
87 Americans and foreigners in 11 U.S. cities for smuggling "play"
money, narcotics and bogus smokes.
Fifty-nine of the
87 crooks were cuffed in one day. (Eight of them were pinched
by Operation "Royal Charm," an FBI sting — the
feds invited them to a fake wedding aboard a yacht moored off
Atlantic City. Several of the stooges actually came from overseas
bearing gifts such as his/her Rolexes for the betrothed.)
In closing this ring,
authorities seized: $4 million in supernotes; one billion sham
cigs (some Chinese) worth $42 million; ecstasy, meth and Viagra
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; $700,000 in mock U.S.
postage stamps and several hundred thousand dollars in jeans.
Last October, the
Brits arrested an Irish nationalist in Belfast after a U.S. indictment
fingered him for helping six others move a $1 million in phony
North Korean 100s in Europe. While seeking medical care, he fled
to Ireland; America is seeking extradition.
North Korea also smuggles
gold, diamonds and weapons — as well as environmentally
sensitive ivory and rhino horn.
Pyongyang plainly
intends to milk the international crime "cash cow" even
more vigorously to support its desperately anemic economy.
The North Koreans
are among the victims. Over the last decade, while the regime
used land to grow poppy instead of food, 2 million North Koreans
needlessly starved, with many children left mentally impaired
from severe malnourishment.
And despite Pyongyang's
assertions that the "perfect" communist state is drug-free,
due to rampant internal corruption, self-imposed poverty and widespread
hunger, homegrown heroin is now making its way into North Korean
veins.
So long as North Korea
peddles drugs and counterfeit coin, stifles its economy and brandishes
nuclear weapons, it will not only be a danger to its neighbors
and the United States, but to itself as well.
Peter
Brookes is a Heritage
Foundation senior fellow. This article originally appeared
in The New York Post.
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