{"id":16668,"date":"2020-06-27T23:33:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-27T20:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/inside-office-39-north-koreas-illicit-global-smuggling-network\/"},"modified":"2020-06-27T23:33:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T20:33:00","slug":"inside-office-39-north-koreas-illicit-global-smuggling-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-office-39-north-koreas-illicit-global-smuggling-network\/","title":{"rendered":"#Inside \u2018Office 39\u2019: North Korea\u2019s illicit global smuggling network"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Inside \u2018Office 39\u2019: North Korea\u2019s illicit global smuggling network<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\nNorth Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un vanishes, then pops up. Now, the portly despot is out of sight again, and that raises the question: Who\u2019s minding the store \u2014 the one that keeps him in booze and fancy wheels?<\/p>\n

His little sister has stepped into his role as saber-rattler,\u00a0even threatening a nuclear attack on the US. But those caught up in the palace intrigue really want to know if she\u2019s also the one overseeing the money machine that keeps the mean machine running.<\/p>\n

That would be the shadowy, notorious\u00a0Office 39 in Pyongyang,\u00a0the headquarters of an allegedly illicit global smuggling network designed to generate millions in hard currency that fatten the coffers of Kim and his family.<\/p>\n

Without it, Pyongyang\u2019s 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 \u2014 not to mention nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere do you think Kim gets his cognacs, Mercedes and Rolex watches?\u201d David Maxwell, a retired US Army Special Forces colonel and North Korea expert, asked the Post. \u201cAll the money to buy that stuff comes from Office 39.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s late father, Kim Jong-Il, launched it in 1974.<\/p>\n

\"Kim<\/img>
Korean leader Kim Jong-Il walks in front of his youngest son Kim Jong-Un in 2010.<\/span>REUTERS<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a bank for Kim Jong Un,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he\u2019s gotten a little more careful in recent years about the illegal activity, Lee said. \u201cIt was getting too much attention and looking bad for the Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Up until the early 2000s, North Korean diplomats working on behalf of Office 39 were the shameless bag men for the regime \u2014 and often still are, according to Sean King, an Asia specialist at Park Strategies in New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Kims are like an organized crime family masquerading as the leaders of a country,\u201d King told the Post. \u201cThe diplomats were sent overseas with quotas of hard currency they\u2019d have to send back, by any means necessary. North Korea\u2019s embassies were organized like a multinational criminal enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Kim<\/img>
Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong Un<\/span>AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

North Korea still maintains about 40 embassies, but the bigger money is made by exporting slave labor. In China and Russia\u2019s Siberia territory, for example, North Korean men do labor like logging and are forced to give almost all their wages to the government.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNorth Korea may still be involved in narco-trafficking, but it\u2019s not with the official sanction of the regime today,\u201d Michael Madden, a North Korea scholar at\u00a038 North, told The Post.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0glimpse into the workings of Office 39\u00a0came in 2017 when Ri Jong-Ho, a former top Office 39 official who defected in 2014, told a Japanese news<\/a> outlet that the operation had five central groups manned by thousands of low-level employees \u2014 a few doing legitimate businesses but many not.<\/p>\n

Ri told the\u00a0Washington 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.\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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“#Inside \u2018Office 39\u2019: North Korea\u2019s illicit global smuggling network” North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un vanishes, then pops up. Now, the portly despot is out of sight again, and that raises the question: Who\u2019s minding the store \u2014 the one that keeps him in booze and fancy wheels? His little sister has stepped into his role…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28772],"class_list":["post-16668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-inside-office-39-north-koreas-illicit-global-smuggling-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}