State Security And Secret Policing In North Korea

This report lifts the curtain on North Korea's three main security agencies, the State Security Department, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Military Security Command. Established with Soviet assistance in the mid to late 1940s and modeled on the Soviet secret police apparatus, North Korea's internal security agencies rely on constant surveillance, a network of informants in every neighborhood, and the threat of punishment in North Korea's notorious prison camps to ensure the Kim regime's total control. The security agencies play a primary role in restricting the flow of information and ensuring strict ideological conformity through harsh surveillance and coercion. North Koreans must participate in self-criticism sessions or face punishment, even time in a political prison camp. State security agents conduct routine checks to ensure that radio sets remain perpetually tuned to the state frequency, and '109 squads' roam border towns at night, arresting smugglers and confiscating South Korean TV shows and dramas that have entered the country via portable media storage devices. Nevertheless, the report also notes that the advent of post-famine small-scale private economic activity, cell phones, DVDs, USBs, smuggled radios and increased access to foreign broadcasting and bribes are beginning to erode some of the information blockade and political controls. Those North Koreans who assume great risks to gain access to information from the outside world and to impart information show courage, whether their actions are an act of dissent or just the result of wanting to learn more about the world. What might ultimately bring change to North Korea is the increased inflow and outflow of information. The security agencies, however, continue to enforce North Korea's information blackout, by increasing border surveillance and cracking down on marketplaces, unauthorized phone calls, and foreign broadcasting. Having ensured the survival of the Kim family's dynastic regime for six decades, North Korea's complex and ruthless internal security apparatus will no doubt continue to be a key element of Kim Jong-un's political control. Greater awareness of how it operates is essential to understanding how the Kim regime remains in power.

This book explores the secret police organizations of East Asian dictators: their origins, operations, and effects on ordinary citizens' lives.

This monograph examines North Korea's Office Number 39: its origins, organizational structure, and activities. The authors focus on Office Number 39's key illicit activities? to include manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs, the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Finally, as Kim Jong-Il grows frailer, assessing how his successor may continue or alter Office Number 39's activities is also examined. (Originally published by the Strategic Studies Institute)

In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive

Kim Jong Il came to power after the death of his father Kim Il Sung in 1994. Contrary to expectations, he has succeeded in maintaining enough political stability to remain in power. Kim Jong Il's Leadership of North Korea is an examination of how political power has been developed, transmitted from father to son, and now operates in North Korea Using a variety of original North Korean sources as well as South Korean materials Jae-Cheon Lim pieces together the ostensibly contradictory and inconsistent facts into a conceptual coherent framework. This book considers Kim and his leadership through an analytical framework. composed of four main elements: i) Kim as a leader of a totalitarian society; ii) as a politician; iii) as a Korean; and iv) as an individual person. This illuminating account of what constitutes power and how it is used makes an important contribution to the understanding of an opaque and difficult regime. It will be of interest for upper level undergraduate, postgraduates and academics interested in North Korean politics, and also those in Political theory.

The classic national security concerns of nuclear proliferation and the production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction cannot be addressed in the Korean peninsula without at the same time considering the implications and interrelationship of what are these days known as the human security issues of food, poverty and, perhaps more controversially, freedom.We agree that East Asia and the world are more dangerous with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the DPRK or North Korea) in possession of nuclear weapons. It is also argued, however, that a comprehensive security analysis identifies many equally significant threats to regional security, such as the risk from industrial and nuclear accidents and the potential for transborder crime arising from the lack of legal and productive avenues for economic activity for North Korea's poverty-stricken citizens. In this book Korea, soft security issues are as important as hard security matters and that the latter cannot be understood, or its dilemmas unravelled, without a clear engagement with the former.This book looks at Korean security dilemmas from the perspective of the various international actors, not just from the viewpoint of the major protagonists the DPRK and the United States. We show that different states and international organizations have different and multiple interests in their relationships with the DPRK and with each other.

The second edition of Hidden Gulag utilizes the testimony of sixty former North Koreans who were severely and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in a vast network of penal and forced labor institutions in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for reasons not permitted by international law. By the time of the research for the second edition in 2010 and 2011, there were some 23,000 former North Koreans who recently arrived in South Korea. Included in this number are hundreds of persons formerly detained in the variety of North Korea's slave labor camps, penitentiaries, and detention facilities. Included in this number are several former prisoners who were arbitrarily imprisoned for twenty to thirty years before their escape or release from the labor camps, and their subsequent flight through China to South Korea. This newly available testimony dramatically increases our knowledge of the operation of North Korea's political prison and labor camp system. This second edition of Hidden Gulag also utilizes a recent international legal framework for the analysis of North Korea's human rights violations: the norms and standards established in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court for defining and determining crimes against humanity, which became operative in July 2002. In addition to the testimony and accounts from the former political prisoners in this report, this second edition of Hidden Gulag also includes satellite photographs of the prison camps.