A Proxy War Waged Against North Korea

The British newspaper “The Sunday Times” reported on Sunday that the international efforts to drive North Korea into a corner is neither diplomatic pressure nor military intimidation, but a “secret war.”

The weekly said, “Intelligence agencies, navies, and air forces from at least 13 (western) nations are quietly co-operating in a ‘secret war’ against Pyongyang and Tehran.”

According to the newspaper, the war “has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, and investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau,” even though “few details filter out from western officials about the program, which has been in operation since 2003.”

“Diplomacy alone has not worked, military action is not on the table, and so you’ll see a persistent increase in this kind of pressure,” said a senior western official.

The Sunday Times added, “Two Bush administration officials indicated last year that the program had blocked North Korea from obtaining equipment used to make missile propellants, and a shipload of precursor chemicals for weapons was seized in Taiwan before it could reach a North Korean port.” The program also successfully froze North Korea’s secret accounts which generated some $500 million a year for the regime.

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former undersecretary for arms control of the U.S. Department of State, is the man who originally devised the program. While serving as undersecretary, he made a serious dent in North Korea’s revenues from ballistic missile sales through this program.

The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which was announced by U.S. President George W. Bush in Krakow, Poland, in May 2003, was also Mr. Bolton’s idea. The stated aim of the initiative is to stop the traffic of weapons of mass destruction on land, in water, and in the air. However, the British newspaper’s report said the initiative had “no international secretariat (to coordinate international efforts), no offices in federal agencies established to support it, and no database or reports of successes and failures.” Those vague qualities make it attractive to Bolton, concluded the newspaper.

pisong@donga.com