Defectors Tell of N. Korean Drug Trade

Their faces shrouded by black hoods to conceal their identities, two North Korean defectors appeared before a Senate panel Tuesday and detailed how Pyongyang has made the export of narcotics and missiles a state-run business.

The estimated $1 billion in hard currency generated annually by these ventures, experts told the committee, is probably subsidizing North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

“North Korea is basically a crime syndicate with nuclear bombs,” said Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), who sponsored the hearings before a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee. “The role of a government is to protect its citizens from criminals. But, in the case of North Korea, it appears the government is the criminal.”

The testimony comes as debate rages within the Bush administration and among its Asian allies about how to quash the North Korean regime’s nuclear ambitions. Some advocate a multilateral “quarantine” to keep North Korea from exporting its nuclear material, weapons and drugs, in what would amount to a containment strategy. North Korea has said it would consider such sanctions to be an act of war.

U.S. officials have long alleged that the North Korean government was producing and trafficking drugs, counterfeiting currency and selling ballistic missiles to Middle Eastern countries. But direct testimony from North Korean defectors has been scarce.

The two men who testified Tuesday defected to South Korea in 1997 and 1998, but because of concerns about reprisals, they entered the Senate chambers wearing black hoods and testified through an interpreter while sitting behind a tall screen.

One man, identified by the alias Bok Koo Lee, said he was a missile scientist who worked at a plant in Chagang province in the north-central region of the country. Lee, an expert in missile guidance systems, said he and five colleagues were taken in the summer of 1989 on a 15-day voyage to a Middle Eastern country where they were ordered to test-fire a missile.

Upon his return, Lee said, he learned that country was Iran, which later became a client for North Korean missile guidance control vehicles.

Lee said that as a missile expert he had no direct knowledge of nuclear issues but that he believed North Korea has atomic weapons.

He said 90% of the parts in the North Korean missile guidance system he worked on came from Japan, shipped by a pro-Pyongyang ethnic Korean group.

Lee defected to South Korea in July 1997 and has been in the United States a week, said Michael Horowitz, a Reagan administration official who is trying to draw attention to the plight of North Korean refugees and who helped arrange Lee’s testimony.

“What happens to him in the future is still undetermined,” Horowitz said. Lee has not officially requested asylum, Horowitz said.

The second defector, who fled in 1998, said he had worked as a government official for 15 years and was involved in narcotics trafficking. He said Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and father of current leader Kim Jong Il, had ordered every North Korean collective farm to set aside land for poppy production.

Some of the drug trafficking has been conducted by North Korean diplomats, who, according to defectors, were expected to support their overseas missions through drug sales.

According to the Congressional Research Service, North Korean diplomats have been arrested for allegedly smuggling heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and hashish. In 1998, a North Korean diplomat was arrested in Egypt with 500,000 tablets of Rohypnol, the so-called date rape drug.

Robert Galluci, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea, told the Senate panel that it stands to reason that Pyongyang is using the money from drug smuggling and counterfeiting to fund its military, including nuclear programs. The U.S., Japan and South Korea should look for new ways to stop the activities, he said.

However, the U.S. should not delude itself by thinking that cracking down on North Korean smuggling will prevent a determined regime in Pyongyang from building a nuclear arsenal, Galluci warned. Instead, the regime could squeeze even more money from the impoverished Korean people, he said.

Tuesday’s testimony raised questions about whether North Korea could survive without the hard currency generated by its illicit activities. North Korea’s legal exports of textiles, gold, steel, cement and foodstuffs such as fish, seaweed and mushrooms bring in about $750 million annually -- less than $40 per capita, said Nicholas D. Eberstadt, a North Korea watcher at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

“North Korea as a state has no visible legal means of support,” he said, arguing that illegal business is not an aberration but part and parcel of North Korea’s diplomacy. “It’s a predatory approach,” he said.

The nation’s trade deficit has swelled to about $800 million a year, Eberstadt said.

That $800 million is a gross measure of North Korea’s gray economy, which includes international aid, remittances from Japan and South Korea, and proceeds from drugs, arms sales and counterfeiting, Eberstadt estimated.

North Korean proceeds are estimated by various agencies at $15 million to $100 million annually from counterfeiting, $560 million from missile sales, and $500 million from drug trafficking.