begin quote from:
To Stop North Korea, Act Like Israel - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/to-stop-north-korea-act-like-israel.html
21 hours ago - In part that's because the Kim family never ran North Korea like a normal nation. Even in a rogue nation like Iran, the vise of economic embargoes can force hard-
The
news last week from the Korean Peninsula about yet another ballistic
missile launch was déjà vu all over again. This one had an estimated
range of 8,100 miles — long enough to hit Washington, D.C., or anywhere
else in the continental United States. President Trump responded with
angry tweets, but Kim Jong-un has good reason to be cocky.
The strongman knows all too well that a military response is highly unlikely. There are some 8,000
North Korean cannons and rocket launchers aimed at Seoul, in effect
holding the approximately 10 million inhabitants of that city hostage.
All sides realize that the human and economic costs of another Korean
war are simply unfathomable.
Several
American presidents have tried to persuade the Kim dynasty to abandon
its nuclear ambitions, through a combination of sanctions and
negotiations. But these efforts have been unsuccessful.
In
part that’s because the Kim family never ran North Korea like a normal
nation. Even in a rogue nation like Iran, the vise of economic embargoes
can force hard-liners to change their behavior. Not so with North
Korea, which has been able to skirt sanctions and United Nations
resolutions because it is run more like a Mafia fief than a state.
The North’s criminal empire is vast and global. According to the Strategic Studies Institute, it includes narcotics trafficking and the counterfeiting of United States currency. North Korea has also been accused of the online hacking of bank accounts; the sale of nuclear know-how; black-market arms sales, including scud and other missiles to Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and other nations; and a whole military enterprise set up to steal crypto currencies.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
This criminal syndicate is run out of North Korea’s mysterious Office 39, a bureau that, according to the Treasury Department,
“provides critical support to North Korean leadership in part through
engaging in illicit economic activities.” Every cog of the nation’s
machinery is mobilized to facilitate the regime’s racketeering:
Defectors have described schoolchildren working in poppy fields; they
say cash and smuggled goods are brought in on state-owned merchant
vessels; and diplomats peddle heroin. Crime is North Korea’s national
industry.
As
in any organized crime entity, the underbosses keep Mr. Kim’s regime
afloat. Their loyalty has been bought and paid for with lavish wealth
and privilege. So far, these crime bosses have been masterful at
circumventing the sanctions that have primarily hurt the enslaved North
Korean population.
That’s
why the United States and its allies ought to take a page from an
Israeli playbook and wage financial warfare against Mr. Kim and his
cabal.
The
notion behind using money as a weapon against terrorism belonged to
Meir Dagan, a legendary soldier and spymaster who developed the idea in
the nascent days of Israel’s fight against Hamas and terror groups
supported by Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Mr. Dagan rightly
believed that money was the oxygen that fueled the groups’ suicide
bombing campaign against Israel. If Israeli security services could
suffocate the funds that paid for the bloodshed, the attacks would stop.
In
1996, Mr. Dagan created a task force code-named Harpoon that mobilized
government agencies to focus on the money reaching terror cells from
state sponsors and international charities. When Mr. Dagan became head
of the Mossad, in 2002, Harpoon became an operational unit inside
Israeli intelligence. His spies used the same aggressive action and
imaginative chutzpah that had made the Mossad a storied force to follow
those funds and to go after Mr. Arafat’s millions and the charities
around the world that funneled cash into Hamas’s coffers.
Harpoon
targeted the banks that held accounts belonging to Palestinian
terrorist commanders, and the unit encouraged lawyers — including me —
to launch suits in United States federal court seeking monetary damages
for victims of state sponsors of terror so that countries like Syria,
Iran and even North Korea would realize that the costs of blowing up
buses outweighed the political ends the carnage hoped to achieve.
The combined espionage, military and legal offensive helped end the intifada by making it too expensive to continue.
The
unit’s greatest success came several years after the intifada, during
the Second Lebanon War, when Mr. Dagan urged the Israeli Air Force to
destroy the banks where Hezbollah kept its cash. Although Hezbollah, the
Iranian-supported Lebanese terrorist group, received hundreds of
millions of dollars a year from Tehran, it was a global criminal
enterprise involved in everything from cocaine trafficking to stealing
cars and money laundering. These activities funded its operations
against Israel and against American forces in Iraq.
With
the assistance of branches of the United States government, including
the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department, Harpoon went
after Hezbollah’s cocaine business in Venezuela and in Lebanon, as well
as its money-laundering activities in West Africa and America. Brilliant
operations and cons were carried out against Hezbollah’s captains —
operations that ultimately stripped them of the vast fortunes they had
assembled over the years. And when the Hezbollah hierarchy was cash
strapped, Harpoon targeted the financial institutions that allowed the
terrorists to move their cash across continents, ultimately shutting
down the Lebanese Canadian Bank, one
of the largest banks in the Middle East. It took the Syrian Civil War,
and Hezbollah’s enormous military involvement on behalf of the Assad
regime on Tehran’s tab, to provide the Party of God with a financial
lifeline. But the fact remains that one of the results of Israel’s
financial war against Hezbollah has been that Israel’s northern border
has remained relatively quiet for more than 11 years.
Most
military commanders acknowledge that there are very few, if any,
feasible solutions to today’s standoff with Pyongyang. The only
effective path is to unleash an offensive press against Kim’s inner
circle.
The
United States must take the lead by ramping up a covert campaign
against the regime’s criminal enterprises. This effort ought to include a
full-court press of dirty tricks, coercion, heavy-handed threats and
even direct action, all covert and deniable, against Kim’s financial
wizards who handle the finances, dispense the narcotics and hijack
Bitcoins.
Such
tradecraft must also be applied outside North Korea and Asia against
the businesses and banks in Europe, South America and elsewhere that
enable Kim’s criminal empire to flourish; bankers and businessmen are
less likely to have the mettle to resist a late-night visit by men who
could ruin their lives. And as North Korea is recognized as a state
sponsor of terror, helping groups like Hezbollah with arms and
expertise, a numbing slew of lawsuits should be filed seeking damages;
those damages will result in the forfeiture of North Korean assets —
open and hidden — around the world.
Sanctions
alone will not work. They have done nothing to stop the missile tests
and the saber rattling. Only when the money dries up will the loyalty of
the men in Kim’s inner circle be compromised and cut away. The North
Korean dictator will then be under enormous pressure to do whatever he
can to alleviate the effects of the spies tapping into his cash and
control. With full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula as the only other
alternative, there isn’t much of a choice.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is
the president of Shurat HaDin, an Israeli law center that has
represented terror victims in lawsuits around the world. She is the
co-author of “Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money
Masters.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 
No comments:
Post a Comment