>
> Kim gave Putin permission to shoot NK drug dealers on sight.
Loose lips sink ships.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1006614,00.html
>...The Asian Wall Street Journal alleges the Golden Star Bank in Vienna is also part of a shadowy financial web controlled by Bureau 39, which was set up in the 1970s to generate hard currency.
It claims Bureau 39 controls a drug-smuggling, counterfeiting and illicit weapons trading operation that generates more than a billion dollars a year, and uses the Korean Daesong Bank and its branches in Vienna, Macao, Seoul and Beijing as a front.
http://www.abc.net.au/abcasiapacific/focus/stories/s851879.htm North Korea, heroin and Australia
Backgrounder on North Korean drugs involvement
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030609/story3.html
> ...According to estimates, North Korea has anywhere from 4,200 to 7,000
> hectares under poppy cultivation. An anonymous North Korean defector
> testified to a U.S. congressional committee two weeks ago that in 1997
> Kim ordered each of the D.P.R.K.'s collective farms to grow 25 acres of
> poppies.
Kim Young Chul, 34, was a cog in the North's drug industry in the late 1990s, working as a driver in a military unit. The poppies came from farms as large as 10 sq km in North Hamgyong and Yanggang provinces. Farmers extracted the resin and fashioned it into balls the size of oranges. "It would be wrapped in leaves and paper and taken to the factory in boxes to be boiled," says Kim. His job was to drive refined heroin to the docks of Chongjin, his hometown, a large port city on North Korea's northeast coast. "I'd pick it up and drive it to the harbor, and it would be taken out to sea to be picked up by ships heading for Singapore, Hong Kong, Cambodia and Macau." Kim says his unit sold between three and five kilos of heroin a month, earning about $3,000 a kilo; the money was deposited in Pyongyang banks controlled by Kim Jong Il, he says. "We never asked questions," says Kim, who defected to South Korea last year. "We thought we were showing our loyalty to Kim Jong Il. We thought he would use the money to improve our lives."
Methamphetamine production was expanded in the late '90s, partly to make up for a drought-induced slump in opium production but also to satisfy demand from Japan. Methamphetamine, a chemical product, is simpler to produce than heroin. But it also relies on the import of expensive raw materials such as the chemical ephedrine. In 1998, Thai police stopped an Indian shipment of 2.5 tons of ephedrine—also used in allergy drugs—bound for Pyongyang. A North Korean diplomat familiar with the case says the batch was seized because Thai customs officials were suspicious that a country such as North Korea would need so much cough medicine. The diplomat, who now lives in Seoul, says the Thais allowed the 2.5 tons through after six months of wrangling. Few people believed the compound was being used to solve a hay fever crisis in North Korea. "That was enough ephedrine to last North Korea 100 years," says a former North Korean diplomat.
-- Michael Pugliese