North Korea's Bureau #39

It sounds like something out of a Graham Greene thriller. But, as aficionados of North Korean rackets already know, Bureau #39 is the quite real invention of North Korean’s tyrant Kim Jong Il. Operating since 1974, located in a concrete building in the heart of Pyongyang,  and reporting directly to Kim Jong Il, Bureau #39 serves as headquarters for North Korea’s global networks of illicit money-raising activities. These include such antics as trafficking abroad in drugs, counterfeit cigarettes and counterfeit $100 bills — all produced by the government of North Korea. The profits flow to Kim, who in turns dispenses them not only to pay for his own pleasures, but to buy loyalties and provide for the hard-cash needs of his totalitarian, nuclear-bomb-building state.

Bureau #39 embodies an interesting concept — utterly corrosive to any civilized world order — in which Kim has ruthlessly perverted the modern privileges of the nation state, enlisting the apparatus of a country to serve as cover for an array of activities that are usually the domain not of governments, but of organized crime. In North Korea, the government holds the monopoly in such matters.

Though Bureau #39 has been mentioned in many reports over the years, it usually features as just one more weird and disturbing item in the roster of murky North Korean institutions. But three seasoned analysts of this scene — Paul Rexton Kan, Bruce E. Bechtol, Jr., and Robert M. Collins —  have just published a monograph focusing specifically on Bureau #39 — in which they explore its role as a vital cog within the North Korean government. My only quibble with them would be that in its perversion of the uses of state sovereignty, North Korea may be an outstanding case, but it is probably not as singular as one might wish. Saddam Hussein made similar use of state powers to conduct illicit global business that helped sustain his regime (and had a computerized database within his government to keep track of Oil-for-Food oil contract kickbacks). And it would be interesting, for instance, to have a tour someday of the internal business records of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

But that said, it’s a fascinating study, worth a look: “Criminal Sovereignty: Understanding North Korea’s Illicit International Activities,” from the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College. And here’s a link to my Forbes column this week, on why President Obama, if he actually wants to do something about the continuing crisis of a nuclear North Korea, would be wise to forget about pursuing yet more six-party talks, and instead put more resources into rolling up the rackets of Bureau #39:  Kim Jong Il’s “Cashbox.”