nKorea: Info Security

The Information Fortress Known As North Korea(Los Angeles Times)…John M. Glionna, Nov 14, 2008.

Some intelligence is smuggled out by groups and individuals these days, but the main thing outsiders know about the reclusive regime is that they know nothing.

Kim’s approach is, ‘Know thy enemy but don’t let them know us,’ “

These days, much of the information gathering on North Korea comes not from governments but private individuals and human rights groups that have managed to piece together a clandestine network of internal reporters. Some nongovernmental aid organizations return from the country with observations of what goes on there.

“Nobody is too confident about information out of North Korea,” Kang said. “Even the North Korean government isn’t that confident of the statistics they compile.”

“What Kim Jong Il has put together is a counter-intelligence masterpiece,” said Korean historian Andrei Lankov.

“I speak of the CIA’s record in North Korea as the longest running failure in the history of American espionage,” said Donald Gregg, a CIA station chief in South Korea in the 1970s and a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul. “It has always been the toughest of the tough targets. In my day, we truly did not know what was going on there.

“The lines of communication are opening up,” Howard said.

Good Friends publishes regular Internet reports on North Korea. One included such headlines as “Food Shortage Lowers the Attendance of a Munitions Factory in Eunduk County” and “15 People Publicly Executed in Onsung County.”

The group has also broken North Korean news, including an explosion in June involving a petroleum pipeline near Pyongyang.

“Someone threw a cigarette without thinking. There were lots of casualties, even deaths,” Kang said. “South Korean intelligence denied the story. They later came back and said we were right.”