North Korea is running a drug ring, and Kim Jong-un is its Bond-style Mr Big
Kim Jong-un apparently demands that diplomats raise cash from drug sales
While the rest of the world watches James Bond movies for a laugh, North Korea’s communist leadership apparently take notes on how to be an evil mastermind. You might recall that in Live and Let Die, the President of a Caribbean island poses as a socialist revolutionary but actually uses his embassies to push heroin. Well, it’s obvious that a bootleg VHS of that particular yarn has been smuggled into North Korea strapped to a diplomat’s inner thigh because, according to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, Kim Jong-un has set up his own drug ring and reinvented himself as Mr Big. It’s hard not to imagine him in a leopard skin hat and white flares, dispensing orders in Seventies jive talk: “Hey baby, take this package to Poland and bust your conk – ya dig?” From the Chosun:
North Korea sent a large amount of illegal drugs to its embassy in an East European country last December and ordered diplomats there to sell it for cash by early April, a diplomatic source here claims … North Korea has ordered each diplomat to raise US$300,000 to prove their loyalty and mark the birthday of nation founder Kim Il-sung on April 15. Each North Korean diplomatic mission overseas is required to send back around $100,000 to the North each year, the agent-turned-defector allegedly said. They used to complain that new leader Kim Jong-un is too demanding.
And, presumably, anyone who disappoints Mr Kim gets pushed into a shark tank.
If the Chosun’s source is correct (and every story coming out of North Korea has to be litmus tested for fraud – sorting out the truth from satire can be tough), North Korea is running a pretty sophisticated operation. It produces the stuff at state-run factories in Chongjin and Heungnam and its narcotics are so renowned for their purity that they are in high demand across the globe. Anyone who drops an E in Camden could well be paying for Kim’s new bathroom in Pyongyang: “South Korean authorities estimate North Korea's annual output of illicit drugs amount to 3,000 kg that translate into revenues of between $100 million and $200 million.” That's the kind of hard currency that is hard to trace and can be spent on other mastermind stuff like satellite launches and hiring Iranian scientists.
Of course, Kim wouldn’t be the first communist to raise funds for the revolution by helping folks to get high. Many of the Marxist movements in Latin America have tried to help the poor of their continent by getting the poor of the other continents hooked on drugs – a bizarre inversion of socialist logic that suggest that the revolution doesn’t end up eating its children so much as snorting them. If any story should leave you full of contempt for what Marxism has become, this is it. An ideology that was supposed to liberate has now succumbed to its own fascisms, creating an army of slaves hooked on the filth that it produces in its collectivised opium fields. It feels cruelly ironic that North Korea is now China's number 1 source of crystal meth - one socialist state pushing drugs to another.
Meanwhile, I’m fascinated to see what Bond-style villainy the North Koreans will emulate next. Putting a satellite in space smacks of You Only Live Twice, while its nuclear project is reminiscent of Thunderball. Would it really surprise us to discover that they’ve gone all Moonraker and built a giant spaceship from which they will release poison to purify the Earth and create a second Eden? Be warned, Kim has already started dressing like Ernst Stavro Blofeld…
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