The CIA will continue to bumble in North Korea as long as they don't understand what Kim really thinks of China's military and the CCP and what his father really thought about them. But maybe now that State and the Pentagon are feeling their way toward recognizing the seriousness of the threat from China, U.S. spy agencies will start to grow a brain about North Korea.
Moving along:
Death And Resurrection In North Korea (Updated); Moon of Alabama, May 31.
This one's a keeper. Even before news trickled out that executed members of the nuclear negotiation team were seen walking around, MoA's Bernhard was detailing a string of astounding resurrections. Very funny reading for those who appreciate trench humor.
North Korean Leader’s Slain Half Brother Was a CIA Source; Warren P. Strobel, Wall Street Journal, June 10:
Kim Jong Nam, the slain half brother of North Korea’s leader, was a Central Intelligence Agency source who met on several occasions with agency operatives, a person knowledgeable about the matter said.
“There was a nexus” between the U.S. spy agency and Mr. Kim, the person said.
Mr. Kim, the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was killed in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia in February 2017, when two women smeared his face with the nerve agent VX. U.S. and South Korean officials have blamed the attack on North Korea, which it denies.
[...]
U.S. intelligence officials at first felt relief that the CIA’s interaction with Mr. Kim wasn’t exposed in the immediate aftermath of his killing, the person knowledgeable about the situation said. But three months after his death, in May 2017, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that while in Malaysia, Kim Jong Nam met with a Korean-American whom Malaysian officials suspected was a U.S. intelligence officer.
Mr. Kim’s role as a CIA source also is described in a book about Kim Jong Un, “The Great Successor,” written by a Washington Post reporter and due to be published on Tuesday, according to news reports citing excerpts of the book. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t seen a copy of the book.
Mr. Kim traveled to Malaysia in February 2017 to meet his CIA contact, although that may not have been the sole purpose of the trip, the person knowledgeable about the matter said.
[...]
Joel Wit, a former State Department official and senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank, said the CIA occasionally has had useful sources among North Korean defectors who supplied information on topics like the country’s weapons program and missile exports.
More frequently, he said, “My experience has been that the CIA has repeatedly thought that it had well-placed sources in North Korea, human sources, that really knew what was going on.…Those sources have more often than not proved to not know what’s going on.”
[...]Meanwhile, Trump claims he wouldn’t have allowed CIA to recruit Kim Jong-un’s relatives; The Guardian, June 11
This has prompted the, uh, Atlantacists to complain that the U.S. President has sided with an enemy country against the CIA.
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