When North Korea sends their people, they’re not sending their best.
Kim Yong-chol, North Korean spymaster and regime insider par excellence, is en route to New York as of Wednesday, scheduled to arrive on a flight from Beijing a little after 2:00 p.m.
Kim (who bears no blood relation to North Korea’s ruling family) had to secure a waiver to make the trip: He’s currently banned from travel to the United States by U.S. sanctions. That ban was slapped on Kim for his role in the Sony hack, but the list of his crimes is much longer.
Kim Yong-chol was previously North Korea’s top spy, as head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). That’s an innocuous name for what could be better thought of as the juche KGB (or the “Notorious RGB”). It’s a ruthless organization implicated in spying, cyber warfare, assassinations, and kidnappings. The 72-year-old Kim is also thought to have masterminded the sinking of the Cheonan (an unprovoked attack on a South Korean naval vessel in 2010 that killed 46) and the shelling of a South Korean island that murdered four civilians that same year.
Perhaps more alarming is Kim’s role at the top of the Korean Workers’ Party, which is by far the most powerful entity in North Korea, more influential than either the military or the Potemkin apparatus that maintains the fiction that North Korea is a functioning nation-state. The KWP is less a political party than a vast criminal enterprise, devoted to maintaining its existence in the most ruthless way possible. With cells in every workplace and neighborhood, its surveillance apparatus is as omnipresent as it is oppressive. And with its involvement in counterfeiting, drug dealing, and weapons smuggling, the KWP exports its misery, too.
Kim’s trip to the States is probably a necessary one, as the groundwork must continue to be laid for the on-again, off-again, on-again summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. While he’s here, Kim Yong-chol is scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
But, as ever, we should keep the malignant nature of the Pyongyang regime in mind as negotiations move forward. By dispatching someone as repugnant as Kim Yong-chol, the Pyongyang dynasty has provided a living, breathing reminder of its inherent nature. For that, if nothing else, it should be thanked.
