If Pyongyang has an equivalent to the late Richard Helms, the Nixon era director of central intelligence who kept the secrets on Vietnam and Iran, that would be Kim Yong-chol, a four-star general and Kim Jong-un confidante. Kim, a former bodyguard of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, is now the director of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). The RGB is North Korea’s nerve center for intelligence gathering and such clandestine operations as the recent hacking of Sony by the so-called “Guardians of Peace.”

General Kim Yong-chol was identified as being “responsible for overseeing the attack against Sony,” in a January 18^th report in the New York Times, by none other than General James R. Clapper, Jr., the U.S.’s current director of national intelligence. General Clapper met Kim Yong-chol over a 12-course dinner held in Pyongyang in November while he was on a secret mission to secure the release of two imprisoned U.S. citizens. (Pyongyang sent General Clapper a bill for the meal.)