convergence

The Criminal State
50 verifiable incidents involving drug seizures in at least 20 countries. A significant number
of these cases involved arrest or detention of North Korean diplomats or officials.” 48 Indeed,
overseas missions and embassies are essentially used as autonomous profit centers responsible
for covering their own costs in country and sending excess revenues back to Pyongyang. 49
An extraordinary office known as Bureau 39 (or Office 39) was established in 1974 to
generate foreign currency by whatever means necessary on behalf of the regime. “To commit
its criminal acts, Office 39 uses the powers and resources of a nation-state—merchant and
military vessels, diplomatic and embassy posts, as well as state run companies and collective
farms.” 50 Thus, criminal activity is not ancillary to the work of Bureau 39 or the corruption of
specific officials; it is rather the primary function of the organization. Bureau 39 runs numerous
front companies with offices throughout the world and “is involved in drug production and
distribution, smuggling, money laundering, currency counterfeiting and product piracy and
illegal gold trafficking.” 51 This is the signature attribute of a criminal state. As Kan, Bechtol,
and Collins write, “North Korea directs its national instruments of power to commit crimes
in other states.” 52 Bureau 39 is the hub of this extensive criminal enterprise, managing the
complicit organizations, activities and processes, and revenue.
In North Korea, we do not have a case of criminals penetrating and infiltrating the
state. It is not the case in the DPRK that criminals have become sovereigns and attained the
prerogatives of sovereignty. Rather it is the state itself —the sovereign—that is the criminal.
Criminal enterprise is its purpose and there can be no personal success for a North Korean
official who defies this institutional imperative. Again quoting Kan, Bechtol, and Collins:
North Korea practices a form of “criminal sovereignty” that is unique in the contemporary
international security arena. North Korea uses state sovereignty to protect
itself from external interference in its domestic affairs while dedicating a portion of its
government and the KWP [Korean Workers’ Party] to carrying out illicit international
activities in defiance of international law and the domestic laws of numerous
other nations. 53
This completes the spectrum ranging from criminal penetration, common to most if
not all states, to the level of criminal infestation leading to loss of legitimacy, criminal capture
in which the state is helpless to repair or reform itself, to criminal sovereignty; the state as
criminal. Is this level of criminal sovereignty unique to North Korea? It is doubtful. Charles
Taylor’s Liberia, Saddam’s Iraq, and others past and present may have been criminalized to
this extent, but deeper examination is necessary. Ironically, in the case of North Korea the
combination of endemic economic failure and comprehensive international sanctions drives
it farther into the realm of transnational crime and illicit networks. Its networks for trafficking
contraband and counterfeit items, money laundering, etc., are extensive. “These networks are
adaptive, resilient, covert, and widespread; they could be put to use for the transfer of nuclear
material from North Korea to other dangerous regimes or to violent nonstate actors.” 54 The
existence of these networks combined with the DPRK’s track record of operating in flagrant
violation of the international rule-based system, including its 2003 withdrawal from the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, justify grave trepidation.
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