Iran and North Korea Historically Team Up on Nukes and Missiles

Posted on June 21, 2017June 21, 2017 by Denise Simon

Iran launched 6 missiles, striking targets in Syria. Revolutionary Guards say in retaliation for last week’s Tehran terror attacks.
Using missiles is a major escalation of Iran’s role in the Syrian conflict. Until now it provided military advisors, volunteers, money. The missiles were launched from western Iran, flew over Iraq striking targets in Deir ez Zor, in eastern Syria. Iranian official Amirabdollahian says attack was “soft revenge” for twin terror attacks in Tehran last week. 800km away. Israeli defense systems followed the missiles and deemed the operation largely a failure due to some missiles failing and others missing targets.

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Meanwhile there is some significant activity occurring at a North Korean nuclear test site. Intelligence officials in the United States and in the region are watching and analyzing the activities including using all high tech systems including spy satellites to determine a probable action by North Korea. There have been recent upgrades and currently several tunnels have seen additional people and vehicle movements.

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(CNSNews.com)– Iran has intensified its development of ballistic missiles in recent years, particularly since the conclusion of the nuclear deal, and is doing so with significant collaboration with fellow pariah state North Korea, according to the exiled opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

The regime has established at least 42 facilities for the production, testing and launching of ballistic missiles, the NCRI reported on Tuesday, revealing for the first time information on 12 previously-unknown sites.

The report was released by Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the NCRI’s Washington office, at a briefing in Washington.

The revelations come at a critical time, days after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for the first time fired ballistic missiles from Iranian territory at targets in Syria – ostensibly at ISIS terrorist positions. It’s believed to be the first time Iran has fired missiles at targets beyond its borders since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Jafarzadeh said the missiles fired at targets in Syria were launched from an underground IRGC facility called Panj Pelleh, an older site in Kermanshah province in western Iran which he said had been the launchpad for missiles fired at targets in Iraq during the Saddam era.

The new NCRI report also comes shortly after the U.S. Senate passed, by a 98-2 vote, sanctions legislation targeting both Iran’s ballistic missile programs and the IRGC. The Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act, which Jafarzadeh praised as a good step, has been sent to the House.

The information released Tuesday, based on the opposition group’s sources inside the regime and IRGC, points to Iran having established missile facilities based on North Korean models, with the help of visiting North Korean experts.

“These North Korean experts who were sent to Iran, trained the main IRGC missile experts in IRGC garrisons, including the Almehdi Garrison situated southwest of Tehran,” the report says.

The IRGC has built a special residence in Tehran for the North Korean experts, who have been involved in helping develop warhead and guidance systems for Iranian missiles.

IRGC Aerospace Force personnel regularly visit North Korea to exchange knowledge, the report says.

Defying international condemnation, North Korea’s nuclear-armed regime has carried out a series of missile launches and Kim Jong-un has threatened to soon test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The NCRI report includes satellite imagery and information on the locations of many of 42 identified IRGC-controlled missile-related facilities across Iran – including 12 which the group says have been hitherto-unknown.

The sites include missile manufacturing plants, launching pads, training facilities, missile storage and maintenance units. Some are located or partly located underground, or in mountainous areas.

None of the sites are in eastern Iran. Most are in the central region, or in Iran’s western and southern provinces. The locations of missile launch sites have evidently been selected taking into account potential targets in the Gulf or westward towards Israel and Europe.

“The sites that are involved with deployment, launching operations and testing are on the western side or on the southern border, here, with a clear objective of threatening the neighbors,” Jafarzadeh noted, pointing at the map, observing that Europe and the West lie in that direction too.

“Western countries as well as countries in the region, those are the countries that they threaten, and have been threatening,” he said.

Reaction to missile tests has been ‘mild’

Jafarzadeh said the objective of the ballistic missile program is two-pronged – to deploy shorter-range missiles to threaten their neighbors in the region, and to develop the capability of putting a nuclear warhead on a longer-range missile.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and six powers, did not touch on the missile program – at Tehran’s insistence – but the Obama administration asserted that by placing verifiable restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program it shut off all paths to developing a nuclear weapon.

In response to a question, Jafarzadeh said the NCRI does not link the expanding missile work directly to the JCPOA, but “when you lose leverage you want to make up for it somewhere else,” he said of the regime. “There is more emphasis on their missile program now than there was a few years ago.”

He pointed out that the JCPOA left Iran with a lot of “room to maneuver” when it comes to ballistic missile activity, and that international reaction to its missile tests has been “mild, to say the least.”

Of the facilities discussed on Tuesday, one extensive complex (Semnan), in a mountainous area south-east of Tehran, is actively associated with the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (Persian acronym SPND), which is believed to be a body tasked with the development of a nuclear weapons capability.

SPND’s existence was first unveiled by the NCRI in 2011, and in August 2014 the U.S. Treasury Department added the organization to its “specially designated nationals” list, making it subject to U.S. sanctions.

“The Iranian regime has remained in power in Iran by relying on two pillars: internal

repression and external export of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism,” the report states, lumping the ballistic weapons program into the latter “pillar.”

“As the regime becomes more isolated domestically and its grip on Iranian society weakens,

it resorts more frantically to the second pillar of its bid to keep power,” it says.

The report noted that Iran re-asserted its intention to continue advancing its missile program after the U.S.-Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh last month. The summit saw the U.S. and most of the world’s Sunni Muslim states take a hard line on Iran.

The NCRI called for effective and comprehensive sanctions targeting the ballistic missile program; the designation of the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization; and for IRGC and proxy militias to be evicted from countries in the region, especially Syria and Iraq.

The NCRI and affiliated People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (MEK) has in the past provided valuable intelligence to the West, including pivotal information in 2002 that exposed nuclear activities Tehran had hidden from the international community for two decades.

The NCRI/MEK was designated a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law until 2012, and is reviled by the clerical regime in Tehran, not least because it supported Saddam Hussein in his bloody eight year-long war against Iran in the 1980s.

It enjoys strong support from some current and former policymakers from both parties in Washington, as evidenced by the list of confirmed speakers at the NCRI’s annual convention, scheduled for July 1 in Paris.

Among them are former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Sen. Joe Lieberman, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Marine Corps commander Gen. (Ret.) James Conway.

Are we Forgetting about bin Laden’s Son, Hamza?

Posted on June 19, 2017June 19, 2017 by Denise Simon

Primer: Hamza bin Ladin was added to the U.S. terror list with Barack Obama amending a George W. Bush Executive Order # 13224.

In this image made from video broadcast by the Qatari-based satellite television station Al-Jazeera Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2001, a young boy, left, identified as Hamza bin Laden holds what the Taliban says is a piece of U.S. helicopter wreckage in Ghazni, Afghanistan on Monday, Nov. 5, 2001.

Newsweek: The foothills of the Spin Ghar mountain range, two dozen miles south of Jalalabad in the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, were once home to hundreds of olive plantations. For tens of thousands of acres, there used to be farms clustered along the banks of the Nangarhar Canal, a monumental hydroelectric irrigation project completed in the 1960s, when Afghanistan was safe and liberal enough to form a regular stop on the hippie trail from Europe to India and the Far East. By the turn of the new millennium, however, more than 20 years of continuous warfare had almost destroyed the canal’s capacity to pump water to the groves, all but killing what had once been a flourishing business.

One day in the fall of 2001, with yet another foreign invasion brewing, a father sat with three of his young sons in the shade of one of the few remaining olive trees. Together, they performed a simple farewell ceremony. To each of the three boys, the father gave a misbaha—a set of prayer beads symbolizing the 99 names of God in classical Arabic. Then the father took his leave and disappeared into the mountains, heading for a familiar redoubt known as the Black Cave—or, in the local Pashto language, Tora Bora. “It was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there,” one of the sons recalled in a letter in 2009.

The boy who wrote that letter was Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, who was then the leader of Al-Qaeda. Hamza was to spend most of the next decade in captivity. He grew up behind bars, missing his father deeply. “How many times, from the depths of my heart, I wished to be beside you,” Hamza wrote to him in the letter. “I remember every smile that you smiled at me, every word that you spoke to me and every look that you gave me.”

Hamza grew up with a fervor for jihad and a determination to follow in the footsteps of his notorious father. And toward the end of his life, the older bin Laden began grooming Hamza for a leadership role. He even made plans for Hamza to join him in his secret compound in Abbottabad—the place where Navy SEALs ultimately shot him dead. But 16 years after their farewell under that olive tree, Hamza’s emergence as a jihadi leader, along with several of his father’s most trusted and competent lieutenants, portends an Al-Qaeda resurgence.

Today, it might seem like the Islamic State group is strong, as its followers attack and kill innocents in London and Manchester. But its power is dwindling, as it loses men and territory in Iraq and Syria thanks to an assault by Iraqi, Kurdish and American forces. Meanwhile, Hamza’s story—based on books, court documents, open-source intelligence, Al-Qaeda videos and records seized from his father’s compound after his death in 2011, among other things—shows how ISIS’s parent organization, Al-Qaeda, is making a comeback—one with potentially deadly consequences for the West and the rest of the world.

Three Jihadi Muskateers

In the months after 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban, as the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, bin Laden family members and high-ranking Al-Qaeda figures escaped to the Shiite stronghold of Iran. That may seem like a surprising destination for some of the world’s most fervent Sunni extremists—men who pepper their public utterances with slurs about their Shiite rivals. But in the wake of the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., Iran was the one place in the Muslim world where America’s military and law enforcement apparatus could not apprehend them. The Iranian authorities deported most of the Al-Qaeda members they captured, but they held on to a few high-value detainees to use as bargaining chips in hostage negotiations and other sticky situations. Among these valuable hostages were Hamza and his mother, Khayria, as well as three key figures: Abu Khayr al-Masri, the head of the Al-Qaeda’s political committee, Abu Mohammed al-Masri, the head of its training camps, and Saif al-Adel, its chief of security and tactician.

Immediately following their arrest in Shiraz in April 2003, those three men were hauled off to Tehran and jailed for around 20 months in the dungeons of a building belonging to Iran’s feared intelligence apparatus. The top tier of Al-Qaeda and their families were held incommunicado and without charge. Around the beginning of 2005, they were moved to a spacious military compound with an apartment complex, a soccer field and a mosque, adjacent to a training camp for one of the many Shiite militant groups on Tehran’s payroll. Their families were allowed to join them, though at least one of the detainees suspected this was a ruse to allow the Iranians to keep tabs on potentially troublesome family members.

But the prisoners were restive. For these hardy mujahedeen, suburban comforts only heightened their humiliation. One of them told his captors he would sooner be extradited to Israel than spend any more time in Iran’s gilded cage. In March 2010, the prisoners staged what one detainee later described as “a huge act of disturbance.” Masked, black-clad Iranian troops were ordered to storm the compound. The soldiers beat the men and some of the children and hauled off the senior detainees to solitary confinement, where they stewed for 101 days.

The detainees’ ability to communicate with the outside world seems to have varied over time. At first, they were held, as one U.S. official puts it, “under virtual house arrest, not able to do much of anything.” Phone calls to family members were strictly limited. But the strictures gradually loosened, just as the detainees’ living conditions slowly improved. The Iranian authorities eventually set up a system permitting prisoners to send emails and browse the web, albeit with limited access.

There were other ways of communicating with the outside too. Adel’s father-in-law, Mustafa Hamid, who was held in Iran under looser conditions, visited the main group of detainees every few months. With his greater liberty, Hamid was in a position to serve as courier, and this may be how Adel was able to publish a column on security and intelligence in the house magazine of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Muaskar al-Battar (Camp of the Sword). Other detainees escaped and brought manuscripts with them, written by the detainees; bin Laden’s daughter Iman smuggled out a text called Twenty Guidelines on the Path of Jihad—a book highly critical of ISIS founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s violence against civilians in Iraq—and eventually had it published. (The book presaged the conflict that split ISIS from Al-Qaeda years later.)

Despite their restlessness, the detainees managed to create elements of their previous lives behind bars. The men came together five times a day for prayers and conversation at the mosque. The prisoners asked that their children be allowed to attend school—and the authorities said no— but Hamza’s mother, who is well-educated, urged him to pursue learning as best he could, and a group of senior detainees took it upon themselves to educate him in Koranic study, Islamic jurisprudence and the Hadith, a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. While in custody, Hamza married a daughter of Abu Mohammed al-Masri and had children.

He would never see his father again, but soon he would become just like him—an advocate of violent, radical jihad.

A ‘Lion’ Emerges From His Den

By 2014, Al-Qaeda and ISIS had officially split. ISIS had not only conquered territory in Iraq and Syria but shocked the world, beheading Americans on tape and broadcasting its brutality. In the eyes of the West, Al-Qaeda was no longer the most dangerous extremist group, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had become a new bin Laden. To some jihadis, however, Baghdadi was much more: He was the leader prophesized to bring about a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

Baghdadi’s rise came at the expense of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s leader. The Egyptian may have inherited bin Laden’s portfolio and job title, but from his grave under the Indian Ocean, the sheikh could not pass on his aura. In July 2014, as the feud between ISIS and Al-Qaeda grew, Zawahiri renewed his group’s bayat , or loyalty oath, to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. At the time, it seemed a smart symbolic move to underline the illegitimacy of Baghdadi’s claim to supremacy. A year later, however, it emerged that Omar had succumbed to tuberculosis in April 2013; Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda had pledged allegiance to a man who had been dead for 15 months. This looked bad for Zawahiri; either he had known Omar was dead and sworn fealty to a cadaver—a grave transgression in Al-Qaeda’s Salafi-jihadi version of Islam—or he had not known and was therefore too far out of the loop to call himself a true emir. The gaffe provoked ridicule from some jihadis, dismay from others. At a time when Zawahiri was already struggling to show his relevance in the age of ISIS, it seemed to confirm the worst fears about his leadership.

But Zawahiri does not stand alone at the prow of Al-Qaeda, and his crew has recently grown stronger—at a time when war with the West and its allies has weakened ISIS. In an audio message recorded in May or June 2015, Zawahiri triumphantly introduced a man he called “a lion from the den of Al-Qaeda.” After four years of silence following his father’s death, Hamza bin Laden’s voice was heard once again, and his words remained faithful to Al-Qaeda’s message. He praised the leaders of Al-Qaeda’s various spinoffs, insulted President Barack Obama as “the black chief of [a] criminal gang,” lauded the attacks on Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon, and called for jihadis to “take the battlefield from Kabul, Baghdad and Gaza to Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv.”

In his 2015 statement, Hamza called for the release of imprisoned Al-Qaeda members, singling out the “sheikhs” whom he credits with his education while in captivity, including the Shura big three—Abu Khayr al-Masri, Saif al-Adel and Abu Mohammed al-Masri. “May God release them all,” Hamza entreated.

His prayers were soon answered. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the middle of its ascendancy in Yemen, had bombed the Iranian ambassador’s residence in Sanaa in December 2014. Later, it had shot dead an Iranian diplomat who was resisting a kidnapping attempt. The group had also successfully taken two Iranian diplomats alive. Sometime in 2015, it swapped them for Al-Qaeda’s three top leaders in Iran, who got a hero’s welcome in Waziristan.

The returning trio brought with them a combined century of experience in jihad. Abu Mohammed al-Masri had worked with Adel to train Somali militants in the early 1990s and plan the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa. American intelligence officials have called him Al-Qaeda’s “most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.” And then there is Adel, whose long career has included serving in the Egyptian armed forces, helping found Al-Qaeda, precipitating the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, acting as a mentor to Zarqawi and serving as Al-Qaeda’s head of security, with intimate involvement in virtually all the organization’s attacks up to and including 9/11. All three men were closely involved in Al-Qaeda’s first major blow against the United States, the embassy bombings of 1998. And after a long absence, all three were now involved in global jihad. (Abu Khayr was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Idlib, Syria, earlier this year.)

Their return came at a time when Al-Qaeda’s main global affiliates had gained in strength, bolstered by the ongoing turmoil in Syria, Yemen and Libya. They have pushed back against ISIS, and in response to ISIS’s recruitment around the world, Zawahiri even announced the formation of a new affiliate. Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, led by a former commander in the Pakistani Taliban, aims to unify Sunni extremist jihadis across the region and “rescue” Muslims living in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Assam, Gujarat and Kashmir. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda’s Waziristani nerve center, Khorasan, continues to enjoy the protection of the Pakistani Taliban and the powerful Haqqani Network, which has ties to the Pakistani security services.

On May 9, 2016, one day after Zawahiri issued his latest call for unity among the jihadi groups fighting in Syria, Al-Qaeda posted a second audio message from Hamza. Entitled “Jerusalem Is but a Bride Whose Dowry Is Our Blood,” the statement reiterated Zawahiri’s plea for unity and urged jihadis to think of the Syrian conflict as a springboard to the “liberation” of the Palestinian territories. “The road to liberating Palestine,” he said, “is today much shorter compared to before the blessed Syrian revolution.” And as in his previous message, he encouraged “lone wolf” attacks on Jews and Jewish interests around the world.

The implication was clear: Zawahiri was preparing Hamza, the sheikh’s son, to lead. And if ever Al-Qaeda wants to reunite with its own wayward progeny, Hamza embodies that chance.

The B-Movie Vampire

For 20 years, the world has been infected with a virulent disease. The name of this malady is bin Ladenism, and ISIS is merely its most recent symptom. As its impetuous behavior makes clear, the group thinks and acts exclusively in the short term. It succeeded in conquering large swathes of Iraq and Syria because, at first, nobody tried hard to stop it. Within weeks of the advent of American airstrikes, it became clear that ISIS had already reached its high-water mark. As presently conceived, it lacks a long-term future, although some of its members can no doubt look forward to long careers in terrorism.

By contrast, many powerful interests have been trying for a long time to destroy Al-Qaeda, and the group has outflanked them all. Since 9/11, it has increased its membership and its geographic reach. This stateless new Al-Qaeda possesses distinct advantages over ISIS. Its decentralized structure makes it almost impossible to pin down; like a B-movie vampire, try to drive a stake through its heart, and it transforms into a thousand bats and flies somewhere else. Contrast this with ISIS, now forced to defend its self-styled caliphate at high cost. When the world eventually summons the will to rid itself of this criminal movement, it knows where to find it. Not so with Al-Qaeda, whose subgroups stretch out in a loose band across the breadth of two continents, and whose sympathizers pepper the globe. The organization’s fanatic patience, its insistence on playing the long game, has made it far more resilient than anyone expected.

For today’s Al-Qaeda, there is little profit in antagonizing the West with spectacular terrorist attacks. Instead, its strategy for the present involves building up resources and territory in places like Syria, Yemen and North Africa while the world is distracted by the Syria conflict. When ISIS finally crumbles, however, the spotlight will return to Al-Qaeda. At that point, they will strike, and strike hard. With bin Laden’s filial heir and ideological successors firmly back in the fold, and the group’s affiliates making territorial gains in Yemen and elsewhere, Al-Qaeda once again has the means and the opportunity to attack.

Hamza is just waiting for the right time.

Ali Soufan was an FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005. He now runs the Soufan Group, a private intelligence firm. This story has been adapted from his new book, Anatomy of Terror.

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Hamza was held under house arrest in Iran, which means, he was being protected until a recent release. Another brother, of an estimated 20-26 children, was Saad, He too was being protected by Iran until 2009 when he left for Pakistan and was killed in a drone strike. It seems the other children/siblings have not taken up the baton of al Qaeda, in fact Omar, the fourth son rejected his father completely. Omar wrote a book about his family and father. Married to a British wife, Zaina, she and Omar live in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia after escaping Iran during a plotted shopping trip. It is alleged that six other siblings remain in Iran. More details here.

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Not too sure any of this is comforting at all regarding any part of the bin Ladin family and where they currently live….you?

Why is China Protecting North Korea? Reasons Abound

Posted on June 16, 2017June 16, 2017 by Denise Simon

Primer:

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued a technical alert about the activity of the North Korea’s ‘Hidden Cobra’ APT group.
The joint Technical Alert (TA) report is the result of the efforts between of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The US Government has tracked the hacker group as Hidden Cobra, but the APT is most popular as the Lazarus APT Group.

The activity of the Lazarus Group surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated.

This threat actor has been active since at least 2009, possibly as early as 2007, and it was involved in both cyber espionage campaigns and sabotage activities aimed to destroy data and disrupt systems. Security researchers discovered that North Korean Lazarus APT group was behind recent attacks on banks, including the Bangladesh cyber heist.

According to security experts, the group was behind, other large-scale cyber espionage campaigns against targets worldwide, including the Troy Operation, the DarkSeoul Operation, and the Sony Picture hack.

The joint alert from the FBI and the DHS further details on the group, including indicators of compromise (IoC) for its DeltaCharlie botnet involved in the “Operation Blockbuster” to power DDoS attacks. More here.

*** Most of North Korea’s cyber operations are located in China hosted on Chinese communications internet/communications platforms. It is espionage of an epic standard. But let us go deeper.

(Remember, Obama removed Cuba in 2015 from the terror list as a means to establish the process to normalize relations)

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Few think of North Korea as being a prosperous nation. But it is rich in one regard: mineral resources.

Currently North Korea is alarming neighbors with its frequent missile tests, and the US with its attempts to field long-range nuclear missiles that can hit American cities. A sixth nuclear test could be imminent. An attack on the US or its allies would be suicidal, so Pyongyang probably aims to extract “aid” from the international community in exchange for dismantling some of its weaponry—rewind about 10 years to see the last time it pulled off the old “nuclear blackmail” trick.

AP

But however much North Korea could extract from other nations that way, the result would pale in comparison to the value of its largely untapped underground resources.

Below the nation’s mostly mountainous surface are vast mineral reserves, including iron, gold, magnesite, zinc, copper, limestone, molybdenum, graphite, and more—all told about 200 kinds of minerals. Also present are large amounts of rare earth metals, which factories in nearby countries need to make smartphones and other high-tech products.

NKNews

Estimates as to the value of the nation’s mineral resources have varied greatly over the years, made difficult by secrecy and lack of access. North Korea itself has made what are likely exaggerated claims about them. According to one estimate from a South Korean state-owned mining company, they’re worth over $6 trillion. Another from a South Korean research institute puts the amount closer to $10 trillion.

State of neglect

North Korea has prioritized its mining sector since the 1970s (pdf, p. 31). But while mining production increased until about 1990—iron ore production peaked in 1985—after that it started to decline. A count in 2012 put the number of mines in the country at about 700 (pdf, p. 2). Many, though, have been poorly run and are in a state of neglect. The nation lacks the equipment, expertise, and even basic infrastructure to properly tap into the jackpot that waits in the ground.

In April, Lloyd R. Vasey, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that:

North Korean mining production has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. It is likely that the average operational rate of existing mine facilities is below 30 per cent of capacity. There is a shortage of mining equipment and North Korea is unable to purchase new equipment due to its dire economic situation, the energy shortage and the age and generally poor condition of the power grid.

It doesn’t help that private mining is illegal in communist North Korea, as are private enterprises in general (at least technically). Or that the ruling regime, now led by third-generation dictator Kim Jong-un, has been known to, seemingly on a whim, kick out foreign mining companies it’s allowed in, or suddenly change the terms of agreements.

Despite all this, the nation is so blessed with underground resources that mining makes up roughly 14% of the economy.

A “cash cow”

China is the sector’s main customer. Last September, South Korea’s state-run Korea Development Institute said that the mineral trade between North Korea and China remains a “cash cow” for Pyongyang despite UN sanctions, and that it accounted for 54% (paywall) of the North’s total trade volume to China in the first half of 2016. In 2015 China imported $73 million in iron ore from North Korea, and $680,000 worth of zincin the first quarter of this year.

North Korea has been particularly active in coal mining in recent years. In 2015 China imported about $1 billion worth of coal from North Korea. Coal is especially appealing because it can be mined with relatively simple equipment. Large deposits of the stuff are located near major ports and the border with China, making the nation’s bad transportation infrastructure less of an issue.

For years Chinese buyers have purchased coal from North Korea at far below the market rate. As of last summer, coal shipments to China accounted for about 40% (paywall) of all North Korean exports. But global demand for coal is declining as alternatives like natural gas and renewables gain momentum, and earlier this year Beijing, in line with UN sanctions, began restricting coal imports from its neighbor.

The sanctions game

After North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, the UN began imposing ever stronger sanctions against it. Last year the nation’s underground resources became a focus. In November 2016, the UN passed a resolution capping North Korea’s coal exports and banning shipments of nickel, copper, zinc, and silver. That followed a resolution in March 2016 banning the export (pdf) of gold, vanadium, titanium, and rare earth metals.

The resolutions targeting the mining sector could hurt the Kim regime. Before they were issued, a 2014 report on the country’s mining sector by the United States Geological Survey noted that (pdf, p. 3), “The mining sector in North Korea is not directly subject to international economic sanctions and is, therefore, the only legal, lucrative source of investment trade available to the country.”

That is no longer the case.

Of course, Pyongyang has grown adept at evading such sanctions, especially through shipping. Glimpses of its covert activities come from occasional interceptions of vessels. Last August Egyptian authorities boarded a ship laden with 2,300 tons (2,087 metric tons) of iron ore heading from North Korea to the Suez Canal (they also found 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades below the ore).

Earlier this year a group of UN experts concluded that North Korea, despite sanctions, continues to export banned minerals. They determined, as well, that North Korea uses another mineral—gold—along with cash to “entirely circumvent the formal financial sector.”

Interested neighbors

Meanwhile China’s overall trade with North Korea actually increased 37.4% (paywall) in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. Its imports of iron ore from North Korea shot up 270% in January and February from a year ago. Coal dropped 51.6%.

North Korea’s neighbors have long had their eyes on its bonanza of mineral wealth. About five years ago China spent some $10 billion on an infrastructure project near the border with North Korea, primarily to give it easier access to the mineral resources. Conveniently North Korea’s largest iron ore deposits, in Musan County, are right by the border. An analysis of satellite images published last October by 38 North, a website affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, showed mining activity was alive and well in the area.

China particularly covets North Korea’s rare earth minerals. Pyongyang knows this. It punished Beijing in March by suspending exports of the metals to China in retaliation for the coal trade restrictions.

Meanwhile Russia, which also shares a (smaller) border with North Korea, in 2014 developed plans to overhaul North Korea’s rail network in exchange for access to the country’s mineral resources. That particular plan lost steam (pdf, p. 8), but the general sentiment is still alive.

But South Korea has its own plans for the mineral resources. It sees them as a way to help pay for reunification (should it finally come to pass), which is expected to take decades and cost hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. (Germany knows a few things about that.) Overhauling the North’s decrepit infrastructure, including the aging railway line, will be part of the enormous bill.

In May, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport invited companies to submit bids on possible infrastructure projects in North Korea, especially ones regarding the mining sector. It argued that (paywall) the underground resources could “cover the expense of repairing the North’s poor infrastructure.”

It was, of course, jumping the gun a bit. For now South Korea—and the world—is stuck with a bully in the mineral-blessed North.

***

China is undergoing a major military build up around the world and has even included collaboration with Pakistan.

The new assessment focuses instead on the buildup on Spratly Islands, noting that previous year the Mischief, Subi and Fiery Cross Reefs, three of the largest outposts, saw the construction of 24 administration buildings, barracks, fixed weapons positions, communication facilities and fighter-sized hangars by China, each of them with runways 8,800 feet long.

While the report notes that China has not undertaken any new land reclamation projects on disputed features in the South China Sea during 2016, it did accuse China of further militarizing the contested Spratly Islands via the construction of 24 hangars capable of housing fighter aircraft, fixed weapons positions, barracks and communication facilities.

Beijing has opposed the deployment of a U.S. missile shield in South Korea to defend against attacks from North Korea, in part because it says it could be used to counter China’s capabilities.

Meanwhile Pakistan itself has not made any comments about this statement.

Published Tuesday, the Pentagon report estimated that China spent US$180 billion previous year on its military – the world’s largest – a figure well over the country’s official US$140 billion defence budget.

The report made “irresponsible remarks on China’s national defense development and reasonable actions in defending our territorial sovereignty and security interests in disregard of the facts“, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters yesterday.

“China likely will seek to establish additional military bases in countries with which it has longstanding, friendly relationships“, the report predicts.

China has cited anti-piracy patrolling as one of the reasons for developing what it calls a naval logistics center in Djibouti.

“China’s expanding global economic interests are increasing demands for the [Chinese Navy] to operate in more distant maritime environments to protect Chinese citizens, investments, and critical sea lines of communication”, the report reads.

The defence ministry in a statement refuted the U.S. assessment, saying “China is not doing any military expansion and does not seek a sphere of influence”. Pakistan has also emerged as the biggest market for Chinese arms exports, a focus area in Beijing’s expansion plans, the report titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2017″, said. He harshly criticized China’s construction in the South China Sea and became the first member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet to lay out a comprehensive strategy on Asia. That region accounted for almost half of China’s over $20 billion in arms exports from 2011 to 2015.

Countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan welcome it as a path out of poverty. “To support this modernisation, China uses a variety of methods to acquire foreign military and dual-use technologies, including cyber theft, targeted foreign direct investment and exploitation of the access of private Chinese nationals to such technologies”, the report said.

Regarding the Senkaku Islands, a group of East China Sea islets controlled by Japan but claimed by the mainland and Taiwan, the Pentagon said that previous year Beijing continued to use law-enforcement ships and aircraft to “patrol” near the islands in an attempt to undermine Japan’s administration of them.

China has also always been a strong military, economic, and diplomatic supporter of Pakistan and is considered Islamabad’s largest trade and defense partner.

It is Better than Putin Planned

Posted on June 11, 2017June 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Timelines and context are important and must be adhered to when it comes to controversy and chaos. America and the world is full of it for sure and personally I lay blame at the feet of Barack Obama.

Let’s begin in September of 2015 shall we? ODNI James Clapper warned in not only Congressional testimony but it presidential dialing briefings to the Obama White House that the Russians had launched a cyber military command. In addition to Russia, Clapper singled out China, Iran, and North Korea as the primary nation states capable of conducting sophisticated cyber attacks and espionage.

“Politically motivated cyber attacks are now a growing reality, and foreign actors are reconnoitering and developing access to U.S. critical infrastructure systems, which might be quickly exploited for disruption if an adversary’s intent became hostile,” Clapper said in prepared remarks for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The testimony on Sept. 10 represents a break from past public testimony on cyber threats. Previous intelligence statements and testimony limited public mention of explicit links between nations and their cyber strikes.

Clapper revealed that Russian cyber warfare specialists are developing the capability to remotely access industrial control systems used in managing critical infrastructure. More here.

Barack Obama did nothing. Obama never established a cyber policy due to rogue countries and cyber attack. Why? Establishing committees and having hearings is theater….this is the kind of stuff that is an act of war…but read on….context, timelines, facts and perspective is noted below.

In May of 2016, Clapper tried again and then attended a breakfast and made it all know more publically. Did anyone listen then? Nope. Further, while on the campaign trail, did any candidate make this an issue? Nope.

Further, Clapper said:

“The transcendent issue here is the Russian interference in our election process, and what that means to the erosion of the fundamental fabric of our democracy,” former DNI Clapper told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 8. “And that to me is a huge deal. And they’re going to continue to do it. And why not? It proved successful.”

Russia’s success in sowing discord perhaps makes it harder for the US to focus on and fight the cyber intrusion that officials say stole Democratic Party emails and planted false news stories about the election. The purpose of this operation was to amplify division and turmoil in US politics. Well, mission accomplished.”

Barack Obama was convinced as was Hillary she was going to win, so Russian intrusion(s) were minimized. That is until she lost. Leading however into October, Obama kinda sorta decided to get serious. This was not until it was determined by the NSA that Russia did intrude into the voting software company based in Florida known as VR Systems where attempts to phish email accounts of 100+ company officials. So Obama’s best response was to trot out DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson ordering him to visit a handful of states to be vigilant.

That was the best Obama could do? No, he should have embarrassed Russia globally as the same thing was happening in other allied countries least of which was Ukraine and later so many more in Europe. Obama should have ordered the entire United States after embarrassing Putin’s operation to go to paper ballots and state the reason(s) why.

Former ODNI Clapper recently said the matter of Russia is not the only concern, China is just as aggressive. Anyone paying attention to that? Nope. China and Russia have a cyber pact.

Image result for putin military cyber hacking unit DailyStar

Hillary lost and now Obama decides to expel Russians and shutter 2 dachas in Maryland and New York. Was that enough? Nope.

Now the media stepped in to point to Trump as having to collude with the Russians on the election system. Former FBI Director said to Trump on at least 3 occasions along with the other intelligence community leaders, such was not the case. The media stayed with it, why? Because of the secondary track of investigation and that is the collection of Trump people have undisclosed and in some cases unreported meetings with Russian officials beyond that of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. That track continues by the FBI.

Here is where at least Jeff Sessions is caught up in the snare. Sessions is in fact an honorable man as proven in his long political history. However, during his confirmation hearing for the top job at the Department of Justice, he omitted all his meetings in oral and written form. The meeting at the Mayflower Hotel is still under dispute. Why? Likely he was told too. Later, Sessions had a ‘duty to correct’ and he did. So, the recusal chatter started and later it was official. It has been reported by ‘sources’ that President Trump is furious at Sessions for his recusal. That too is suspect since those ahem…sources are unnamed. It is also reported that Sessions offered to tender his resignation over this mess, that too is suspect due to unnamed sources.

Now we have a recused AG, then later one Rod Rosenstein is confirmed at Deputy AG and the whole Russian probe fell into his lap. It never should have gotten this far if Trump himself had taken heed of his White House and outside personnel and quit tweeting and perpetuating the whole topic. Instead, his anger fired Comey. While I agree there is reason to be challenging Comey and his work as Director at the FBI least of which is the Hillary thing…one too must remember the FBI does NOT bring formal charges, but rather the DoJ does. Lynch was not going there. Comey covered for her and that was a mistake, until later Lynch abused that chain of command and met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac and told Comey to assume political speak with regard to investigation, commanding him to use matters rather than investigation. He capitulated again.

So Rosenstein names a special counsel for the Russian probe, one Robert Mueller. He does have a career history with James Comey. So, how come the White House and all the pundits did not blow a cork when Mueller was named?

Further, President Trump’s long time attorney, Marc Kasowitz comes out in support for his client as he should. But, has Kasowitz been forthcoming about his own Russian clients like Oleg Deripaska? One has to go look for that, it is in open source and Deripaska has deep connections with the Kremlin and Putin. Head tilt on this one.

Meanwhile the issue of Flynn was still brewing and then came memos and well, Comey’s testimony. So, Putin wins again. We don’t trust anyone, much less each other and certainly we don’t trust the political bunch on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC. This is just how Putin planned it.

Where is Trump on all this now? Sadly he is not launching any punishment at Russia either on the hacking/phishing front or that of the chaos in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen or Crimea or Ukraine….and on and on. Why is the big question.

Thoughts?

Gitmo Detainee Arrested in France, ISIS Network

Posted on June 7, 2017June 7, 2017 by Denise Simon

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to take him in April 2009, and Lahmar moved to Bordeaux later that year.

The French official said Lamar, at 48, is the oldest of the four men and two women who were arrested and said that there were no indications the group was plotting an attack. More here.

Surprise, surprise, another inmate released from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been arrested for reengaging in terrorism. His name is Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar and his Department of Defense (DOD) file says he has links to “multiple terrorist plots” and as a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) plotted with Al Qaeda to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo.

“Detainee advocated hostilities against US forces and the international community in Bosnia, and is linked to multiple terrorist plots and criminal related activity,” according to Lahmar’s DOD file. “Detainee had intentions to travel to Afghanistan and Iran, and is reported as doing so prior to his capture. Detainee has demonstrated a commitment to jihad, and would likely engage in anti-US activities if released.” Lahmar ended up at Gitmo in 2002 because the Algerian government refused to take him into custody after Bosnian authorities exhausted the legal limits for detention. The Pentagon recommended continued detention and determined that he was a high risk that posed a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies. Lahmar was also labeled a “high threat” from a detention perspective and of high intelligence value.

Also of note in the DOD file is that Lahmar was on Saudi Arabia’s payroll as an employee of the Saudi High Commission for Relief (SHCR), a non-governmental organization (NGO). He was arrested and convicted in 1997 for assaulting an American Citizen in Bosnia but was released, “after the SHCR intervened on his behalf,” the military file states. “After his release, detainee returned to work for the SHCR in Sarajevo.” Authorities in Croatia believe Lahmar was involved in the 1997 bombings in Travnik and Mostar and that he served in the el-Mujahid Brigade conducting training for acts of terrorism in the 1990s. Other reports link Lahmar to car theft and document forgery and indicate he’s wanted in Belgium and France for his involvement in violent activities, the military file says.

Despite his disturbing Pentagon document, the Obama administration released Lahmar from the top security compound at the U.S. Naval base in southeast Cuba in 2009 after France agreed to take him. This week he was arrested in Bordeaux as part of a terrorist cell that operated a recruiting network for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A British newspaper report says Lahmar was one of six people—four men and two women—captured as part of an aggressive crackdown on a jihadist recruiting network in the European nation that’s been rocked by multiple terrorist attacks in recent years. Just a few years ago a former Gitmo captive, 46-year-old Moroccan Lahcen Ikassrien, was arrested in Spain for operating a sophisticated recruitment network for the Syrian and Iraqi-based terror group known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Like Lahmar and Ikassreien, many of the captives released from Gitmo have predictably returned to terrorist causes and it has long been documented in military and intelligence assessments. Just last year a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) showed that of the 161 Gitmo detainees released by the Obama administration, nine were confirmed to be “directly involved in terrorist or insurgent activities” and that 113 of the 532 Gitmo captives released during the George W. Bush administration have engaged in terrorist activities. “Based on trends identified during the past eleven years, we assess that some detainees currently at GTMO will seek to reengage in terrorist or insurgent activities after they are transferred,” according to the ODNI, which is composed of more than a dozen spy agencies, including Air Force, Army, Navy, Treasury and Coast Guard intelligence as well as the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency also stated in its report that “former GTMO detainees routinely communicate with each other, families of other former detainees, and previous associates who are members of terrorist organizations. The reasons for communication span from the mundane (reminiscing about shared experiences) to the nefarious (planning terrorist operations). We assess that some GTMO detainees transferred in the future also will communicate with other former GTMO detainees and persons in terrorist organizations.”

Other examples of recidivism among Gitmo captives include dozens who have rejoined Al Qaeda in Yemen, the country where the 2009 Christmas Day airline bomber proudly trained, and a number of high-ranking Al Qaeda militants in Yemen involved in a sophisticated scheme to send bombs on a U.S.-bound cargo plane. A few years ago, a Gitmo alum named Mullah Abdul Rauf, who once led a Taliban unit, established the first ISIS base in Afghanistan. In 2014, Judicial Watch uncovered an embarrassing gaffe involving an Al Qaeda operative liberated from Gitmo years earlier. Turns out the U.S. government put him on a global terrorist list and offered $5 million for information on his whereabouts!

As far back as 2010 former president Barack Obama’s National Intelligence Director confirmed that one in four inmates released from Gitmo resume terrorist activities against the United States. A year earlier the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which gathers foreign military intelligence, disclosed that the number of Gitmo prisoners who returned to the fight since their release had nearly doubled in a short time. The assessment was made by using data such as fingerprints, pictures and other intelligence reports to confirm the high rate of recidivism among the released prisoners.