North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Japan’s new leader, Kim Yo Jong slams Zelensky and advisory on DPRK IT workers

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Former Japanese defense minister Shigeru Ishiba will take charge as the country’s new prime minister this week, and he could bring a new approach to relations with nuclear neighbor North Korea, questioning his predecessors’ reliance on sanctions and endorsing dialogue with Pyongyang. NK News Correspondent Shreyas Reddy joins the podcast to discuss what Tokyo’s new […]

Welcome to a new realm of insights into the Korean Peninsula. At Korea Risk Group, we delve deep into the complexities of North and South Korea, offering bespoke analyses that empower decision makers. Whether you're in government, business or academia, our tailored solutions provide clarity in an opaque region. Let our team guide your strategy with data-driven insights and on-the-ground intelligence. Step into a world of informed decision-making and visit www.careeriskgroup.com today. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the MK News podcast. This episode was recorded on Tuesday, the 1st of October 2024.

And I'm joined by a stream yard by my colleague, Shreyas Reddy. Shreyas, welcome back on the show. Thank you for having me. And happy Armed Forces Day here in the Republic of Korea. Indeed. Do you know why they chose this day for Armed Forces Day? I have a feeling you're about to tell me, Jacko. I am about to tell you, and our listeners.

74 years ago today, the Republic of Korea's 23rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division, crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea on the East Coast. So they turned the defense into an offense in the Korean War and started to invade North Korean territory, hoping to knock out the Korean People's Army and avoid a reflare up. They did not see, of course, a couple of months later that the Chinese were going to join the war on the North Korean side. Anyway that's why they chose October 1st because this is

the day that the Korean army went over the 38th parallel into North Korea. All right so we've chosen a couple of stories there's a lot going on this week. Let's talk about the new Prime Minister of Japan Shigeru Ishiba. He already is quite famous in in Korean affairs. He's been to North Korea. So tell us a bit about him. What should we need to know? Well, I think the first thing I think when it comes to Shigeru Ishivas is that in Japanese political circles, he has long had a reputation as being a bit of a maverick. Despite coming from a political family himself, like many Japanese politicians,

he's perhaps best known for being a little more outspoken, a little more willing to go against the grain and push back against senior leaders. So in Japan's ruling party, he has typically not fared well in leadership elections in the past. He's lost four times. He has run for the prime ministership before, hasn't he? Well, the leadership of the ruling party, which effectively makes him the prime minister in most cases. So in fact, he's said to be sworn in later today, or said to be elected if parliament confirms him as the prime minister today.

But for now, he's still just the leader of the ruling party at the time of recording. But yeah, so he's run for that post four times before and he's been very popular with the general public and the lower party levels of the liberal democratic party's membership, the grassroots membership. But the lawmakers typically don't trust him because he tends to be a little outside the establishment,

shall we say, in terms of how he approaches things. But this time, fifth time of asking, he seems to have come out on top, perhaps, possibly due to the party's own decline in popularity ahead of the general election. They probably figured they could do with someone who the public actually likes. Right, and as I said, he's been to North Korea back in the 1990s as part of a parliamentary delegation and he served as Minister for State Defense and then Defense Minister in the noughties.

So he's not a stranger to North Korea and Korea related affairs. Indeed, so in fact, the 1992 visit to North Korea and Korea related affairs. Indeed. So in fact, the 1992 visit to North Korea when you saw just a junior lawmaker, I think it was the second term, that played a big part in getting him interested in security affairs in the region, seeing there was a threat that was right in Japan's backyard that very openly hated Japan. And so I think just getting that taste of anti-Japan propaganda, seeing this very militaristic country, he thought, okay, this is a country worth keeping an eye on.

And so over the years, I think his policies have also kind of reflected, his interests have reflected his passion for defense and security issues. So as defense minister, as junior defense minister, he's held lots of different posts over the years where there was that focus. But also, it kind of shaped his approach to Japan's military, where he for a long time pushed for Japan's militarization, a topic that is obviously of concern to South Korea as well, not just North Korea and many countries in the region. But at the same time, he's perhaps, even though he's seen as a defense hulk by, compared to some other people in that party,

he is a moderate. So he's willing to show perhaps a little more willingness to compromise, for example, saying we need to acknowledge South Korea's grievances over historical disputes, over their treatment under colonial rule, even though at the same time he opposes things like South Korean court awarding damages to forced labour victims against Japanese companies. Ah, yes. Okay. And he also has an interesting approach to North Korea too. What's his stance on sanctions? So, he has traditionally just questioned their effectiveness effectiveness, so like many Japanese politicians, one of the overarching concerns with North Korea is how do we get them to address the issue

of the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 80s. Yes, right, the abduction issue, which is a forever issue in Japan. Exactly. And Ishibaya has always said we need to have direct engagement. We need to have liaison offices in Pyongyang and Tokyo to be able to have regular communication, not just back channel communications. And to do that, are sanctions the way to go? He says no. He says that fundamentally is a disincentive for dialogue. So he has explicitly said that as leader, he will push to move sanctions, frankly, it might be hard for him to push back against the establishment and how things are currently done, especially if he also wants to keep the US on

board. But we don't know that personally, he does not think it's the best strategy. Right. Yeah. So having a liaison liaison office in Pyongyang, that would be very interesting. Having a summit would also be interesting. Do we have any sense whether North Korea might be interested in that kind of contact with Japan at this time? Well, frankly at this point, North Korea has been quite open about the fact that it has no interest in talks with Japan frankly or anyone else but earlier this year the Kim Jong-un sister stated that Pyongyang will pay no attention to and reject

any contact negotiations with the Japanese side as far as North Korea is concerned they've already resolved the abducting issue so they're not willing to talk to Japan about it. Okay. All right. Well, let's leave that there for a moment. And let's go on now to Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. He was at the United Nations in New York recently. And he talked about, he actually mentioned North Korea in discussing the war that Russia is waging against his country. Tell us about that. Well, as one can imagine, with Ukraine, the biggest concern is Russia. And on that front of late, we've certainly seen a lot of concern coming from Ukrainian officials about Russia's weapons imports from North Korea, essentially saying that North Korea is the leading supplier of munitions right now of artillery being used to kill Ukrainians. And so they've accused Russia of making North Korea and Iran de facto accomplices in what

Zelensky describes as a criminal war. And so he continued denouncing Russia, of course, but also criticized North Korea effectively for supporting Russia's efforts. And so that's, and it's not just him, of course, even at the same meeting at home sidelines with the UN General Assembly, US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken also backed that and said, fundamentally, North Korea is delivering trainloads of weapons and ammunition to Russia, including ballistic missiles, artillery, launchers, everything, and essentially saying, you are supporting Russia's efforts to kill innocent Ukrainians.

So fundamentally condemning North Korea for supporting Russia's war efforts. Did North Korea make any kind of a statement through its diplomats at the United Nations to respond to this? North Korea's United Nations representative, Ombudsman Lee, spoke last night. So his focus was more about confirming North Korea's nuclear status more than anything else, but we have already seen a direct condemnation from Kim Yo-jong again. So she's certainly had an active week. Essentially in a statement released through the state-owned Korean News Agency, she accused,

as she put it, the malicious Zelenskyi clique of killing innocent Russian citizens, a bit of a turnabout there, and rejecting the accusations of North Korea being an accomplice in Ukraine's war efforts. So I think that's kind of the approach she's been going with. Right, okay. Well, I suppose we could have expected that. Now you've written an interesting story for NKPro quite recently on North Korean IT workers who are often found working for countries around the world, but of course the people who hire them don't know they're North Korean and there's been a warning that's been released by Mandiant, the the IT security firm owned by Google. So tell us a bit about that. Well, it's been an issue that a lot of countries and the UN have increasingly been or at least the former UN panel of experts

have increasingly been raising in the last few years about North Korea deploying about 10,000 estimated overseas IT workers to other countries. That is a lot. Yeah, so and essentially earning millions for the North Korean regime's nuclear and missile development. And yeah, it's certainly probably more lucrative, I guess, per person than woodcutters in Russia, I would imagine. Certainly, I think fundamentally, you can just have someone sitting behind the computer taking up lots of different jobs. And that seems to sitting behind a computer taking up lots of different jobs. And that seems to be the mode right now earning lots of money, mostly just into target Western

companies. So US tech firms and other sectors, where they can perhaps get a little more value for money in terms of their efforts, mostly while sitting behind a laptop somewhere in Russia, China, well, China, perhaps more so, but certainly and also in Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, reportedly. Right. Wow. Now, they're not native speakers of English, so I wonder where they're pretending to be

from. Well, to be honest, I think they seem to be managing fine in their own unique way, taking up different, they end up impersonating real individuals. So could be from, for example, I think they've gone and linked themselves to certain universities in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, say that this is where our background is from. So Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, they've kind of just to not appear North Korean, but at the same time, not necessarily appear native US employees.

And so fundamentally what they do is they often have brokers based in countries like China, who will then go deal with other people who perhaps in the case of the US, there have been a couple of cases recently where the US authorities charge middlemen working in who are possibly low level criminals, but essentially, we don't really know too much about them. But they fundamentally operated these large-scale laptop farms where they would basically reach out, they would receive laptops from US companies on behalf of these IT workers who had secured jobs under fraudulent identities. And so they received them at an address and the workers would then use these remote access tools to

log into these laptops to connect to the company networks to do whatever they need to do. And for the most part, it seems that they essentially did their job because they were there to earn money. But at the same time, they essentially also got access to companies' internal networks. So all we know, they could have used that opportunity to just deploy some malware that some point in the future, they could use to do other things like steal money or wreak havoc on the systems and disrupt their operations. Yeah. So the danger for companies is that not only is it a breach of sanctions in hiring North Koreans, it's also potentially leaving the back door open for either

theft or malware or something like that. So what advice does Mandiant give to Western companies to avoid this happening to them unwittingly hiring North Korean tech workers? Well, to be honest, a lot of it is what you expect they should be doing anyway, just some common sense approaches to recruitment. For one thing, I think a lot of these overseas IT workers, when they apply for jobs, they will during interviews or during meetings, they will not turn the cameras on they will Essentially time they may not line that way people won't know that they're not the

Folks who applied so you think that you're already be a part of the measures just once in a while I'll speak to turn their cameras on especially during an interview. So also They should be more stringent background checks, including possibly in some cases collecting biometric information or identity proof. And also recruiters will need more training on the fact that this is a problem, this is something that you need to know. A lot of these employees, they may also be using real people's identities. So just search, do some of the reverse searches for the photos, for the details that are given, maybe monitor for artificial intelligence tools used to modify profile pictures. At this point,

there are verification tools that can do that. And fundamentally, if you're sending a laptop to someone, your company property to someone to be able to work on something, make sure that it is in the location that it's meant to be. So I think just essentially the idea is keep an eye out, make sure that you take a common sense approach to this, do your due diligence on whom you're hiring and how they're working for you. Right. Now lastly, a story that you didn't know we were going to talk about today, but I just saw it on the NK News website. This is going to be interesting for people who visit North Korea. Pyongyang now has a new subway station,

or I should say more accurately, it now has a new subway station name, and that is because the reunification station or Tongil-yeok has been given a new name, Moranbong station. This is all part of the removing words like unification from the discourse in North Korea. What do you think about that? I mean, this is something that we've been expecting for a while anyway.

It was flagged earlier this year that the name, old name was moved, but at that point the new name was still not visible. So earlier this year- Right, and in some cases they simply covered up the old name on the map with a bit of paper. Pretty much, yeah. And on digital displays it would just say station, nothing else. So you couldn't really say what it was meant to be.

But now it appears that it's been renamed Moranbong. So Moranbong station, and it's a fairly common name in North Korea. It's a district in Pyongyang. It's a prominent location from Moranbong Hill. And of course, for a lot of people who aren't that familiar with North Korea, they may also recognize it from the Moranbong Band, North Korea's famed girl group. Yes. Yeah. And we can thank our friends over at the North Korean Archives and Library, NKAAL, who tweeted some photographs of the new station name at the end of September.

I interviewed that gentleman on this podcast recently. So that's it. Once again, it'll be, we're seeing little by little changes made in North Korea to remove unification from the discourse. We can expect on the seventh of this month, so in about six days from now, that there'll be some kind of a constitutional reform and we'll see how they deal with the unification issue there. So something to look forward to. I was going to say sites like this will also be interesting hopefully in the near future to get more information about how they change physically because it's not just

the names right. There's also all these symbols all over all these so different ways in which they reflect that unification ideal. So as you said obviously in the upcoming parliamentary session ideal. So as you said, obviously in the upcoming parliamentary session, we should see an official change, but there's no doubt the efforts to keep wiping away those traces of the unification goal physically will probably still take some time. It will do indeed. Yes. And thanks again for coming on the show today, Shraaz, and we'll see you again soon. Thanks a lot. Shraaz and we'll see you again soon. Thanks a lot. Celebrating DPRK's golden era of aviation in vintage airline chic. Explore the stars with our Nada hoodie, inspired by North Korea's answer to NASA. Or toast to tradition with our Taedonggang beer t-shirt, capturing the essence of North

Korea's renowned brew. Each design is a conversation starter. Find yours at shop.nknews.org. Again that's shop.nknews.org. to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode, and to our post-recording producer genius Gabby Magnuson who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.