US: Drug trade funds N Korea arms programme
North Korea is using an international heroin smuggling trade to fund its nuclear weapons programme, a senior Pentagon official has claimed.
Andre Hollis, the Assistant Secretary of Defence for Counternarcotics, said Pyongyang had boosted its arms spending by trafficking drugs to Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia and Australia.
His comments followed the seizure last month of a North Korean ship carrying £30 million worth of heroin off the coast of south-eastern Australia.
One of the men on board was believed to be a former senior envoy in Pyongyang’s Beijing embassy.
“This heightens concerns that North Korean officials may be using illicit trading activities to provide much-needed hard currency to fund its army and weapons of mass destruction programmes,” Mr Hollis told Congress.
“Any illicit trafficking involving North Korea is a potential threat to the security of the US and its friends and allies in Asia and elsewhere.”
North Korea has been involved in the drug trade since at least 1976, when a Pyongyang diplomat in Egypt was arrested with a large cache of hashish.
Since then there have been at least 50 arrests or drug seizures involving North Koreans in more than 20 countries, State Department counter-narcotics official William Bach told a Congressional committee.
A witness identified only as a former high ranking North Korean government official told the hearing that he was confident the ship seized in Australia was part of a state sponsored drugs trade.
The man, who defected to South Korea in 1998, said he had direct knowledge of 30 other Pyongyang officials involved in drug trafficking.
He said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il personally designated an area in the country’s Hamkyung Province as an experimental poppy farm for opium in the late 1980s.
Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald said: “Given the nexus between its state-level drug production and trafficking business and its weapons programs, North Korea is essentially a crime syndicate with nuclear bombs.”
