![]() And when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011, they used someone they thought was a Mexican drug cartel hit man. Chinese triads are being used by Beijing’s Public Security Bureau to intimidate protesters and gather intelligence abroad. The Turkish security forces have used rival heroin-smuggling gangs as weapons against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party to penetrate Turkish expatriate communities, for example. Increasingly, though, states are turning to this on a more regular basis. After all, criminals are essentially self-interested and intrinsically untrustworthy. In the main, though, these connections tended to be quite rare, one-off necessities more than actual policy. In the 1990s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency used the D-Company criminal organization to launch terror attacks in India. The Sicilian Mafia provided local knowledge and muscle for the Americans before the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. Of course, intelligence agencies have long used criminals as proxies from time to time. Gangsters, after all, have all kinds of skills and capacities that can be of value to intelligence agencies and covert operations in the modern world, whether moving goods or people untraceably across borders, raising funds for political purposes, or simply putting a bullet into an inconvenient enemy of the state. ![]() Unlike the North Koreans, they are typically cutting deals with the underworld rather than simply moving into it themselves. Other states committed to challenging the international order are learning from Pyongyang’s example, though - if with a little more subtlety. Cheap, potentially lucrative, and not relying on physical contact, cybercrime is the ideal operation for an impoverished and isolated pariah. (In 2009, KNIC managers in Singapore reportedly sent then-leader Kim Jong Il $20 million in cash as a birthday present.) Turning to cybercrime has been a logical step. Thae Yong-ho, a former diplomat who was the highest-ranking defector in 20 years, claimed in 2017 that these schemes earn Pyongyang “tens of millions of dollars” annually. (KNIC) runs systematic insurance frauds abroad. ![]() It arranges for methamphetamines to be brewed inside government chemical works, the state mint helps produce some of the highest-quality counterfeit bank notes in the world, and the state-owned Korea National Insurance Corp. Its infamous Bureau 39 is essentially the government’s mafia office, dedicated to generating resources by illegal means to support the state (especially its nuclear program) and keep the Kims in imported luxuries. There’s no doubt that North Korea has led the way in turning organized crime toward state ends. Welcome to the modern age of hybrid war, when even crime has been weaponized. There’s growing evidence that other states - particularly Russia - are increasingly turning to organized crime groups as proxies, intelligence assets, and sometimes even as hired killers. This puts the Hermit Kingdom, for once, ahead of the curve. North Korea has relied on such criminals and thugs to do its bidding for years. But journalists have tended not to draw any distinction between the Lazarus Group and the regime of Kim Jong Un, which is understandable. To be more exact, they’ve been pointed at the cybergang known as the Lazarus Group, the group of hackers linked to the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures and the theft of $81 million from a Bangladeshi bank. Following the WannaCry ransomware cyberattack, which shut down computers around the world from Russia to Taiwan last month, fingers have been pointed at North Korea.
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