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N. Korea puts spy agencies under military control in major shakeup
SEOUL, May 10 (Yonhap) -- North Korea has carried out a reshuffle of government organizations, shifting the jurisdiction over its overseas espionage and cash cow operations from the Workers' Party to the military, sources said Sunday.
The North has separated its two major spying and cash-generating overseas trade units -- Room 35 and Operation Unit -- from the Workers' Party and transferred them to the People's Armed Forces, the sources said on condition of anonymity.
The Operation Unit is known to train and send agents to South Korea, the United States and Japan, but its recent operations are believed to have shifted toward trades of arms, drugs and fake bills.
Room 35 is North Korea's intelligence unit in charge of collecting information from South Korea, Japan, China, Southeast Asia and Europe.
Kim Hyon-hui, one of the two North Korean agents who blew up a Korean Air flight over Myanmar in 1987, was believed to have belonged to the Room 35 and to have been trained in the Operation Unit.
"North Korea's Operation Unit handles a large amount of cash through illegal activities such as counterfeiting currency, manufacturing drugs and exporting arms," a source said. "With the Operation Unit now under its wing, the North Korean military will have a major source of independent financing."
The latest shakeup appears to be intended to address overlapped functions among government organizations and raise their overall efficiency, according to North Korea watchers.
The sources said North Korea may be trying to shed a terrorism-related image from its ruling Workers' Party, which has tagged along since the 1987 flight bombing.
The latest U.S. report on terrorism-sponsoring nations, released on April 30, said that North Korea "was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987."
The U.S. government removed North Korea from its list of terrorism-sponsoring nations in October as the North had agreed to follow steps to dismantle its nuclear program.
The denuclearization process, however, was stalled late last year over a dispute on how to verify North Korea's past nuclear activities.
hkim@yna.co.kr
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