[The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team concluded in a report released last month. When U.N. officials contacted the implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.]
By
Joby Warrick
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Participants practice Wednesday for a parade on the main Kim Il Sung square
in central Pyongyang. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)
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When North Korea launched its
Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the
event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought
an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in
the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.
Entire sections of booster rocket were
snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons
experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with
motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components
were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.
The trove “demonstrates the continuing
critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the
missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team
concluded in a report released last month. When U.N. officials contacted the
implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received
only silence.
China’s complex relationship with North Korea
was a key topic during last week’s U.S. visit by President Xi Jinping, as Trump
administration officials urged Chinese counterparts to apply more pressure on
Pyongyang to halt its work on nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems.
Yet, despite China’s public efforts to rein in North Korea’s provocative
behavior, Chinese companies continue to act as enablers, supplying the isolated
communist regime with technology and hardware that allow its missiles to take
flight, according to current and former U.S. and U.N. officials and independent
weapons experts.
The private assistance has included sensitive
software and other items specifically banned for export to North Korea under
U.N. Security Council sanctions, the officials and experts said.
China has officially denied that such illegal
exports exist, but investigations show restricted products were shipped
privately to North Korea as recently as 18 months ago. Still unclear, analysts
said, is whether the Chinese government tacitly approved of the exports, or is
simply unable or unwilling to police the thousands of Chinese companies that
account for more than 80 percent of all foreign goods imported by North Korea
each year.
“There’s all kinds of slack in the system,” said
Joshua Pollack, a former consultant to U.S. government agencies on arms control
and a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies. “It could be that the Chinese don’t care enough to do
much about it. A second possibility it that they don’t have the systems — such
as strong export controls — in place. Or that it’s just corruption.”
Whatever the reason, experts say, the flow of
products through China has allowed North Korea’s missiles engineers to achieve
progress that would otherwise be difficult for an impoverished regime that is
cut off from the West and lacks a sophisticated microelectronics industry.
When confronted privately about such exports,
Chinese officials have typically demanded high levels of proof — specific names
and dates that can be difficult to derive from water-damaged rocket parts
pulled from the ocean, said an Obama administration nonproliferation official
involved in sensitive negotiations with China over its relations with North
Korea.
“They’d say, ‘give us details,’ but in most
cases we could never say it was ‘this precise person on this precise day,’”
said the official, who insisted on anonymity in describing diplomatic negotiations.
“With them, it was never a team sport. It was always just the bare minimum of
what they had to do in order to avoid having to take serious action.”
The Unha-3, the rocket that launched North
Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into orbit on Feb. 7, 2016, was among the
most powerful ever built by Kim Jong Un’s government. It is also the most
worrisome. U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials have long believed that
the three-stage, 100-foot-tall rocket was designed as a forerunner for a future
nuclear-tipped space vehicle that could allow North Korea to threaten cities as
far away as Washington.
Mindful that spy agencies would seek to
recover spent parts after the launch, North Korean engineers laced the rocket
with explosives so that each stage would self-destruct while hurtling back to
Earth. Still, South Korean navy ships were waiting to scoop up any parts that
survived, eventually harvesting enough components to allow a crude
reconstruction of the entire rocket.
Investigators determined that the Unha-3’s
frame was indigenously made. But inside the rocket’s shell was an array of
electronics, including specialized pressure sensors, transmitters and
circuitry. An extensive probe by U.S. and South Korean officials revealed that
many of the components had been manufactured in Western countries and shipped to
North Korea by Chinese distributors — a finding that was echoed in the United
Nations Panel of Experts report made public on March 9.
The report, which received scant attention
outside the world body, described elaborate systems for disguising technology
exports intended for North Korea. Some schemes involved Chinese front-companies
created by North Korean intelligence agencies; others were run through banks
created as joint ventures by Pyongyang and foreign partners, including Chinese
financial institutions. As sanctions grew tougher, the sanction-busters simply
learned new tricks for getting around the rules, the panel’s investigators
found.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is
flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with evasion techniques
that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication,” the eight-member panel
concluded. International resolve for approving new sanctions had “not yet been
matched,” the report said, “by the requisite political will, prioritization and
resource allocation to ensure effective implementation.”
Some of the banned components exported to
North Korea can’t be found inside a missile frame. A separate report by U.S.
weapons experts reveals how Pyongyang used Chinese middlemen to obtain access
to European-made software essential for making parts that go inside advanced
rockets.
The report recounts a 2015 business deal in
which a European manufacturer agreed to sell sensitive software and
industrial-control systems to a Chinese company based in the northeastern
Chinese city of Shenyang, about 150 miles from the North Korean border. The
deal that came with an important condition: None of the items were to be resold
to North Korea.
The agreement was quickly broken, according
to the report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a
Washington nonprofit that focuses on nuclear-weapons proliferation. The
purchaser, a manufacturing giant in northeastern China known as the Shenyang
Machine Tool Co. Ltd., integrated the European technology in its own line of
industrial milling machines used to make metal parts. Two of those machines
were then sold to North Korea, the report said. While North Korea’s eventual
use of the machines is not known, the controllers and software are used
elsewhere to manufacture parts for missiles as well as centrifuges used to make
enriched uranium.
“These goods were supplied to Shenyang
Machine Tools under the condition that they would not be retransferred to North
Korea or other sanctioned states,” said the report, set to be released this
week. European officials “decided to investigate the responsible individuals in
the Shenyang company but this effort failed,” the document said. Shenyang
officials would later claim that the transfer of sensitive technology had been
inadvertent, the report said.
David Albright, author of the report and a
former U.N. weapons inspector, declined to identify the European manufacturer
or the government that conducted the investigation, citing confidentiality
agreements. The Shenyang firm did not respond to emailed requests from The
Washington Post seeking comment.
Albright, the author of dozens of technical
studies on North Korea’s weapons programs, noted that China has made a show of
prosecuting other businesses that violate sanctions on trading with North
Korea. But he said the Shenyang case illustrates that illicit trade continues,
often under complex schemes that are difficult even for Chinese authorities to
spot.
But he argued that the Chinese could do much
more.
“It’s a question of priorities,” said
Albright, who has discussed such cases with Chinese officials. “China is an
export economy and money is never a dirty word, ever. There are good people in
the system who would like to do more, but as you work your way down through the
bureaucracy, the interest goes way down.”
There are signs that Beijing is beginning to
tighten the screws. In September, Chinese authorities arrested at least 11
business executives in the border city of Dandong for allegedly selling banned
goods to North Korea. Among those arrested was Ma Xiaohong, the 44-year-old
founder and chairwoman of Hongxiang Group, a company accused by U.S. officials
of supplying Pyongyang with rare metals and chemicals used in nuclear-weapons
production. China also recently curtailed coal imports from North Korea and
imposed unilateral sanctions intended to pressure Kim Jong Un into halting
further nuclear tests.
In public comments after the Ma arrest,
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said his country would be
“relentless” in enforcing sanctions aimed at ridding the Korean Peninsula of
nuclear weapons.
“These efforts are there for all to see,” Lu
said.
During last week’s presidential visit, Trump
administration officials urged President Xi to do still more. At a news
conference on Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on China to
join in a “new strategy to end North Korea’s reckless behavior.”
The same message has been delivered privately
as part of a pressure campaign that dates at least to the early years of the
Obama administration. In meetings, U.S. officials have warned that a failure to
halt the illicit trade could speed up Kim Jong Un’s nuclear timetable and
increase the risk of a regional war — one that could devastate regional
economies and send waves of refugees streaming across China’s border — an
outcome Chinese leaders are particularly anxious to avoid, according to a recently
retired U.S. diplomat and veteran of numerous rounds of such talks.
“China may be willing to close its eyes to
some things,” the diplomat said, “but they’re not prepared to welcome North
Korea as a nuclear-weapons state.”
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