Jeroen hypothesized that the US is likely to have informants in the
military of any randomly selected country, and that North Korea is
likely no exception. Well, I'd say yes and no. The thing is, there is
no way to judge the loyalty of such informants. How can you be sure
that your so-called informant isn't a plant? When you are dealing with
people in regular countries you can do some poking around and
investigate your informant a bit. But North Korea is notoriously
closed. I bet we have many many times more informants in, say, the
Dutch military than we do in North Korea. Or perhaps a better example
would be in a non-allied country that nevertheless is not totalitarian.
I'm sure we have tons of informants in Ghana.
But North Korea is different. It is totally closed to outsiders. Most
countries CIA people can visit posing as businesspeople or journalists
or humanitarian workers or some such. But no foreigners are allowed in
North Korea...not even South Koreans. Remember the big to-do in the
news last year when the NK gov't allowed visits between family members?
You can't even offer a North Korean money for information, since
foreign currency is worthless there.
And totalitarian countries have ways of rooting out traitors that
democratic countries don't. For instance, in Iraq every army officer
at some point will be approached by a friend who will ask him if he is
unsatisfied about the rule of Saddam Hussein. And that officer will
immediately turn his friend in to security forces, because he must
assume that his friend has been ordered to ask him those questions.
Failure to turn in your friend means the security forces come and get
you. Then the officer is ordered to perform the same stunt on another
person. It becomes impossible to do anything other than report such
contacts because you never know if it is a sting.
Now, democratic countries don't bother with this sort of thing, because
it is hugely destructive to morale, violates civil rights, and requires
enormous investments in security workers. But the inefficiency is
irrelevant to a dictator, since the entire state is set up for his
benefit the only important thing is holding on to power.
Anyway, even if we had many informants in North Korea, they would be
useless. Even if our secret mole tipped us off, the information would
almost certainly be ignored. If you mobilize for invasion every couple
of months only to back off every time, then how can your victim tell
the real mobilization from the fake mobilization, especially when only
a handful of the top oligarchs know for sure?
A couple of months ago I nominated North Korea as the country that most
resembles George Orwell's 1984. That pretty much sums up the
difficulty of getting accurate information about the place. The silver
lining is that the North Korean dictators must therefore operate blind
themselves. Transparency is much more efficient. But of course
efficiency is not their goal.
=====
Darryl
Think Galactically -- Act Terrestrially
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