In Kim’s Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure

December 19, 2011
By MARK LANDLER and CHOE SANG-HUN
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it — to say nothing of Washington, where the State Department acknowledged “press reporting” of Mr. Kim’s death well after North Korean state media had already announced it.

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea. Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist. The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.

Kim Jong-Il possibly suffered a stroke: US intelligence

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has apparently suffered a health setback, "possibly a stroke," a US intelligence official said Tuesday, noting he had not appeared at a 60th anniversary parade.

"It does appear that Kim Jong-Il has had a health setback, possibly a stroke," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said Kim appears to have fallen ill in "the last couple of weeks."

Kim failed to appear at a massive military parade in Pyongyang Tuesday, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the secretive Stalinist state.

But there were no outward signs of a struggle to succeed him, the official said.

US intelligence was "pretty confident" of its assessment of a health setback, the official said, saying a stroke "possibly is what it looks like now."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment about the reports on Kim's health and absence from the parade.

"Obviously, this is a very opaque regime, so I'm not in a position to offer any comment to you," McCormack said.

He said he could comment only on North Korea's failure to press ahead with arrangements for verifying the internationally-agreed disablement of its nuclear weapons program.

"We don't necessarily have a good picture into the decision-making processes of the North Korean regime, but we can see very clearly outputs or lack of outputs," McCormack said.

"And thus far we have, over the past several weeks, we have not seen outputs in terms of their agreement to a verification regime," he said.

"So that's where our focus is on," he said.

He again acknowledged that North Korea has also taken steps toward restarting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor by moving equipment that had been in storage back to former positions.

However, he said there is no sign the reactor is operational.

A US official dealing with North Korea could not comment on the health reports but noticed that the reclusive Stalinist state has become even more opaque than usual.

"It's been tough getting answers out of Pyongyang in recent weeks," the senior official told AFP, referring to answers to questions about the deadlock over North Korea's nuclear program.

North Korea last week announced that it has stopped work on disabling Yongbyon, and would consider rebuilding the plants, because Washington has failed to drop it from a terrorism blacklist.

The Yongbyon reactor is at the heart of Pyongyang's decades-old nuclear weapons drive and produced the plutonium for its October 2006 atomic test.

Last year North Korea sealed a landmark deal with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to abandon all its nuclear weapons in exchange for badly needed energy and economic aid and security and diplomatic benefits.