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On May 1st, 1946, a South Korean guerilla tried to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Kim was speaking at a political rally in Pyongyang when the White Shirt guerilla threw a grenade on stage. Kim's bodyguard---the young soviet officer Yakov Novichenko---caught the grenade and threw it away. Novichenko was seriously mutilated by the grenade blast, but Kim survived the incident without injury.
The recent assassination attempt against Trump reminded me of this story, and I wanted to share it with themotte for two reasons:
It's just a great story, and one that I wish were more widely known. For me, it helps shed light on why the North Koreans felt like they "needed" to start the Korean War and invade the South in 1950. (I only know about Novichenko because of my time living in North Korea, where a North Korean army officer told me to look him up.)
I feel like there should somehow be a meme connecting these two assassination attempts and the Trump/Kim summit, but I'm not enough of a meme-warrior to figure out how to do it. Maybe one of you all can pull it off?
Neat story. Never heard of it.
Tangential, but wtf? I can't believe this has been hidden in theschism for years. Have you written about your experiences in this role beyond your polite request to resume academic exchange? I assume we haven't resumed it.
You lay out some good points with the Soviets in that post, re: collapse and nukes. Academics can provide a basis for further collaboration. Do you think there are any risks associated with academic exchange with geopolitical rivals and adversaries?
There's:
I have more fun stories I'd like to share but either haven't gotten around to it or have been asked by the "state department" not to.
With major powers like China/Russia, I think there's some risk (but the way the FBI/military talk about the risk is way overblown). With a much smaller country like North Korea that is super isolated, I think there's basically no risk.
even though they have a history of cyberattacks and crypto scams? I don't know why you think there's no risk, or any benefit, in freely helping them increase their IT skills. Even if the stuff you're teaching them is purely peaceful, it frees up their state resources to work on other, more black-hat stuff.
Eh... I think the cyberattacks/crypto scams are blown way out of proportion. Literally every country on earth does this. For some reason, however, it's only used as an excuse to block exchanges with North Korea and not with countries like Israel.
Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.
I disagree. For example:
Albert Einstein was part of an enemy state in WWI. This led to his theory of relativity being ignored by the outside world because a Good American (TM) wouldn't support German physics. If non-Germans had paid more attention to Einstein, then we would have understood relativity ~10 years earlier, and the whole world would be better off because of it. Ignoring Einstein did not result in increased capabilities of the German war machine, and I think was clearly a mistake in hindsight. Who knows what types of Einsteins are living in North Korea right now that we don't even know about because we don't want to support North Korean science?
Above I give two examples of the work I did in North Korea that resulted in North Korean programmers being assigned peaceful tasks (contributing to open source software and fixing the KCNA webpage) that they would not have otherwise completed. If these exchanges hadn't been happening, then those programmers would have been assigned other tasks (possibly military related) instead. I personally know several American machine learning researchers who have benefited from the pull requests, and several government analysts who rely on the improved KCNA website to perform their jobs.
There's a lot more examples of why I think this work is a net-benefit in the /r/theschism link above. If you disagree with any of those particulars, I'd love to learn why.
I'm fascinated (not being sarcastic) by your journey from NSA employee to working for North Korea. I would really like to know what motivated such a journey.
I also must admit I have a lot of skepticism about the value of helping North Korea. The DPRK is one of the few countries left in the world I would unambiguously call "bad" and while I understand the argument that "We should try to entice them into joining the international community and normalizing," I just... really don't think that will work with the existing regime.
You can find a summary of my career in this college newspaper bio of me: https://tsl.news/professor-mike-izbicki-discusses-path-to-pacifism/. There's more details about me leaving the navy on my blog at https://izbicki.me/blog/my-co-discharge.html.
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Holy shit! And you still went to North Korea?
With that kind of past I would not have wanted to put myself within grasp of a regime with little to lose and a lot to gain in picking your brain.
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Man, this is such a strange conversation! I don't want to accuse you of being an NK propaganda tool but... I feel like you're hitting a lot of their talking points.
Let's go back to the start:
It makes no sense that they would invade a peaceful neighbor just one random terrorist- who defected from North Korea! tried to lob a homemade bomb at their leader. That sounds like something North Korean army officers would use as an excuse. Kim Il Sung was looking to take over all of Korea ever since the day he got into power, and was heavily backed by the USSR the whole time, just waiting for the right time to invade. They invaded 4 years after the assassination attempt, during which South Korea made absolutely no attempt to kill Kim Il Sung or even build up their military.
You want to make a meme connecting Trump to Kim Il Sung... why? Kim Il Sung is not very popular in the US, even among the fringe online right. Are you trying to make Kim Il Sung more popular with Trump fans?
Every country has some degree of cyberwarfare ability, sure. But most of them simply keep it in reserve as an emergency warfware option, or (like the US and Israel) occasionally to target terrorists and nuclear weapons development. North Korea uses it regularly, either to "earn respect" for their regime, or to bring in foreign cash when they have no legitimate exports. See eg: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/dprk-cyber-espionage.pdf. These attacks are increasing over time, suggesting that they are gaining technical skills and are not bound by any sort of international norms. This is actually becoming a large part of their "economy!" ("Remarkably, North Korea is also deemed responsible for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency heist, worth $530 million, to the detriment of the Japanese exchange Coincheck.34 It appears cyber thefts have become an integral part of Pyongyang’s strategy as a way of survival.")
Not the point. I'm sure these academic exchanges don't directly teach hacking capabilities. But it's opportunity cost. When they teach basic, civilian skills for free, which Pyongyang would have had to fund itself, that allows the regime to use its own resources to create more "cyberwarriors." It's the same pattern we've seen from North Korea again and again- Giving them food, money, or technical equipment does not help their people like it would a normal country. It simply lets the regime transfer more people and resources into its military. Giving them food during the 90s famine didn't stop their military buildup, and the more recent sunshine policy did nothing to halt their nuclearization or cyberwarfare programs.
In a larger sense- you said you teach computer science? I'm sure you know more about computer and programming than I do. But don't you think the state department knows more about diplomacy and military matters than you? Of course your NK colleagues seem nice, they're not going to put you next to someone who's openly hostile. But the state department can monitor the nasty parts of their government much more than you can as a visiting professor, and there's a good reason why the government has decided that it's a bad idea to give them technical help or even to travel there as a tourist. Don't be a Useful Idiot.
Eh.. sorry it got strange. I definitely don't think the North should have invaded the South. It was a bad decision morally and strategically, and it decimated the Korean people. I just think it's worth understanding our enemies' motivations in order to be able to accurately predict their future behavior, which is necessary to make them less dangerous.
I understand your point about opportunity costs, and think it's quite valid. We just have a different model of how collaboration works. Your model is:
My model is:
Of course, details matter about which model is true in any situation. I think the specific examples I've shown are solidly in the second category.
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For what it's worth, I thought the 2014 Sony Pictures hack was hilarious and saw it as a vague fargroup vs vile neargroup.
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I don't disagree personally but countries do stuff like that all the time.
What I've been taught in history class is that the casus belli and the reason for war are different. 99% of the time, at least.
Doesn't that make the case for "countries do it all the time" even stronger? I thought the original argument is that a respectable country would not use such a trivial casus belli.
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"all the time?" Like what? Do you think Trump is going to invade Pennsylvania to get revenge for the assassination attempt?
Following a single terrorist attack, the US invaded two countries that had nothing to do with it. You might have also heard of a minor skirmish called World War I.
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In the balance of it, creating an technical class within North Korea that is not military in nature is important, I think. NK having its software devs being more civilian is important in the long term for creating a philowestern elite.
If this was a third-world country with limited state power that might make sense. But NK isn't like that. There is no "separate technical class" or "civilian class." If those devs are useful to the military regime, they'll just be transferred to work on whatever the rulers deem useful. Creating more "civilian" devs just frees up more resources to use for blackhat devs. And if they start to act "philowestern" from exposure to the internet, they can just be imprisoned or executed (as many people are who are caught with contraband material, like banned books or even SK dramas on DVD.
This sort of thinking has been tried. For a good long time now, most notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Policy. The hope was that giving them free, peaceful aid would make them a more friendly nation. It didn't work, it just gave them enough resources to keep their shitty dictatorship running while they developed nukes and ICBMs. It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" is going to magically change the mind of people who have spent decades running one of the cruelist military dictatorships on Earth.
Academic exchange is not "no strings attached aid". It is a mutual relationship where both parties benefit from the arrangement.
With all due respect to small military dictatorships, I do not believe that they bring forth Einsteins nearly often enough for an arrangement with them to be "mutually beneficial", except in the most literal sense of the word where the other party gets at least a little bit of benefit.
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