Fight the Blackmail

Yet again, North Korea is playing hostage politics with America — sentencing a US citizen in its custody, Kenneth Bae, to 15 years at hard labor. It’s time we stopped giving in to this extortion.

If past ritual is any guide, Pyongyang expects America to respond by sending a prominent envoy to pay tribute to Kim Jong Un’s regime and petition for Bae’s release. That’s how it worked under Kim’s late father, Kim Jong Il, when ex-Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were summoned in 2009 and 2010 respectively, their high profile visits at least part of the outrageous price for bringing home Americans held prisoner.

For the United States, this is a losing game. If North Korea gets away with wringing concessions from us in exchange for Bae, it has every incentive to snatch more Americans as bargaining chips.

We should answer this kind of stunt with something other than a kow-tow. And an obvious bit of leverage is available, right in the heart of New York — the nest of at least 10 North Korean officials at Pyongyang’s mission to the United Nations, in Midtown Manhattan. Let’s kick them out.

Yes, a UN agreement with the US government lets UN member states base envoys in New York. But our State Department still issues — or denies — their visas.

The US government would be well within its rights to evict the North Korean diplomats immediately, and take its own sweet time about approving entry for any more. In a multitude of ways, their presence is an affront, and potentially even a danger, to America.

Under US rules, North Korean diplomats in New York are restricted to UN business. But that leaves them free to hob-knob not only on UN premises, but also in one of America’s busiest cities — a crossroads of finance and information. And North Koreans have abused this privilege.

In 2008, for example, Senate investigators reported that North Korea had manipulated a UN bank account to secretly transfer at least $1 million to its mission in New York. North Korean officials never did provide a satisfactory explanation of what those clandestine funds were used for — but whatever it was, North Korea appears to have gotten away with it. (Our government, then desperate to salvage a disintegrating nuclear freeze deal, imposed no penalties.)

North Korea’s UN envoys represent a government that in recent months has conducted its third nuclear test, along with a long-range missile test, and has threatened nuclear strikes on Washington, on US bases in the Pacific and on America’s ally, South Korea. US authorities have also accused North Korea of counterfeiting American currency, which is itself an act of war.

And Pyongyang has a record of kidnapping foreign nationals abroad, dealing narcotics out of some of its embassies and periodically engaging in murderous attacks such as the shelling of South Korean islands and sinking of a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan, in 2010.

North Korea has also operated for years as a vendor of munitions and missiles to the Middle East, especially to such hostile powers as Syria, Iran and their Hezbollah terrorist clients.

Not least, the government of North Korea has survived for three generations of dynastic totalitarian rule by inflicting on its own people atrocities that rival those of Stalin or Cambodia’s Pol Pot. North Korea’s envoys in Manhattan may look civilized enough, but they are the human faces of a regime responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1 million-plus North Koreans by famine, along with the executions, hunger, torture and agonies that are the hallmarks of the Kim family gulag.

So US authorities have cause aplenty to usher North Korea’s diplomats out of Manhattan, and suggest that the delegation would be welcome to return — as soon as it represents a regime that respects the civilized norms listed as a requirement of membership in the UN charter.

Until then, it is indecent that the diplomatic bagmen of hostage-taking, war-mongering, nuclear-threatening North Korea should be permitted to stroll the streets of New York, and pursue their government’s murderous agenda at a United Nations paid for in large part by billions in US tax dollars.

Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she heads its Investigative Reporting Project.