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TOKYO- Pyongyang earns about 60 percent of its foreign currency by running narcotics, said a former high-ranking North Korean official who defected to the South in 1998, according to a report this week in the Japanese daily Yomiuri Simbun.
Now in Washington to provide intelligence about the communist state to the U.S. government, the defector, who was not identified, said that the founder of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, first ordered that opium poppies be grown in 1991, and the current leader Kim Jong Il had every collective farm allot 10 hectares for poppy cultivation. The mountainous Hamgyong province is the hotbed of poppy growing, the defector said.
According to the article, "Room 39 at the headquarters of the North's Workers Party" is in charge of producing, processing, transporting and exporting opium, and payments are received on the open seas at times and places arranged by phone. Payments are always cash.
The defector reportedly said the customers include Koreans, Japans, residents of Hong Kong, Chinese and Russians, but that Japanese buyers constitute the largest group. According to the article, Jang Song Taek, the first deputy director of the Workers Party Central Committee and the closest confidant of Kim Jong Il, oversees Pyongyang's narcotics operations.
(Choi Heub, pot@chosun.com )
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