EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a week-long series of excerpts from Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America by William C. Triplett, which as released Monday. The first installment of this series can be read here.
Next to the nuclear-weapons program, there is probably nothing more secret in North Korea than the “joy brigades,” sometimes known as the “pleasure team.” These are exceptionally pretty young women from the countryside who are brought to Pyongyang in their mid-teens. They are taught to sing and dance for the Dear Leader’s private parties. Their principal purpose, of course, is to become sex objects for the Great Leader and his closest aides. When he is in a rare magnanimous mood, he is known to pass them out to his subordinates as party favors.
In one instance, after a drinking party he told the male guests they could have any of the young girls they could catch. This led to ludicrous scenes of elderly drunken lechers chasing the girls all over the palace. One defector’s account paints the following scene:
[T]he party scene was overtaken by pandemonium. Men and women were rolling over each other near the tables and sofas. Young ladies were shouting, ‘Comrade leader!’ as they tried to escape. Elderly officials grabbed young ladies that had escaped into the restrooms where they forced them against washbasins to threaten them with comic faces. The scene was overtaken by extreme frenzy.
PAYING FOR KIM’S PLEASURES
It takes a lot of money to keep the Dear Leader in the kind of lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed. Office 39 is Kim’s private slush fund. Money from the sale of narcotics and arms deals and counterfeiting operations pour into this office. The funds collected from the Chosen Soren for the Dear Leader’s birthday and other holidays also fill the coffers. Office 39 even has its own gold mine. North Korea has a system known as “loyalty” funds or “loyalty payments.” These are funds that are voluntarily given by Korean people around the world to show they are loyal to the Kim family. Those who show such loyalty are often rewarded or at least hold the hope that they will be rewarded in the future.
If the funds collected are in foreign currencies, they are often invested abroad. These funds are moved from banks in Singapore to banks in Europe, particularly Switzerland. It is estimated that Kim has two to four billion dollars stashed away abroad. He has highly trusted aides in Europe who handle the money for him. One of them is reported to be the North Korean ambassador to Switzerland.
Office 38 handles the outflow. This is the purchasing office for the Kim family. Everything they want is handled from here–the cars (nearly all Mercedes Benz or expensive sports cars), jewelry, fancy food and clothes, luxury furnishings for the palaces and villas, boats, the latest of anything one could imagine. When his oldest son was a child, Kim gave him a million dollars worth of toys for each of his birthdays. North Korean agents would search Europe and Japan looking for “every electronic game on the market that might be of interest to children, regardless of price.”
Office 38 pays for all travel and overseas education expenses for the royal family. Kim’s oldest son was educated in Switzerland and Moscow. The North Korean government spent over two million dollars to build a villa on Lake Leman as his residence while he attended school in Geneva. One of Kim Jung Il’s nieces describes walking out of the most expensive restaurants in Geneva without paying the bill. North Korean agents told the restaurant they would pay for anything she ordered.
Kim likes to give gifts to those who please him. Very often these are Mercedes Benz cars with the license plate beginning with “216″–signifying his birthday, February 16. Police and guards who see any Benz know that it belongs to a high official. If it has the “216XX” license plate, they know they are close to the Dear Leader.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Wednesday, “The Serfs”
–William C. Triplett, a national-security expert, is the author of Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America.