[A-List] Intelligence Failure and Famine in North Korea

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Hazel Smith

Intelligence Review (April 2004) pages 40-43, 51

Recent inquiries in the USA and the UK into alleged intelligence
failures regarding the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) have highlighted shortcomings in the way information is used and
conclusions are drawn by Western intelligence agencies. There is a
danger the same errors could be repeated in North Korea.

Given the seriousness of the consequences of North Korea's possession of
WMD - which could range from forcing a regime change to a possible US
pre-emptive strike - ensuring that intelligence assessments are accurate
is of the highest importance. By examining the parameters in which
information about North Korea has been collated, assessed and used in
the recent past, it is possible to gauge the quality of the debate
currently being presented.

The basic premises about North Korea, which inform policy development,
scholarly debate and journalism, have been built from information that
is largely founded on inference from isolated and de-contextualised data,
speculation, ideological assumptions and worst-case scenarios. None of
this is unusual as a way of interpreting highly charged issues of
international security. What is unusual is the extent to which such
'knowledge' circulates as an unquestioned body of factually-based
evidence and analysis and forms the foundation of major Western powers'
intelligence estimates. It provides at best a sometimes skewed
perspective and at worst a false picture, and almost every issue on
which there is supposedly 'common knowledge' of North Korea contains
this whole spectrum of knowledge distortion.

Shortcomings in this common knowledge can clearly be seen in the
assumptions about the famine of the 1990s, and the use of food aid,
including the diversion of food aid to the North Korean military.


Cold War sources

Information that comes from unbiased sources that can be cross-checked
and placed in context provides a good foundation for accurate, reliable
knowledge. Information that cannot be verified through cross-checking,
especially if it is provided through non-objective sources such as
defectors or anti-regime activists, must be used with extreme care. From
this knowledge base, analysis needs to be logically and systematically
constructed, and gaps in the information identified.

Up until the 1990s, the lack of reliable, accurate and verifiable data
from or about North Korea - combined with the lack of regular access to
the country by visitors with any form of analytical training, such as
academics, international officials or journalists - has meant that
intelligence estimates were almost entirely based on biased sources that
could not be checked. In other words, the knowledge base has been thin
and consequently, analysis and understanding have been weak.
US sources were widely acknowledged as poor, even within the
intelligence community itself. For many years, Seoul was virtually the
only source of regular information on North Korea for the USA; this
information was deeply tainted as it had been filtered through a heavily
ideological Cold War prism. South Korea was an authoritarian state until
1987; it was also under threat from Pyongyang, which was politically
committed to overthrowing the South Korean state by force if necessary.
Right up until the advent of ex-South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's
remarkable shift of policy into engagement with the North in the late
1990s, South Korean intelligence was noted for propagating 'intelligence'
that was supposedly based on North Korean 'defector' interviews but
actually presented a stereotyped picture of the situation in the North.
Defector interviews can be useful if they are taken as part of a wider
intelligence picture and with the caveat that defectors may have an
interest in exaggerating or distorting their claims. In the North Korean
case, the problem was exacerbated because most of the defectors, even
the most senior, had only a partial picture of their own society - as
one would expect in a closed country.

However, the primary blame for the lack of good Western intelligence
lies with the North Korean government. Pyongyang issued some meaningful
basic data and through the speeches of Kim Il-sung in particular, used
quantitative analysis to criticise the lack of progress in the social
and economic sectors surprisingly often. However, the government rarely
permitted independent research and critical evaluation, either from
domestic or foreign analysts. Its most profound external relations were
with other closed countries such as the former Soviet Union and China,
economic and political partners that were also not likely to issue
information. In any case, Chinese and Russian knowledge of the
socio-economy of North Korea was not substantive. Visiting delegations,
even from 'friendly' countries, tended to operate at the
intergovernmental level and few foreign nationals were permitted to
travel around the countryside or speak with North Koreans outside very
formal channels of communication.

The North Korean government did admit some foreigners on short-term
visits as part of study-tours, political, sporting and cultural
exchanges, or as potential or actual business partners. However, their
freedom of movement was heavily circumscribed. While Pyongyang's
objective was to show the foreigners that it controlled its territory
effectively, in practice what was displayed was the regime's attempt to
control lives and to limit personal freedoms and so, in the public
relations sense, the government was its own worst enemy: reporting from
these short-term delegations was invariably negative. Furthermore,
reports from such delegations were (and remain) a problematic source of
information in that they were unable to report on conditions accurately.
There are no visible state secrets to be found wandering around a North
Korean city; what is evident is some sense of the quality of life. For
example, in Pyongyang there is poor quality low-rise housing throughout
the city. Most apartment blocks are shabby, badly constructed and
unmaintained, with windows screened by plastic in the winter to try to
keep out the cold. Urban residents keep pigs and chickens and grow food
on balconies, evidence of the still massive food shortage among
residents who do not have access to relatives living in the country who
can grow food.

However, even during the height of the Cold War, there was some useful
information available. The London-based International Institute of
Strategic Studies (IISS) produced reliable and usable quantitative data
on the country's military capacities on an annual basis, within the
context of its international comparative reviews of global military
surveys. Some data on foreign trade and foreign relations could be
obtained from North Korea's partners. There were also discrete pieces of
research carried out by foreign academics, including the 1988 nutrition
survey of Kangwon, the most southeastern province, which was conducted
by an Australian professor of nutrition in cooperation with North
Korea's Institute of Child Nutrition.

At that time it did not find evidence of the widespread malnutrition
that characterised the province a decade later.


Post-1995 sources

Since 1995 there has been an explosion of public and usable quantitative
and qualitative data. Most of it comes from thousands of reports
competed by hundreds of nonresidential and dozens of residential
humanitarian and development organisations that have been operating
since Pyongyang asked for help in responding to the famine of the early
1990s. Most of this 10 years' worth of data collection is reproduced on
the 'Reliefweb' website (www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf) and is
co-ordinated and updated on a daily basis by the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

South Korea's democratic transition of 1987 and the policy of engagement
so dramatically epitomised by the North/South Korea Summit of June 2000
has also encouraged a proliferation of solid, professional and less
ideologically framed research. Furthermore, South Korean academics are
now less hampered by fear of breaching the country's severe (and still
extant) National Security Law that prohibits 'unofficial' links with the
North.

To be useful for intelligence purposes, data needs to be analysed
professionally. Assessments derived from humanitarian operations in
North Korea were, in the main, completed by experienced and professional
analysts used to working with incomplete socio-economic data and in
contexts where governments and other political forces had much to hide.
When recruiting personnel for their North Korea operations, the major
humanitarian organisations factored in these considerations. On the
whole, they sent some of their most experienced workers. Humanitarian
officials working for the major agencies - in particular the UN World
Food Programme (WFP) and the International Federation of the Red Cross,
which had the largest number of resident international staff - stayed in
North Korea for periods of up to four years. During this time some of
them became familiar with the language and, in the case of the WFP
workers, spent months in outlying offices in the most remote parts of
the country.

Humanitarian workers based their assessments on both qualitative and
quantitative data. Qualitative data was gathered from observation,
interviews, government reports, assessments from the hundreds of
visiting specialists including agronomists, nurses, doctors, academics,
priests, engineers and food technicians. Reliable and important
quantitative data emerged from the two large-scale national nutrition
surveys of 1998 and 2002, which covered over 80 per cent of the
population. Systematic agricultural data came from the twice-yearly
mission of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). This was
combined with analysis of satellite photography and carefully evaluated
data from regular visits (between 400 and 500 a month) by WFP
humanitarian officers to farms, hospitals, schools, clinic, orphanages,
county offices, and beneficiaries' homes. By 2004 North Korean
agriculture and food sectors had been subject to 10 years of
increasingly sophisticated, intensive and systematic analysis. This data
included key socio-economic analysis and included a charting of the
early developments of marketisation, the relative vulnerability of
different social groups and the changing attitude of government. All of
these reports contain a mass of systematically organised data: but it is
the exception rather than the rule if they are read or utilised by
Western scholarly, media or intelligence communities.


Distorting famine figures

There is now enough publicly credible data available about North Korea
that there is no need to use speculation or propaganda as substitutes
for careful and qualified analysis. However, this continues to be the
case. For example, foreign observers have regularly cited the figure of
three million dead from famine, or ten per cent of the country's
population. Those who use these figures also frequently argue that the
government left the people in the northeastern provinces of North
Hamgyong, South Hamgyong and Ryanggang to starve to death. The argument
goes that these provinces were 'triaged' by the government. The figure
of three million was extrapolated from a 1998 survey of North Korean
migrants and refugees in China, and was published in the reputable
British medical journal The Lancet. These North Koreans in the main came
from North Hamgyong province, and the scientific work in question
specifically stated that their findings could not be extrapolated to the
whole country. Firstly, the North Koreans interviewed in China were not
a representative sample of their home province; secondly North Hamgyong,
which has an urbanised, non-agricultural population, was not
representative of the country as a whole.

There is no doubt there was a terrible humanitarian disaster in the
1990s. The most reliable evaluation, carried out in a doctoral thesis at
the University of Warwick by South Korean economist Suk Lee, shows that
up to 660,000 people died from starvation and malnutrition-related
diseases. However, the truth is that nobody - including the government -
probably knows the real figure. Getting the 'facts right' is not just a
question of scholastic accuracy. One important result of inaccurate
'common knowledge' is the likelihood of not being able to identify the
real political ramifications of social phenomena. A more informed
analysis of the famine, the northeast and the state's reaction might
have discovered, for instance, that the state's inability to prevent
this formerly privileged social group from sliding into unemployment,
destitution and fear of starvation in the space of a few years, was
actually a sign of the state's new inability to control and direct
policy in strategic socio-economic sectors, rather than reflecting the
state's ability to make and implement policy choices. The state lost its
capacity to feed the people as a result of a number of factors. These
included economic collapse and the end of systematic foreign support
from China and Russia at the end of the Cold War; natural disasters that
destroyed harvests and grain reserves; an inability to respond fast
enough to changed circumstances given the rigidity of the political
system; and an initial unwillingness to accept that the only realistic
option was to alter foreign and domestic policies and seek assistance
from the West.

It is not true that the government cut off food to the northeast, or
that the humanitarian organisations went along with this policy (another
variant of the argument).

We do know, from interviews with country officials, hospital and clinic
directors, teachers and care workers throughout the country, that during
the economic meltdown of the early 1990s those counties with scarce food
supplies suffered most. This applied whether these were the non-food
producing mining towns just north of Pyongyang, the port areas of Nampo
and Haeju in the southwest or the northeast. The old Public-Distribution
system had nothing to distribute in many months of the year throughout
the 1990s.

The northeastern provinces suffered the most because they had the least
agricultural resources, not because of any government policy. It seems
highly unlikely that Pyongyang would deliberately ignore the North
Hamgyong population, which contained large numbers of militant and
organised urban workers that provided the political and mythological
heart of the ruling Korean Workers' Party, and where the provincial
party leadership had enormous clout within the national party apparatus.

From the beginning of the enormous food aid operation of 1998 onwards,
the largest of the UN humanitarian organisations and the
non-governmental organisation operations, - the UN WFP and the Catholic
agency CARITAS - systematically focused their aid effort on the
northeast, precisely because these were the most vulnerable areas. The
dozens of humanitarian workers who have lived and worked in the
northeast over the past ten years are available to be interviewed on and
off the record. These operations are all publicly documented in readily
accessible formats as is the various data regarding different
assessments of population change.


Food aid myths

The 'common knowledge' on food aid is underpinned by three assumptions
that very often go unquestioned. The first is that there is systematic
diversion of international food aid to the country's elite; second, that
it is diverted to the million troops of the North Korean military; and
third, that food aid is not received by the most vulnerable, or to those
it is designed to reach. The most extreme version of the food aid thesis
is that the country's leader, Kim Jong-il, is deliberately starving his
people and does this by diverting international food aid to the armed
forces in order to keep himself in office.

More than 90 per cent of food aid is grain surplus from developed
countries - corn, wheat, sometimes wheat flour and occasionally rice.
Grain surpluses come about because the agricultural produce cannot be
sold on international markets, sometimes because of poor quality. If not
distributed internationally as food aid, these surplus grains are used
as animal food, ploughed back into the land, put into warehouses, or if
there is insufficient storage capacity, sometimes burnt or simply thrown
away.

Regarding the first assumption, the North Korean elite is a relatively
small group of people close to Kim Jong-il and his family. Pyongyang's
elites, like those elsewhere, have gastronomic choices. Their access to
hard currency and contacts abroad means that they do not have to resort
to surplus grain that is barely above the quality of animal feed to form
any part of their diet.

There is perhaps more justification for the second assumption, that is
speculation that the military may have been given access to 'diverted'
food aid. Kim Jong-il has an 'army first' policy, designed to secure
domestic regime security as much as to guard against external enemies.
The army is relatively more privileged than it was in the period of the
previous president, Kim Il-sung, having access to greater domestic
political power. However, because of the country's overall lack of
resources, the government also suffers from economic constraints that
make it difficult to feed, clothe, house and support its army.

When such speculation is balanced by adherence to available data, we can
draw a more detailed picture. The armed forces receive first priority
from the country's own domestic food production - this is public
knowledge, and openly and frequently stated by the government. The most
popular basic grain is locally produced 'sticky rice', which is not
often available to poorer North Koreans who have to rely on the cheaper
and easier to come by potatoes and millet as staples. There is no reason
to doubt that the military share the same food tastes as the rest of the
population and are much more likely to consume locally produced rice in
their basic diet, rather than the much less popular and less nutritious
corn, wheat or the brown rice that comes in as international food aid.
Some international food aid probably does end up with the armed forces,
but this is much more likely to come from the bilateral donations from
the South Korean and Chinese governments than from the multilateral food
assistance channelled through the UN World Food Programme. Bilateral
food aid is given directly to the North Korean government and by its
nature unconditional. If the government decides to allocate bilateral
food aid to the military this is not 'diversion' - even if it does not
accord with the policies of the international community.

Other available data suggests that the military are also relatively food
insecure, as are their families. The very size of the military means
that although soldiers are guaranteed a basic grain allocation, the same
guarantee cannot be made to soldiers' families. The data from government
sources and the media on the efforts being made within the army to
establish farms and food production; regular reports from neighbouring
Chinese towns and villages of soldiers stealing food from civilians; and
observations by humanitarian workers and foreign visitors that they see
'skinny soldiers' throughout the country bear out the conclusion that
the military are not excessively well-off. Soldiers desperate enough to
steal food may also be steal food aid but there is no evidence of
systematic food aid diversion to the army as public or government policy.

On the other hand, no international aid agency that has been involved in
the regular delivery and distribution of food aid to North Korea has
ever reported systematic diversion of food aid. Monitoring of the
distribution of food is much more efficient and regularised than in the
early days of the aid operations in the mid-1990s. This does not mean
that Pyongyang has not placed undue restrictions on the humanitarian
organisations' ability to operate freely, however. It is difficult, for
example, for the agencies to assess the impact of food aid on
individuals and communities.

There is also very reliable data available that should raise some
queries about the veracity of the third assumption - that Kim Jong-il is
systematically starving his people. The 1998 and 2002 internationally
supervised joint humanitarian agency/governmental nutrition surveys give
comparable quantitative data showing that whereas the very high levels
of severe and chronic malnutrition among children directly indicated
famine or post-famine conditions, the still unacceptable but much lower
2002 figures were more directly indicative of chronic poverty. The 2002
figures were directly comparable to the poor countries of Southeast Asia
- particularly Indonesia and Cambodia. The national agricultural data on
crop supply regularly collected by the Food and Agriculture Organisation
indicates a continuing domestic food shortage. Most North Korean
families did not and do not have hard currency to buy food from abroad
and must survive from what is available in country. Given the
improvement in the nutritional status of children, the government must
have been either directly feeding children under seven from domestic
production; creating the domestic conditions that would allow the poor
to obtain food; or facilitating the distribution of international aid to
children - to those to whom it is directed. Either way, none of this
indicates a government that has a policy of 'starving its people'.

By relying on common knowledge assumptions rather than working through
details logically, the standard line of analysis has largely failed to
consider the enormous socioeconomic change that has taken place in North
Korea over the past decade. The government still cannot directly feed
all its population, yet the population has found a way to survive. The
government may not have a policy of 'diverting' food aid but it is very
likely that food aid is entering the local economy as something to be
shared, bartered, swapped and even sold by individuals and households in
the burgeoning marketised economy. In many countries the 'monetisation'
of aid is an objective of international donors. In North Korea,
monetisation may be happening by default, but while the intelligence
analysts are bound by prior assumptions shaped more by what they imagine
rather than what careful investigation of the data might produce, they
will continue to be unable to chart the real social change that is
taking place in North Korea - and thus they will be unable to offer
informed policy options to external actors to help shape peaceful
transformation in the Korean peninsula.

http://www.japanfocus.org/104.html

Hazel Smith is Professor of International Relations at the University of
Warwick, UK, and currently on research leave as Senior Academic
Programme Officer, Peace and Governance programme, United Nations
University, Tokyo.