Here’s the article.And whether or not they did, do you think it’s a good idea?
Certainly the CIA has attempted to kill heads of state before. Castro comes to mind(though I’m not sure how reliable all the accusations from books cited in article are). And they’ve failed before. Castro comes to mind. But did they in this case?
Assassinating Kim - how good an idea is it? Presumably, the government is privy to all sorts of data about NK that I don’t know, but it seems a risky move to assassinate him unless you have someone prepared to step in to fill the power vacuum. Especially with a nuclear-capable state. Though this article indicates a slow-acting method, so that gives wiggle room. The government of NK has a history of making unfounded claims, as I understand it. So I’m not sure what I think. I absolutely think the government of the US (and SK) would do such things, if they thought it the best course. But I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate they actually did this time. Wish I knew more about the actual method of the alleged attempt - at least then I could judge whether I thought it intelligent or stupid.
Sure, why not? Take him out and the top hierarchy. Turn the internet on for the populace. Tell them that their brothers to the South are in charge now, and leave.
I don’t think we did. What’s more likely - that some high-level official in the US is ignoring long-standing policy, jeopardizing himself and the US international reputation, or that Kim Jong Un is making shit up?
Considering that they just used a nerve agent on his half-brother, I would not be at all surprised to find out that his own people attempted to kill him with the same stuff.
Full text of allegation at this link (names removed). I really hate the bombastic way everything NK releases is written. It’s annoying to read and it makes it way to easy to not take them seriously, even when I should.
If the CIA is that incompetent, I wouldn’t worry about them killing anybody. Although they were given credit for killing Guzman in Guatemala, and were clearly instrumental, if peripherally, in the unfortunate demise of Allende in Chile. Otherwise, I can’t think of anybody important the CIA has actually killed, no matter how zealously they tried.
They always try to kill the wrong people, and actually worked to protect the lives of really bad people like Mobutu and Marcos.
I knew a guy named Mike Kim, and he spelled his name backwards, so people wouldn’t think he was related to the dictator.
Considering that the IRS has a contingency plan for collecting taxes in the aftermath of a nuclear war, I would assume the CIA has numerous plans to assassinate people along with many other not-very-nice methods of assuring state security and defense stored somewhere (hopefully not in a low-security database). I sincerely hope they will never be given authorization to use such plans.
My default assumption is not to believe anything they say.
There are a lot of difficult moving parts here. Even assuming that the Russians permit the CIA to be active in their far east and to pursue a plot to destabilize the DPRK, it would seem difficult to get close enough to any particular worker not just to slip him a satellite phone and a large wad of cash but to assess whether he has the acumen to bribe his way back to Pyongyang with them. I further don’t know whether it’s plausible that this same worker would somehow get out to China for the next meeting.
Finally, even if the above gets accomplished, and the CIA has an asset informing on what he sees in daily life in Pyongyang, I don’t see why the CIA would think that this laborer might reasonably have any opportunity to get close enough to Kim Jong-Un to use a biochemical or radioactive agent on him.
According to the Bourne series of documetaries, the CIA is nothing but a cascade of progressively more complex covert death squad programs using highly trained, genetically modified supersoldiers to eliminate threats to national security and kill journalists in the middle of Waterloo Station, run without formal authorization or acknowledgement by a succession of senior agents or directors who are more weathered as they go on, culimating in the King of Weary Grizzled Jadedness, Tommy Lee Jones. So, in the Bourne universe, definitely.
In our world where the CIA is a giant, largely inept bureaucracy that seems mostly focused on covering up its intelligence and operational errors after bumbling the planned downfall of yet another regime unfriendly to the United States and her interestd, not so much.
However, if anybody would serve this world best by leaving it, Kim Jong-un is high on the list.
The CIA have killed lots of people. At least if we say they killed Allende, given that they only did that by proxy. They gave Suharto a list of suspected Communists to be killed, which they were. They had Lumumba killed. Obviously many less important people too. They ran the Phoenix programme, a particularly brutal death squad in Vietnam. They trained the Contras to specifically target civilians and soft targets.
As for protecting bad people, allegedly they recruited a young Saddam Hussein to kill Abdul Qasim, the then head of the Iraqi government, and then spirited him to safety in Beirut when the assassination attempt went horribly, horribly wrong.
So does anyone think them doing a mass launch of missiles at South Korea would be anything less than a total shit-show of exploding and off-course rockets?
They don’t need missiles to hit South Korea. Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea, as well as a number of US military bases. The missiles are for hitting targets further away - Japan, Guam, etc.
And if they launch a dozen missiles at Japan, I think there’s a good chance that one would make it. (Or possibly, make it close enough to get shot down by anti-missile missiles. I don’t know much about the capabilities of missile defense there.)