BEIJING // Details revealing mistakes surrounding the recent missile launch by North Korea have been leaked to the media, highlighting the powerful presence of Seoul's intelligence operations in the communist country.
In a revealing sign of how much the National Intelligence Service, South Korea's spy agency, knows about what is going on inside its rival, JoongAng Ilbo, a major daily in South Korea, reported on the circumstances around the rocket launch. The report said the ship sent by North Korea to retrieve its rocket debris broke down halfway into the journey, while its monitoring team lost track of its rocket, thereby creating confusion and dampening the initial excitement over the launch.
"Even though North Korea launched a rocket, the Pyongyang authorities fell into disarray with the reason not wholly due to the [subsequent] failure of the rocket to enter the orbit," the newspaper cited a "key intelligence official" as saying. It said the problems started in February when Pyongyang revealed it was preparing to launch a communications satellite. Soon a series of technical glitches ensued in the run-up to the launch date, making the North Korean authorities worried about the possibility of failure.
Despite the technical ill-preparedness, the North Korean scientists had to meet the deadline in April, ahead of yesterday's opening of the Supreme People's Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament in North Korea. Yesterday Kim Jong Il, the North's leader, was reappointed head of the nation's most powerful National Defence Commission. The widely expected event reaffirms his grip on the nation amid speculations over his ailing health.
North Korea staged a 100,000-strong rally praising his leadership in conjunction with the "success" of the satellite launch. But the US, South Korea and Japan see it as a failure. And South Korean intelligence agencies saw the signs of failure coming well in advance. Before Pyongyang launched its rocket, the North came up with an idea of how to retrieve the rocket debris. The initial plan was to send two military vessels with engineers on board to the areas where the remains were likely to fall.
But the authorities feared a possible hostile reaction from Japan for dispatching military vessels near the Japanese territory. So as a "safe measure", Pyongyang instead sent two commercial freighters, one to the Sea of Japan, east of the launch site at Musudan-ri in the country's north-east, and the other to the Pacific Ocean, 3,600km from the launch site. The first vessel was in place as scheduled, but the second commercial ship broke down halfway to its destination. "The North Koreans became greatly flustered and tried to place the failure on to others, while the South's intelligence officials, who were on the snooping, were basking themselves in irrepressible laughter," the newspaper quoted the intelligence official as saying.
In terms of tracking down the rocket, North Korea lacked the radar technology to trace it and was unable to identify the trajectory of the second and third sections of the rocket. With its rocket missing, the newspaper said North Korea fell into a flurry of confusion and had to rely on news reports from its adversaries - the US, South Korea, and Japan - to obtain the relevant information. In another episode, after its rocket preparation was exposed by the international media, North Korea stepped up its security around the launch site by dispatching fighter jets and destroyers, according to a testimony given to a South Korean parliamentary committee by Brig Gen Hwang Ui-don. But a MiG-21 fighter that was supposed to protect the launch site crashed due to mechanical problems.
The tension escalated when Japan announced that it would shoot down the rocket in case it fell in its territory. The newspaper did not say how the spy agency obtained all this "inside" information in North Korea. Seoul is known to have a vast network of intelligence agents throughout North Korea. When two US journalists were recently detained by North Korea's border patrol, the US requested help from South Korea to track down the pair. Seoul's intelligence agency went into a "full operation" and was soon able to tell its US counterpart in great detail about the whereabouts of the journalists, including a timeline of the incident and how they were interrogated by the North, according to South Korean news reports.
Chinese media recently reported that a large number of South Korea's agents work inside China, particularly near the China-North Korean border area, to collect information on North Korea. Some analysts believe the South Korean spy agency's leaks to its media on the launch were meant to demoralise the North Korean leadership. slee@thenational.ae