The North Korean Ministry of State Security (MSS) has accused the CIA and the NIS (South Korea’s intelligence service) of conspiring in a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The attack was supposedly going to take place on 15 April using “a biochemical or radiological weapon”.
The MSS claims to have captured an agent who they refer to only by the name “Kim”. He is a North Korean who had previously worked as a lumberjack in the Khabarovsk region of Russia, but was most recently resident in Pyongyang. The MSS claims that he was recruited by the CIA in 2014. He was supposedly given $20,000 and a GPS device that he was to use during the attack. Interestingly they make no mention of finding an actual weapon.
They have named Cho Ki-chui as Kim’s NIS agent runner and said that they have been in contact with each other more than eighty times. The MSS also named Xu Guanghai, director general of import export company Qingdao NAZCA Trade Company Limited, as another South Korean agent allegedly involved in the plot.
The MSS has said that revenge operations against the “fanatic terrorists” of the CIA and NIS will be started “immediately”.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that the CIA would be plotting to assassinate Kim Jong Un at a time when talks between him and President Trump are apparently making some progress. However, the CIA and the NIS do run agents into North Korea and occasionally the MSS does manage to catch them. The MSS then tends to claim that it was all part of some great imperialist plot because that sounds a lot sexier than saying that they have simply picked up one or two routine agents.