Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Sources in Seoul say that Kim Jong-il’s son Jong-un has taken full control of North Korea’s State Security Department. The department’s main duty is to keep track of dissidents. It has 50,000 agents. Separately, Chu Sang-song has been sacked as Minister of People’s Security following an incident in which students attacked founding father Kim Il Sung’s birth home.

The students had been dismissed for watching South Korean soap operas on USB memory sticks, and they felt particularly aggrieved to be singled out when virtually every other student had been doing the same. Since the incident in February, in which the students scrawled “Down with the Kim Dynasty” on the walls of Kim Il Sung’s home, a larger number of State Security Department and Ministry of People’s Security personnel have been assigned to the major universities for surveillance operations.

Other signs of a renewed crackdown in the light of the Mideast unrest include reports that Pyongyang has ordered institutions and households to register how many computers and portable storage devices such as USBs and MP3 players they own.

Mobile phone subscribers in North Korea jumped from 1,600 in 2008 to 300,000 last year according to North Korea’s Egyptian partner Orascom Telecom. South Korean intelligence sources say there are about 450,000 mobile phones in North Korea, although the figure could be higher given the number of people reportedly using Chinese cell phones in the border areas.