There’s no doubt that North Korea has led the way in turning organized crime toward state ends. Its infamous Bureau 39 is essentially the government’s mafia office, dedicated to generating resources by illegal means to support the state (especially its nuclear program) and keep the Kims in imported luxuries. It arranges for methamphetamines to be brewed inside government chemical works, the state mint helps produce some of the highest-quality counterfeit bank notes in the world, and the state-owned Korea National Insurance Corp. (KNIC) runs systematic insurance frauds abroad.
Thae Yong-ho, a former diplomat who was the highest-ranking defector in 20 years, claimed in 2017 that these schemes earn Pyongyang “tens of millions of dollars” annually. (In 2009, KNIC managers in Singapore reportedly sent then-leader Kim Jong Il $20 million in cash as a birthday present.) Turning to cybercrime has been a logical step. Cheap, potentially lucrative, and not relying on physical contact, cybercrime is the ideal operation for an impoverished and isolated pariah. Other states committed to challenging the international order are learning from Pyongyang’s example, though — if with a little more subtlety. Unlike the North Koreans, they are typically cutting deals with the underworld rather than simply moving into it themselves. Gangsters, after all, have all kinds of skills and capacities that can be of value to intelligence agencies and covert operations in the modern world, whether moving goods or people untraceably across borders, raising funds for political purposes, or simply putting a bullet into an inconvenient enemy of the state. [...]
Increasingly, though, states are turning to this on a more regular basis. The Turkish security forces have used rival heroin-smuggling gangs as weapons against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party to penetrate Turkish expatriate communities, for example. Chinese triads are being used by Beijing’s Public Security Bureau to intimidate protesters and gather intelligence abroad. And when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011, they used someone they thought was a Mexican drug cartel hit man. (He was actually an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.) [...]
But most of this state-sponsored organized crime is more low-profile. We are seeing more and more cases, especially in Europe, where local counterintelligence services believe gangsters are acting as occasional Russian assets. Some work on behalf of the Russia state willingly. In other cases, these criminals have been turned into assets without their knowledge, thinking they are simply doing a service for a Russian gang. And yet for others, they are made an offer they can’t refuse. In a recent report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, I call these “Russian-based organized crime” — whether ethnically Russian or not (because many are Georgians or the like), they are criminals with business or personal interests back in Russia, a fact the Kremlin can use as leverage.
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