
A secretive group trying to bring down North Korea’s regime - chatmasta
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-the-secretive-group-trying-to-bring-down-north-koreas-regime/ar-BB128HXF
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chadmeister
This sounds like propaganda looking to provoke NK leadership. No super secret
coup is having articles posted on msn about them...or you know they'd all be
dead...

~~~
api
Reminds me of a joke about conspiracy theories: "How do you know if a
conspiracy theorist is right?" "They haven't found the body."

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Mountain_Skies
Hope this goes better than the when there were unintended consequences from
the UK and the US overthrowing the government of Iran. Seems like every time
outsiders decide to topple some regime, something worse pops up in its place.
That might be hard to imagine with how terrible North Korea currently is, but
there are ways for it to be even worse.

~~~
maallooc
The case of North Korea will be very different from (insert middle
east/central american country here). It's surrounded with robust countries
like China, South Korea and Japan. There are so many interests that it's
impossible for a simple militia or a government of their own to hold a grasp.
They will go down and they will be absorbed by their neighbors. At least for
now.

~~~
Ididntdothis
South Korea should be worried about the cost of such a reunification. East
Germany was in much better shape than North Korea and the Germany
reunification still took a lot of money and time to do. Building up North
Korea will be very hard.

~~~
ses1984
Why is cost even an issue? The cost is nothing compared to all the suffering.

Building up North Korea isn't hard, living in North Korea is hard.

~~~
pmichaud
Look, I get that you mean that it's worth paying a high cost to stop all that
suffering, but the cost _not_ nothing.

The reason it's important to me to say so is that at some point, some actual
people with actual (limited) resources, will have to devise a plan to make it
all better, and then actually do the plan. That is a huge challenge that
involves trade offs and hard decisions. And if you start with magical
thinking, instead of extremely realistic reasoning, you're going to end up
hurting a lot of people.

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secfirstmd
One of the problem for groups working on NK issues is that SK heavily
penetrates them at the human and technical level in order to control and
mostly disrupt their operations. It goes in swings and roundabouts but SK is
at best ambivalent about these sort of operations. Especially as government
policy changes. It makes working on NK operations like this quite tricky.

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maallooc
How's Christopher Ahn's extradition trial going? Haven't seen any updates
since the bail.

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jamestimmins
Worth appreciating that the author casually referred to their Italian
operation as "the Italian job".

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andreig2191
"They acted with military efficiency, according to testimony from the seven
embassy staff members inside. Brandishing fake guns, they bound the wrists of
the North Koreans and placed bags over their heads."

Is there such a thing as reckless treason?

Also, this would be a wonderful movie!

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neonate
[https://archive.md/if0Lx](https://archive.md/if0Lx)

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Gunax
They wanted to play spy.

Hearts are in the right place, but I advise them to leave the ops to the
professionals.

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blago
Sounds like a front for some (US or foreign) alphabet soup agency.

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jshevek
How is this paywall bypassed? I've tried disabling scripts, reader view, and
archive.org.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200403225044/https://www.wsj.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200403225044/https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-
the-covert-group-threatening-to-bring-down-north-korea-11585923813)

Edit:

From the FAQ for HN:

> _Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do
so._

~~~
anonu
Pay for WSJ?

Or find it cross-published in some news aggregator:

[https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-the-secretive-
gr...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-the-secretive-group-trying-
to-bring-down-north-koreas-regime/ar-BB128HXF)

~~~
dang
We've changed to that URL from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-
covert-group-threate...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-covert-group-
threatening-to-bring-down-north-korea-11585923813). Thanks!

