U.S. officials have confiscated North Korea’s second-largest cargo vessel in a crackdown on the smuggling operations that finance the regime’s nuclear weapons program, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
“This sanctions-busting ship is now out of service,” John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, told reporters Thursday afternoon. “Forfeiting the ship will deprive the North Korean regime of a significant means by which it has evaded sanctions and funded itself.”
The seizure is an unprecedented attempt to enforce international sanctions on North Korea as part of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to induce dictator Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear weapons arsenal. The ship, known as the Wise Honest, was used to deliver coal shipments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to foreign buyers, and then return to North Korea loaded with heavy machinery.
“With this seizure, we have significantly disrupted that cycle,” Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney handling the case, told reporters.
The Wise Honest was detained by Indonesian officials in April of 2018, as U.S. and North Korean officials were preparing for Trump and Kim’s Singapore summit, the first face-to-face meeting between an American president and a North Korean dictator. U.S. officials obtained a sealed warrant to confiscate the ship in July, just weeks after the two leaders met for the first time. They filed a complaint “seeking forfeiture” of the ship earlier Thursday, on the same day that North Korea tested a pair of short-range missiles, in the latest sign of tension amid stalled talks over the denuclearization of the regime.
“The United States has certainly been tracking the Wise Honest, and others, and may have been waiting for it to be in the right location or the right time to have the best political effect,” David Maxwell, a retired Army special forces colonel who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said after the court documents were released. “It takes considerable intelligence work and the right assets in the right location to make a seizure like this.”
The court documents call attention to lax enforcement of sanctions by Russia and China. Federal officials allege that the regime would send the ship “through one safe port in Russia” before delivering the cargo to a buyer in a different city, in order to obscure the origin of the coal. The complaint also alleges that the Wise Honest was loaded with heavy machinery at a Chinese port.
“We hope this investigation demonstrates to everyone that, working with our law enforcement and intelligence partners around the world, the FBI has the ability to interdict illicit activity globally,” William Sweeney, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said during a press call on the case.
The Wise Honest is owned by a company “controlled by North Korea’s army,” Berman noted. The case could lead to an unusual legal battle with North Korea, which has 60 days to protest the Justice Department’s seizure of the vessel.
“This can be contested by North Korea in the Southern District of New York,” Berman said, although Justice Department officials don’t know if the regime will do so.
U.S. intentions toward other smuggling vessels are clear, though. “If we have the opportunity, yes this would be the first of more [seizures],” Demers said.
