BY: Reuben F. Johnson
Kiev – Intelligence agents from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and China are making regular attempts to acquire design data from former Soviet ballistic missile design centers and other defense industrial enterprises in Ukraine and in other former USSR republics in an effort to extend the range of North Korea’s missiles.
Military sources told the Yonhap news agency in the neighboring southern Republic of Korea (ROK) that if North Korea had acquired the data two of its agents were attempting to buy from one Ukrainian defense plant, some of the current missiles in Pyongyang’s arsenal could see their range extended to the point where they could hit targets in the continental U.S.
The two intelligence agents from the DPRK, identified as Ryu Song-Chul and Lee Tae-Kil, were caught by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) in July 2011 after they met with a Ukrainian engineer employed at the Production Association Southern Machine-Building Plant—more commonly known as Yuzhmash—in the city of Dnepropetrovsk.
The engineer, who had tipped off the SBU in advance, passed the two agents files of design information with classified markings before the Ukrainian service stepped in to arrest them.
The arrests occurred last July, but it was only last week that a Ukrainian court tried and convicted the two agents, sentencing each of them to eight-year prison terms. Both agents intend to appeal their convictions.
Read the full story at The Washington Free Beacon