Counterintelligence

The current brinkmanship in East Asia - even if it is just diminishing due to special dates in the North Korean calendar - is a signal, how strong and urgent the domestic political struggle is going on: There are influential groups which are fighting for a place at the sun, at the Taedonggang Craft Brewery Bar in Pyongyang or in a VIP room in Macau. There are also informal networks which are helping to get a remittance inside and rocket engines outside - to name only a small part of the business. In other words: Society is changing - even in North Korea. The intelligence about it still seems to be poor, related to the stuff you can read or hear from Western intelligence agencies. I tried to describe a scenario where the old values of Juche are eroding and the new one change the system - hopefully: La voie nord-coréenne. Du Djoutché à la ploutocratie?, in: Courtois, Stéphane: Communisme 2013 - 1920-2012. Vietnam, de l'insurrection à la dictature, Paris 2013, pp. 411-420.

This is the title of a new paper I published in Jane´s Intelligence Review. For those who want to go deeper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%27s_Intelligence_Review or http://www.janes.com/products/janes/security/news/intelligence-review.aspx Short: "Over the course of 2012, police raids were carried out throughout Germany that highlighted the growing problem of non-state actors acquiring sophisticated counter-intelligence (CI) capabilities. Formerly the preserve of the state, counter-intelligence - defined as the totality of measures deployed by an organisation to prevent hostile intelligence collection efforts against it - has increasingly become a tool and a function of a range of illegal groups." In other words: It´s about the subject I analysed in my dissertation "Private Intelligence. Geheimdienstliche Aktivitäten nicht-staatlicher Akteure", which was published in 2011: http://www.amazon.com/Private-Intelligence-Geheimdienstliche-nicht-staatlich