[imText1]On the 5th, the Chosun Central News Agency relayed that North Korea’s National Security Agency (NSA) had detained North Korean civilians and foreign spies for collecting information regarding important military facilities inside North Korea.
The National Security Agency, like South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, is a bureau which deals with information-related work domestically. In order to preserve the hereditary dictatorship of the Kim Il Sung patriarchy, the agency monitors the civilians’ lives and movements and is in charge of investigating defamatory incidents regarding the Kim father and son and tracking down anti-regime crimes.
The NSA is also responsible for managing political prison camps holding arrested political prisoners. Simultaneously, it is in charge of the maintenance of the border patrol and immigration control, carries out political maneuvering toward foreign countries, gathers information about other countries, and intercepts foreign spies and their activities within North Korea.
The NSA commemorates November 19, 1945 as the anniversary of the founding of the NSA, the day Kim Il Sung himself visited the “Security Staff Training Center” in Nampo, South Pyongyang.
However, in South Korea, it is known to have started out as the Security Bureau of North Korean People’s Committee’s in February 1947, immediately after the August 15th independence day.
The NSA, along with the regime’s establishment, was transferred from the Special Information Unit under the Ministry of Homeland Affairs to the Political Security Bureau, and then was absorbed under the Ministry of Public Security (the Police), which was established in 1951. In October of 1952, it was transferred to the Ministry of Home Affairs once again and was reinstated into the Ministry of Public Security in October 1962. The NSA belonged to the Social Safety Agency until 1973.
Subsequently, according to the order of Kim Il Sung in May 1973, a period for unofficially deciding the successor of Kim Jong Il, the section regarding political security, under the auspices of the Societal Security Agency, was divided and was transformed into the National Political Security Agency.
Afterwards, the first Director of NSA, Kim Byung Ha was executed for punishing an ambiguous crowd and for breaking off the Party and the masses by reigning over the Party. In 1982, it suffered the humiliation of being demoted to the National Security Agency with the elimination of its “Political” title.
It was promoted again as the now National Security Agency in 1993. It is said that the NSA was promoted as the National Security Agency after its 45th anniversary in 1990.
The NSA, while dubbed the Political Security Bureau at the Ministry of Public Security from 1862 to 1973, has led political maneuvering against the South and tracked down and rounded up anti-regime activists.
The NSA purged the main branch of its so-called anti-Party and anti-revolution family, including the Cabinet’s Vice-Premier Park Geum Cheol, the former Women’s Union Chairwoman Park Jung Ae, Kim Chang Bong, the former minister of the People’s Armed Forces, and others between 1967~68. Up until 1970, approximately 6,000 people were punished, including Kim Il Sung’s political opponents and the hostile class. Close to 70,000 political prisoners were confined in prison camps and were monitored.
The National Political Security Agency was founded as an independent information organization and until the early 1980s, directly dealt with reactionary elements as well as events that threatened the stability of the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il regimes.
The NSA’s chief responsibility is maintaining the Kim Il Sung and Jong Il regimes and ensuring the highest level of security for its leaders.
The officials closest to the Kim father and son are the Escort Bureau’s Royal Guards consisting of 3 battalions and the National Security Agency’s 5th Bureau (also dubbed the “event bureau”), which is in charge of tracking down domestic terrorists during provincial inspections.
Anti-South Korean operations are undertaken by the United Front Department’s “No.3 Office Building,” which encompasses the Bureau of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, the Operation Bureau and the No. 35 Department (the Foreign Information Investigative Bureau).”
Accordingly, the NSA has chosen people with dissatisfactions against the regime and those rebelling against the system as at-risk targets and intensively observes them. Thus, the agency announced the foreign spy incident on the 5th as an event “threatening the Communist Regime”
Currently in North Korea, with the Worker’s Party in decline, role of the National Security Agency as protector of the Kim Jong Il regime has been heightened
