A directive personally signed by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been issued to the Ministry of State Security regarding the reorganization of its ranks.
“The order to reorganize the Ministry of State Security’s ranks came after Kim received a direct report that a Workers’ Party Organization and Guidance Department inspection had found that ministry officials were granting privileges to trading companies and smugglers in return for bribes,” a Daily NK source in Pyongyang said recently.
The Ministry of State Security’s top missions are securing the North Korean system and ensuring the stability of the regime. As such, it wields great authority, watching everything the public does and ferreting out and punishing individuals who threaten the regime, including anti-regime figures, counterrevolutionary elements and spies.
However, as corruption has become widespread among state security officials—the so-called eyes and ears of the regime—people now mock the ministry for “having been felled by money” and “falling subordinate to capitalist tendencies.”
“Public perception of the ministry is shifting from being an entity to be feared to an organization with whom backdoor deals are possible for money,” the source said. “So, with Kim recently receiving a report of not only the corruption of Ministry of State Security officials but also this social atmosphere, he signed a powerful order to ‘securely reform the ranks with people armed with a firm revolutionary ideology.'”
According to the source, the order emphasized that officials should “once again take pride in regime stability alone, taking as their example the spirit of the first and second generation of state security officials of the past who quietly protected the regime, making virtues of simple purity and poverty.”
Ministry scrambles to restore credibility
In this case, “reforming the ranks” means not only a simple personnel shakeup but a full-scale renovation, involving the re-verification of personnel loyalty and ideological rearming. Accordingly, the Ministry of State Security is now in a state of emergency, with the ministry’s leadership carrying out sweeping internal inspections.
Inside the ministry, personnel have already begun intensifying struggle sessions, expanding self-criticism sessions and implementing “revolutionizing” measures, while officials are being quickly replaced or transferred.
“People are being replaced so quickly that it’s hard to determine who went where,” the source said.
“The latest incident is no mere case of corruption among state security officials; it demonstrates how marketizing trends across society have even penetrated the Ministry of State Security,” the source added. “The state says it will respond by re-verifying loyalty, but the ministry’s authority has already suffered great harm due to generational change and the power of money.”
Whether the Ministry of State Security can regain its authority as an impregnable fortress remains to be seen. All eyes are now on whether Kim’s order will be a solution that restores discipline within the ministry and contributes to regime security—or merely a signal flare revealing regime instability.
