North Korea’s Ministry of State Security has recently issued to its regional branches emergency orders that correspond to a quasi-state of war. The orders suggest a measure aimed at responding to the US-ROK Combined Command Post Training for nine days that began on Monday.
According to a Daily NK source in Yanggang Province on Wednesday, the provincial branch of the Ministry of State Security received an emergency order from the ministry’s national headquarters on Sunday. The order called on ministry personnel to adopt a combat posture corresponding to a quasi-state of war. Ministry of State Security offices in the province have been responding with 10 days of 24-hour, day and night drills assuming a quasi-state of war.
In particular, the source said provincial bodies of the Ministry of State Security have tightened surveillance of targets in accordance with directives from above, as well as of people living near military bases.
According to materials obtained by Daily NK, the details of the ministry’s order are as follows:
- Find and arrest all enemy spies and impure and hostile elements that could discover our (North Korea’s) secrets and disrupt rear area operations.
- Have local strategic military bases and other units in particular areas of responsibility use all informants to select people who frequent the area and ferret out people collaborating with enemy spies.
- Have informants and mass surveillance networks keep an eye on anything unusual in regions, points or places where spies could enter, escape or parachute in.
- Establish security measures to suppress all behavior that could hinder military activities by controlling all secret paths across the border and executing security activities in the surrounding areas.
With the US-South Korean exercise underway, the Ministry of State Security is apparently focusing even more on its original mission of watching over ideologically suspicious individuals.
The source said the Ministry of State Security usually holds corresponding drills three to seven days before military exercises in South Korea. He said he believed the current drill order was issued along the same lines.
The source added that the order has a “hidden intention”; namely, faced with a grave internal situation in the face of food shortages, the authorities are using the tense atmosphere generated externally to strongly clamp down on their own people.
Meanwhile, local ministry officials are reportedly complaining about having to spend 10 days in their offices or bunkers, unable to return home at all.
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