In this podcast we discuss how Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) can be used to get a better understanding of North Korea and the challenges of gathering OSINT in a closed environment. 


Welcome to the World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defence Intelligence Community.

Now on to the episode with your host, Harry Kemsley.

Hello and welcome to this edition of Jane's World of Intelligence.

As usual, your host, Harry Kemsley and my co-host, Sean Corbett.

So in recent podcast, Sean, we've had a range of different topics, a range of different things to talk about.

1 of the things that's come up previously that I'd like to revisit today is, how does the open-source environment help and work in more closed environments.

And there's little more closed in the world than the North Korean environment.

And I'm delighted this morning to introduce the listener to Christina Vareal.

Christina Vareal is Senior Analyst on the Northeast Asia Country Intelligence Team.

Before joining Jane's in April 2022, Christina spent 6 years in the proliferation and the nuclear policy team at the Roussea Think Tank, culminating in a short period as acting director.

Prior to Rusi, she worked with the International Centre for Security Analysis at the Policy Institute, Ings College, London.

Her work primarily focuses on researching and analysing North Korea's domestic security and stability, the country's WMD programs, foreign relationships, and the implications for security.

So, Christina, clearly with that background, there's a lot we could speak about with regard to North Korea.

As I said in my introduction, what I'm really keen to look at is how does the open source environment work in such a closed environment as the North Koreans?

Perhaps you get us started for the listener, just to give us a quick resume of what's going on in North Korea right now that's of interest and that you've learned from open sources?

So North Korea at the moment is in a really, really interesting situation.

And I'm not just saying that as somebody that follows it closely.

I think there's a lot going on in the country that is likely to have impacts on the region and potentially globally as well in the coming years and months.

At the start of 2020, North Korea took the decision to fully close all of its land, sea and air borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which stopped pretty much all trade for a significant period of time.

We have seen maritime trade return, but in terms of land borders and air borders, they're almost still completely closed.

There's been 1 exception of the border reopening to allow the new Chinese ambassador to Pyongyang to enter the country.

But aside from that, there's been no movement of people coming in or out, which has quite a significant impact on the country.

So we're not just talking about diplomats, North Korean diplomats that aren't able to return.

We're talking about significant foodstuff imports, fertilizer imports.

Even illicit trade has been impacted by these closures.

So we don't think of North Korea as a country that has vast economic relations around the world, but it does rely on its illicit networks to access revenue generation and important resources to keep the country alive quite simplistically.

And the impact that the border closure has had is all of that has stopped.

And that's going to have some really negative consequences for the country.

Like I said, food security situation is probably quite precarious right now.

But the impact that that's had on our ability to assess the country in open sources has also been quite stark.

The border closure not only impacted trade, but has resulted in on the ground reporting also, also coming to an end.

So Embassies in North Korea have to close.

So the UK embassy, for example, the Swedish embassy, they are no longer operating and open.

UN aid workers that were on the ground in North Korea have also had to withdraw.

They've not been in the country since about, I think March or May 2021.

So that means we're not getting those more accurate insights as to what's going in, what's happening on the ground.

And the reports that we've got from organizations like the UN have now diminishing value because they've not been produced in the last few years.

And I think the direction we see North Korea going in and some of its narratives and its control over retaining some of the measures that were put in place following COVID, suggests that actually we're maybe not going to get access to those types of reports and information again anytime soon.

So when we're thinking about the current ability, our current ability to look at what's going on domestically in North Korea, there is definitely a current challenge in what resources and information we have available.

That said, it's definitely not all doom and gloom that we do have resources and information that we can access that help our understanding and assessments of that picture.

Maybe we could come to, sorry Christine, maybe we can come to the how you do what you do in this stark environment in just a second.

But Sean, I just want to underscore the importance of this conversation.

Given your background, it's very clear that North Korea has been and remains a country of great importance to global politics, global security situations.

Of course, many eyes have been focused on other parts of the world, not least Ukraine, arguably China and so on, and the power struggle going on with the US.

Maybe North Korea, to some extent, to some extent, has fallen off some people's radars.

From your background, Sean, just give us your own assessment of how important it is that we do get insight into what's happening in China, into Korea, sorry, given just how important that is.

Yeah, so as you know, Harry, it's 1 of the, what we call the primary 4 plus 1 priorities for definitely the 5 eyes, particularly the US actually.

So as I said, the 4 plus 1 is China, Russia, DPRK, Iran, and then the counter-terrorist challenge.

But as you will all know, the focus on China right now is huge in the US and the focus on Russia as well, for obvious reasons.

So DPRK, I mean, I've been looking at DPRK since 1989 in the intelligence community, and it has always been a real challenge.

Now, the problem is that it's about the intent.

Understanding what it is they're really trying to do is really important.

And we're not necessarily there yet because it's such a closed and difficult intelligence target.

You know, and probably the answer is yes, but it's yes, but you know, you don't develop intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear capability just to protect your regime, or do you?

But for me, it's survival of the regime and all of the above as well.

So yes, it's really important and it's probably not getting the attention that necessarily it would deserve always because of the distractions of what else is happening in the world.

If open source were to be a service to the IC, the intelligence community, from what Randy Nixon was saying to us recently in that podcast we had with him, it would be in a complimentary way where we would provide insight, perhaps on the flanks where agencies were less able to spend resource because they were so focused on a really high priority issue, or indeed it would be in terms of indicators and warnings.

And just to pick up on that point you made there, Sean, about intent, I don't want to go straight to intent, Christina, because that's a big topic in itself.

I want to go back to the question I was asking earlier, but we're going to get to intent eventually, because that's ultimately the indicator that what we might need to understand where this is all going.

Why are they testing 70 missiles and so on?

But let's go back to the question in mind from before.

Given that it was already closed, that has become more and more difficult, your word was stark.

So know that you are producing monthly reports on what's happening in Korea, which are being used by a range of different customers in a range of different ways.

How are you getting those insights that you need from the open source environment?

So my first port of call when trying to understand and assess what's going on in North Korea is always state media.

There is a variety of state media outlets that we can look at, all with slightly different intentions, some more geared towards international audiences, policy makers in different capitals, some related to the domestic audience in North Korea, others related to trying to influence and persuade, maybe not at the government level, but at the sub-government level around the world, influence and persuade people to be sympathetic to North Korea's aims to support the regime.

So looking across the spectrum of the content North Korea puts out there is incredibly valuable.

There is a lot of that available online that we can access.

We have to understand that the content North Korea puts online that we can access is there because they've chosen to put it there.

But it's also very, very highly controlled and crafted.

So that actually gives us a really good insight into what message they want us to be reading.

That doesn't mean we should take that message at face value,

that means that we can understand that that message is being put out there for a reason.

And it can help us understand, give us a starting point to understand why they might want us to be consuming that narrative.

And once you start to do this over a period of time, and I think this is incredibly important when looking at North Korean state media, and it must be done over a period of time to look at the trend.

You can then monitor and see changes in narratives.

Is the person attributed to a particular statement the same?

Is it a person that is higher ranked within the leadership in the party?

Is it a person that's potentially lower ranked?

Is it a statement that's come from a party official or a government official?

And all of these things give us little clues as to what North Korea intends us to take away from those messages.

That said, what North Korea says and does does not happen in a vacuum.

And what North Korea says and does can sometimes also be 2 very different things.

So looking at other sources and the broader context is also imperative to understanding state media.

So for example, narratives that we've seen over the last 3 years now, 3 and a half years, should always be understood in the context of North Korea has its borders closed.

What's the relationship between China and the US, for example,

how is that implicating the US presence in the region, either directly or indirectly to the North Korean threat?

What narrative is that helping to underpin for the North Korean regime.

And again, then what North Korea puts out influences that context and influences those circumstances.

They kind of they should always be considered in a package.

We should never be considering these things separately.

The other thing that I will also look at is specialist news sites.

So for example, Daily NK, Radio Free Asia, they have access to sources within North Korea.

They can be incredibly insightful, but they can also pose challenges in that they are often anecdotal.

So the comments and the quotes that sometimes those sources have access to are reflective of an individual situation or, you know, a local situation.

They might not necessarily give access to the picture of the situation across the entire country.

And they don't always give access to good insights, those leadership structures.

The insight they can give is, you know, what's happening in those towns and those villages and how those people are perceiving their situation.

And that's really important and valuable.

But again, it must be understood in that context.

And then the final thing I wanted to kind of add to that information piece of the types of narrative sources that we look at would be defective reporting.

Again I think there is tremendous value in looking at defective reports.

Defective reports are incredibly valuable.

They do give us insight that we might not otherwise be able to access.

But again, defectors have left the country for a reason.

So we have to also understand their position within that context.

Defectors have also declined in number quite dramatically over the last 10-ish years.

Data I think from the Ministry of Unification in South Korea for

had only 67 defectors entering the country, entering South Korea.

And obviously we can put that in the context of COVID and those sorts of things, not just in North Korea, but also in the countries that North Koreans leaving the country would be experiencing.

But if we look at the trend prior to COVID, the decline was also well on its way.

The trend of people leaving North Korea, that number was declining prior to COVID.

So I think in 2019, South Korea reported just over a thousand North Koreans entering the country, which was down from about 2, 700 in

And you know, defectors, we have to understand that yeah, that information is very valuable.

It will likely continue to decline, especially as we see North Korea, I would say, very likely continue to retain some of their COVID-19 restrictions on the movement of people, the movement of trade coming in and out of the country, because of the benefit that's had for enhancing their social control within the country.

I would imagine that defectors will, the number of defectors will likely stay quite low in the coming years.

So quite a few different sources, despite the fact that the sources you previously had have somewhat gone away because of the COVID and the restrictions on that.

Sean, it sounds to me though, like the situation in North Korea is still somewhat impenetrable for us, particularly where we're getting less and less defectors.

It still feels a little bit like that's quite hard for us to see beyond inferences from state media, from third party news media around it and so on.

There's quite a lot to unpack there from what Christina was saying, but you're right.

And that's why we call it intelligence, not information because it is piecing together those, you've heard me say this before, pieces of jigsaw.

You don't know if it's the same jigsaw, it may not have any pictures on it, but you still got to put it together as much as you can.

But there's 2 pieces that really struck out for me in Christine's bit.

The first was the narrative in terms of understanding who the narrative is aimed at.

Is it an internal 1 to keep the population, you know, compliant, or is it external to message, you know, against us?

But I think if you flip that as well, is looking at what their reaction is to external stimuli, for example, you know, joint South Korean, Japanese and US exercises, and you're going to see a reaction.

And what that reaction is, will tell you quite a lot about whether it feels threatened, about whether it's feeling belligerent, or, you know, it is, what sort of state that the mind is in.

But going back to the sources, this is a classic case with DPRK that you need every single source you possibly can to try and understand it as much as you can and that includes in the open source domain.

So for example you know we've always we've always used imagery quite quite heavily with North Korea because you can actually see stuff.

Now, that's not to say, I mean, they are incredibly surveillance aware and they know when satellites is passing, et cetera, et cetera, but there's only so much you can do.

So for example, for reasons I won't go into, I was quite looking at the border, the northern border crossing between, and excuse my pronunciation, but Sinuiju and Dandong, which is a really major road crossing point between North Korea and China.

Now, in recent years, as Christina said, the huge amounts of trucks used to go to and fro, just have stopped because of COVID and other things.

Now, that indicates very much now, obviously, North Korea is very heavily dependent on Chinese trade.

If that's not happening, how are they managing to, you know, sustain themselves?

So imagery is 1 side, but the whole messaging and the narrative, I think, is another piece that is really important to get into.

And as Christina said, You know, we can't ignore the defector reports.

Now, there's a real gotcha, and you know that I have healthy skepticism with some of the humans, because human is just about what an individual either thinks or wants to message.

Now, by definition, as Christina said, people that come across clearly want to because they want to get away for it.

So they're going to have a negative perspective.

That's not to say they're wrong, but they all and I love the way Christina put it.

You know, it's it's about the individual and how they think of what they think.

Let me just pick up on that point there, Christina, with you, because you mentioned it and Sean's just sort of underscored it for me.

You talked about, let's use the state media as the focus for this question.

In the state media, we're reading and listening to what they're saying.

And through that, you're telling me that you can detect because of who's saying it or exactly how they're saying it, the words they're using, the lexicon, what the message is for the audience that you believe it's intended for.

That doesn't strike me as a trivial thing to be able to do.

That feels like 1 of those things that takes a long time to really get underneath.

That's not something you could pick up tomorrow and start to think about.

It's 1 of those things that strikes me as being a long term endeavour.

I think, as I mentioned before, it's understanding and developing a picture of the trend as well.

I think it would be incredibly difficult to, for the first time, open North Korean state media, read an article and make an assessment on what their thinking is, what their intent is, based on reading just 1 article.

The trend and monitoring the narratives and the language is so important for understanding those shifts, or potentially lack of shifts.

It's not always just about the specific content of individual articles, but as a collective, the particular topics that state media also wants to be talking about.

So for example, in 2016, There was a good number of articles related to North Korea and China's engagement.

So talking about sports teams, you know, visiting and exchanging musical troops, visiting each country and having exchanges.

Then all that disappeared around the time when China supported additional UN security councils following North Korea's nuclear missile tests.

We obviously cannot reach hard conclusions,

you can take that change and you can say, okay, well, what's the circumstance in which this change has occurred?

We can look to the international context and say well this is potentially 1 factor and then you can look for other pieces of evidence that might suggest that the relationship between North Korea and China has changed.

So it's about the trends in the actual written words, but also the trends in the topics as well.

You know, we can see that with, for example, at the moment, a lot of the content in state media is referring to managing agriculture in the country and developing agriculture, responding to extreme weather events, preparing the country for extreme weather events.

That's not necessarily unusual for this time of year, but it demonstrates that actually there's an awareness that this is an issue for the country and that they want to be talking about it and publishing it in state media.

And that has maybe outbalanced in the last month or so content related to military tensions with the US and South Korea.

But Again, it's about identifying those patterns and those trends so we can really understand any minor changes, identify them early so we're then monitoring them and tracking them and understanding whether or not they're an anomaly or they're about to become a new pattern as well.

Yeah, I think that's really the point for me, really well described by Christina, Sean, and in the fact that I don't doubt that our agencies are all around the world in the Western world looking very intently at what's going on and making their own assessments.

But I know this is not a one-person sport.

There is lots and lots of interpretations that could be going on.

And that blend of what Christina is describing with her team and how they're interpreting the nuances that might be available to us.

And I particularly like that connection you've made there, Christina, between outside events and then reading the reactions and trying to see those connections.

Again, that's, Sean, that's not something that happens quickly.

That's something you can only begin to understand over a long period of time.

And I think there was a complementarity, is there not, Sean, between what Christina is doing from open sources and what others might be doing from more exquisite sources?

And of course there are 2 other elements to this.

So, you know, the West have a, you know, much as we try to get inside the cultures of other countries and regions, you know, we're not that close.

So getting the South Korean perspective, getting the Japanese perspective, and even to an extent the Chinese perspective as well, because, you know, they are, obviously, they feel quite close to DPRK in some ways, but they feel obligated to support them.

But they're not necessarily their best friends because, you know, if the worst ever happened and there was a conflict between North and South Korea, the first thing that would happen, there would be probably millions of refugees heading North into China.

So looking at their state media and what they're saying about North Korea, I think is important as well.

And just while I'm on the regional perspective, 1 of the really powerful pieces for open source intelligence with this particular target North Korea is the way it facilitates intelligence sharing.

Because each of the nations involved, without going into detail, have been involved in negotiations between some of the countries that are very interested.

They don't necessarily have any or they don't or didn't have strong intelligence sharing treaties and arrangements with each other at this very highly classified level as a collective.

But if you can use open source intelligence to say, right, and then give everybody a consistent and coherent view on what's happening, that is as close to what they think in exquisite sources as possible.

That really is powerful in facilitating a strong discussion.

And I know because I've been involved in those discussions.

Yeah, we've seen that happen with Sean in other conversations.

Look at what's happened around Ukraine, where non-traditional allies are in desperate need of intelligence support from some of the more capable intelligence countries around the world, and indeed are getting it, but often by use of open source content such as that which James produces and reports.

It's that it is shareable, it is usable in a sense that is much, much easier to do than we're finding from classified sources.

So Christina, because time is always going to evaporate on us, I'm going to pivot us round to a point we made earlier in terms of intent.

Sean described intent as being alongside capability as a way of deciding how much threat there really is from activities we're seeing.

So help us understand how intent of a regime such as we see in North Korea, can be understood by open sources?

You've talked a little bit about state media and how we might interpret that, but how else could we look at that specific question of what is in the mind, what are they really trying to do in North Korea from open sources?

My starting point would always be the state media outlets and content.

But then I think comparing and contrasting that with something that Sean mentioned earlier, actually in satellite imagery, does the action match the words?

Taking an example of the nuclear program, for example, the North Koreans might state that they are looking to, or you know, in

they could state in a press conference with Trump that they were looking to commit to suspending some activity with their nuclear program, which can then lead to some people interpreting that as being a cessation of all activities across the nuclear program.

But then you can look at satellite imagery and see some of the nuclear facilities still in operation.

And so that suggests that the intent of actually rolling back or limiting their nuclear capability was maybe not as it was portrayed in the narrative.

So I think that's really, that's really important.

I think on intent, the other thing that I think is worth, is worth saying is that intentions are not static, they change.

And so although Sean mentioned the kind of the long term intention of maintaining the regime, maintaining the Kim family's dynasty and their power, and not necessarily changing the internal bureaucratic and leadership structures of the country.

The intention of what North Korea is hoping to achieve is going to change with long-term and short-term goals.

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Using OSINT to understand the closed environment of North Korea