“평양이 70년을 기다려 온 그 말을, 서울과 워싱턴이 하고 있다” “The words Pyongyang has waited seventy years to hear — Seoul and Washington are now saying them.”

Ri Jong-ho, Former North Korean Senior Economic Official, Speaks from Washington

Interviewee Profile
Ri Jong-ho
Former Senior Economic Official, North Korea’s Office 39

Ri Jong-ho is a former senior North Korean economic official who served at the apex of the regime’s clandestine financial apparatus from 1993 until his defection in October 2014. North Korea’s Office 39 is the regime’s core institution for managing the Kim regime’s governing funds and hard-currency acquisition. Over two decades, Ri rose from president of the Daeheung Shipping Company to Executive Director & CEO of Daehung General Trading Company (vice-ministerial rank), Chairman of the Korea Kumgang Economic Development Group under the National Defense Commission (vice-ministerial rank), and finally Chief Representative of the Daeheung Trading Company’s Dalian, China branch. In 2002, he was awarded the “Labor Hero” medal — the highest honor conferred on a North Korean citizen. He defected in October 2014 and currently resides in the United States, where he is completing his memoirs.

[Editor’s Note: Mr. Ri’s statements are based on his personal experience and recollection. Certain accounts — particularly those relating to internal deliberations and closed sessions of the North Korean leadership — cannot be independently verified by third parties. The Korea Signal has confirmed the authenticity of his career and senior rank through available records; readers are encouraged to weigh individual assertions accordingly.]

EDITOR’S PROLOGUE

The strategic landscape surrounding the Korean Peninsula is shifting faster than at any point in recent memory. In the immediate aftermath of the May 2026 U.S.-China summit in Beijing, reports of an imminent Xi Jinping visit to Pyongyang have surfaced, prompting sharp debate in Washington over what, if anything, the United States may be prepared to concede on the nuclear question. At the same time, a number of prominent think tanks and media outlets have begun openly arguing that denuclearization should be abandoned in favor of arms control — accepting North Korea as a nuclear-armed state and managing the threat from there.

Seoul’s clock is equally urgent. President Lee Jae-myung has made the “recovery” of wartime operational control a top priority of his term, and the administration’s inaugural Unification White Paper, released in May 2026, officially frames the inter-Korean relationship as a “peaceful two-state relationship” — a formulation that, critics argue, effectively endorses Pyongyang’s own “hostile two-state” doctrine. Compounding these concerns, allegations persist that $8 million was illegally transferred to North Korea in 2019 during Mr. Lee Jae-myung’s tenure as Gyeonggi Province governor, raising the possibility of cracks in the U.S.-ROK sanctions front.

The Korea Signal met in Washington with Ri Jong-ho, who spent more than two decades at the core of North Korean’s Office 39 — the regime’s principal hard-currency apparatus — before defecting in October 2014. There are vanishingly few people in the world capable of testifying about the internal logic of the Kim regime at this level of direct experience. His written testimony is at once a historical document and an urgent policy warning.

Ri Jong-ho:

The diagnosis that thirty years of denuclearization diplomacy has failed is correct. But the cause is being misread. The failure was not a product of clumsy negotiation. It was a product of the fact that North Korea never intended to give up its nuclear weapons — not from the beginning.

I confirmed this directly. From 1993, I served as president of the Daeheung Shipping Company under Office 39. In the early-to-mid 1990s, Kim Jong-il issued the following directive to officials engaged in external affairs:

“Conduct diplomacy as if behind a fog, so that the enemy cannot see inside. Take everything they put on the table — but never show your hand, and secure only tangible gains.”

I received this guidance in person at a Central Party lecture in Pyongyang — a session where the leadership passed directives down to senior cadres. When the 1994 Agreed Framework was concluded, Kim Jong-il celebrated what he described as a triple victory. First, we have bought time to develop our nuclear weapons. Second, without leaving our seats, we have obtained two light-water reactors worth $4.6 billion. Third, we will receive 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil every year until the reactors are completed — plus sanctions relief and food aid. The agreement that Washington read as the beginning of denuclearization, Pyongyang celebrated as a simultaneous victory on nuclear development and economic extraction.

The deception was exposed in October 2002, when Assistant Secretary Kelly arrived in Pyongyang with evidence of a covert uranium enrichment program. First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju’s response was not denial but defiance: “We have every right to do this, and the urgent need.” All along, North Korea had been freezing its plutonium facilities as a performance while quietly advancing its uranium program in the background. The Agreed Framework collapsed. North Korea withdrew from the NPT. Those who now advocate arms control have forgotten the lessons of that failure and are walking, of their own accord, into the same trap.

There is a further reason why arms control is worse than a failed denuclearization policy. A state that has not implemented one percent of a denuclearization commitment will not implement an arms control regime. And even if it signs, in a country of countless tunnels and controlled movement, there is no way to verify what has been hidden. An arms control agreement is not “cold peace” — it is international recognition of North Korea’s nuclear status. While that agreement is being celebrated, North Korea will be working with Russia to develop more sophisticated weapons, and when that technology is sold to Iran and the broader Middle East, the consequences will be catastrophic far beyond the Korean Peninsula.

Yet the vulnerability Washington consistently overlooks is this: North Korea’s nuclear deterrent is tied to one man. Iran’s nuclear program is institutionalized within the Revolutionary Guards and its ideological framework — it would survive any change of leadership. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is bound to a single person’s will. Without a living Supreme Leader’s command, the system does not function. The legal provision stating that “if the Supreme Command comes under attack, nuclear strikes will be launched automatically” is less a description of actual capability than a warning: do not touch the leadership. I watched this system operate from the inside.

If Kim Jong-un disappears, the most probable scenario is not that his successor presses the nuclear button in his name — it is that the successor uses the arsenal as a bargaining chip to secure survival for himself and the elite. Venezuela showed us this path. When Maduro was arrested in January 2026, acting president Delcy Rodríguez initially denounced the action as “kidnapping” — then within days was cooperating with President Trump. Elites who had spent years vowing to resist Washington reversed course the moment their own survival was at stake. The strategy the United States must combine is threefold. First, make unmistakably clear — as it did in Caracas — that it will not tolerate an adversarial nuclear-armed leadership indefinitely. Second, offer Kim Jong-un’s successors genuine security guarantees and an economic off-ramp. Third, on that foundation, demand verifiable nuclear disarmament. Time is on Pyongyang’s side. Every moment spent debating arms control is a moment handed, in full, to Pyongyang.

Ri Jong-ho:

If Xi Jinping does visit Pyongyang, in my experience it is a double play aimed at two targets simultaneously.

The first target is Washington. The White House fact sheet from the summit confirms that both presidents reaffirmed a shared commitment to denuclearizing North Korea and agreed they could not recognize it as a nuclear-armed state. There was clearly substantial discussion at that meeting about how to handle a Pyongyang determined to cling to its weapons. Xi’s move to Pyongyang immediately afterward is a bid to extract real concessions on Taiwan and tariffs by playing the card: “We’ll handle Pyongyang.”

The roots of this card go back to the Korean War. When I was stationed in China, Chinese officials and citizens would say to me:

“The mountains and fields of North Korea are soaked with the blood and bones of hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers. If Chinese forces hadn’t entered that war in 1950, the North Korean regime would have been finished long ago. Never forget that debt.”

And yet, paradoxically, it was precisely that war that blocked China’s own deepest ambition. By pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into the Korean peninsula, China lost the opportunity it had within reach to “liberate” Taiwan. North Korea is simultaneously China’s greatest strategic lever and its most enduring strategic burden.

The second target is breaking the Moscow-Pyongyang axis. The North Korea–China relationship is currently cold — trade and exchanges have fallen sharply from their previous levels. Kim Jong-un, meanwhile, has dispatched more than twelve thousand troops to Russia along with weapons and artillery shells, personally signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty in June 2024,⁵ and publicly calls Putin his “closest comrade.” Beijing is acutely alarmed that this brazen pro-Russia posture is provoking an arms race among South Korea, the United States, and Japan and driving an anti-China alignment. Xi’s visit is an attempt to press Kim with the twin levers of economic lifeline and historical memory — “do not cross the line” — and to remind Pyongyang that hegemony in Northeast Asia still resides in Beijing.

But this pressure does not work well. I witnessed the reason firsthand. When Xi visited Seoul before Pyongyang in July 2014, Kim Jong-un unleashed a torrent of abuse — language I will not repeat here — and issued a direct order to sever all relations with China, including trade and diplomacy, and to reorient the country’s axis toward Russia. Today’s North Korea–Russia intimacy and anti-China distrust are the direct continuation of that moment. China’s decision to lead UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea in 2017 was further expression of the same mutual distrust — something that simply does not happen between genuine allies. Let me state the conclusion plainly: North Korea, China, and Russia are not a single bloc. Strip away the common anti-American front and there is no shared code between them. China cannot actually control Kim Jong-un, yet performs the role of Pyongyang’s handler for Washington’s benefit. The gap between that advertised influence and actual control — that is the lever the United States must exploit. Washington should use this structural fracture as a strategic asset, pressing China to return to the level of sanctions enforcement it led in 2017, layering on a maximum-pressure campaign of its own, and pairing it with a verifiable denuclearization roadmap. The crack in the North Korea–China relationship: that is where America’s path lies.

Q3

*On May 26, 2026, President Lee Jae-myung stated at a cabinet meeting that South Korea’s military ranks fifth in the world and that its annual defense budget far exceeds North Korea’s entire GDP, concluding that the country already possesses sufficient capacity to defend itself — and directed the Ministry of National Defense to proceed swiftly with the “recovery” of wartime operational control.*⁶ When the Defense Minister reported there would be “no significant problem” if OPCON were transferred the following day, President Lee corrected him: “The answer should be no problem at all.” He also rebuked the military leadership for what he called excessive dependence on foreign forces. You spent decades observing the North Korean leadership up close. How would the Kim regime receive these statements?

Ri Jong-ho:

I spent decades watching the North Korean leadership’s strategy toward the South. Let me be direct: a statement like this from a South Korean president is precisely the signal Pyongyang has spent seventy years waiting to hear.

There was one thing — and one thing only — that all three generations of the Kim family feared: the U.S. military stationed in South Korea. Nuclear carrier battle groups, strategic submarines, strategic bombers, stealth fighters, real-time satellite surveillance, and the hundreds of thousands of reinforcement troops that deploy automatically in a crisis. The withdrawal of U.S. forces has been the foundational objective of North Korean policy — domestically and externally — for decades, the linchpin of their unification strategy. And now a South Korean president is sending a signal that aligns, of his own accord, with that very strategy.

Let me speak plainly about the context behind this posture. During his presidential primary campaign, President Lee publicly stated that “pro-Japanese collaborators teamed up with the American occupation forces” following Korea’s liberation. Describing the United States as an “occupation force” rather than a liberating ally is language drawn directly from North Korean propaganda — the exact formulation Pyongyang has used in its southern psychological operations for decades. The background of his closest associates reinforces this context. The policies that emerge from this soil — Pyongyang’s strategists will have been the first to read where they lead.

The question of OPCON itself also needs to be set straight. South Korea’s wartime operational control was not seized by the United States. It was voluntarily transferred by President Syngman Rhee to the UN Command in the immediate days after the North Korean invasion of 1950 — because the survival of the nation depended on it. Nothing was taken; there is nothing to “recover.” The word “recovery” (환수) presupposes an act of dispossession that never occurred, and it is a formulation that strikes directly at American sensitivities.

The “fifth-ranked military in the world” argument is also dangerous logic. Against a nuclear-armed North Korea backed by nuclear great powers, conventional military rankings are a meaningless comparison from the outset. And that statement hands the Trump administration — already inclined to demand higher burden-sharing and redeploy forces to other theaters — a ready-made rationale: “If they say they can defend themselves, so much the better. No reason for us to spend blood and treasure. Redirect the troops.” Defense Secretary Hegseth has already signaled he welcomes an accelerated OPCON transfer. Washington and Pyongyang are running the same calculation simultaneously — that is the essence of the problem.

If the Combined Forces Command framework is actually dismantled and U.S. forces genuinely depart, the consequences will be severe. China will move to treat South Korea as an economic and political satellite. North Korea, in partnership with Russia, will watch for its moment to pursue forcible unification. Security instability means economic collapse: foreign capital flight and a collapsing won will devastate an export-dependent economy. I know better than almost anyone how welcome these words from Seoul must sound in Pyongyang. Peace is not preserved by declaration — it is preserved by balance of power. The decision over the alliance’s survival lies not in Seoul but in Washington. That Washington is now moving toward the exit — that is the picture Pyongyang has waited seventy years to see.

Ri Jong-ho:

Let me address the flow of funds first.

The $8 million went — without question — into Kim Jong-un’s personal slush fund. The vault managed by Office 39, or his Personal Secretariat directly. I worked inside that system for more than a decade. The procedure for approving a South Korean official’s visit to the North works like this: the United Front Department, which handles South Korean operations, reports upward to Kim Jong-un — “The Gyeonggi Province governor wants to visit; we propose to admit him in exchange for a fee.” That is where the framing of “visit costs” originates. Kim Jong-un must then personally authorize the visit. Without the Supreme Leader’s approval, not a single South Korean official of any standing sets foot on North Korean soil.

This practice was institutionalized around the time of the first inter-Korean summit in 2000. Approximately $500 million was transferred to Pyongyang before that summit could take place.⁸ From that point, it became standing procedure. A North Korean official who admitted a senior South Korean figure without first collecting payment would lose his head. That is how the system operates.

Now to the question of policy autonomy. Let me be precise about what is established and what is not. The illegal transfer of $8 million to North Korea has been established as fact by the Supreme Court of Korea in the conviction of former Vice Governor Lee Hwa-young. President Lee Jae-myung has been identified by prosecutors as the alleged final authorizer and has been indicted; his trial is currently suspended. No judicial finding has been made against President Lee personally, and I will not pre-judge an outcome the courts have not yet delivered.

But let me speak structurally. A leader who carries credible, unresolved allegations of having facilitated illegal financial transfers to an adversary government operates under an inherent vulnerability: that government holds the power, at any moment of its choosing, to expose the full details of the transaction. If Kim Jong-un or Kim Yo-jong were to publicly reveal the internal details of this arrangement, the sitting president would find it very difficult to hold his position. That is the structural trap I am describing.

This is not speculation. The evidence is in the policy record. In May 2026, the Lee administration’s inaugural Unification White Paper formally declared that the inter-Korean relationship should be redefined as a “peaceful two-state relationship oriented toward unification.” The government argues this is distinct from Pyongyang’s “hostile two-state” doctrine and does not violate the Constitution. In my assessment, it is the South Korean government adopting and executing the very frame Pyongyang constructed — and it contradicts the spirit of peaceful unification as mandated by the Constitution. President Lee has not once, since taking office, publicly criticized North Korea’s hostile two-state declaration. Taken together, these facts support the judgment that this administration is being pulled along by North Korea’s implicit pressure.

On OFAC sanctions: the illegal provision of dollar funds to the North Korean regime satisfies, in principle, the threshold for the U.S. Treasury to examine potential independent sanctions — regardless of how senior the individual involved. Even if sanctions were imposed against President Lee personally, that would constitute holding the individual who allegedly authorized and directed the illegal transfer to account. It would not be directed at the Republic of Korea as a state, or at the alliance. In fact, the moment the same legal principles are applied equally to the leaders of allied nations, China and Russia lose their basis for contesting the legitimacy of North Korea sanctions — and the foundation of the U.S.-ROK alliance grows stronger, not weaker.

This matter is not a domestic South Korean controversy. It goes to the heart of the credibility of America’s North Korea sanctions architecture and the foundations of the alliance itself. An alliance’s credibility is sustained only when law and principle are applied consistently. No sitting president is above the law. That is the bedrock of liberal democracy.

EDITORIAL NOTE

This interview was conducted in Korean in written Q&A format in Washington, D.C., in May 2026. Mr. Ri’s responses have been lightly edited for clarity and concision; no substantive content has been altered. All matters relating to pending legal proceedings are reported as alleged, or as set forth in prosecutorial indictments; The Korea Signal takes no position on questions of individual legal culpability.

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