North Korean Ex-Diplomat Says Blackmail Is Part of Regime’s Playbook

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Defector’s tale of asking $1 billion from Israel to halt missile sales to Iran holds lessons for U.S.

SEOUL—In a Stockholm cafe one winter’s day in 1999, North Korea’s ambassador to Sweden made a proposal to his Israeli counterpart, according to a former Pyongyang diplomat: Give North Korea $1 billion in cash and we will scrap our agreements to sell our missile technology to Iran and other enemies of Israel.

The Israelis refused, and days later offered food aid instead, according to the account. The talks ended without an agreement. Since then, North Korea has remained a steady supplier of conventional and ballistic weapons and nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Syria.

The account of the offer, in a 2018 memoir by the translator at the meeting, former senior North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho, shows how Pyongyang has tried to use the threat of weapons proliferation to shake down its adversaries for cash that could finance its nuclear and missile programs.

This is part of the mind-set that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his team faced as they sought specific denuclearization commitments from North Korean officials in talks on Friday and Saturday.

Over the weekend, North Korea accused the U.S. of violating the spirit of last month’s summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, by making “gangster-like” unilateral demands.

North Korea has consistently offered concessions in exchange for economic assistance, though it has failed to satisfactorily deliver.

Mr. Trump declared the North Korean threat to be over after he met Mr. Kim in Singapore and said Pyongyang would immediately begin dismantling its nuclear operations.

But North Korea has also been pushing ahead with weapons programs as it pursues dialogue with Washington, according to new satellite imagery.

The Israeli government declined to comment on the events outlined in the memoir by Mr. Thae, who defected to South Korea in 2016. Efforts to reach Israel’s ambassador to Sweden at the time of the cafe meeting, Gideon Ben Ami, and the North Korean envoy, Son Mu Sin, weren’t successful.

Mr. Ben Ami said in a television interview last week that he had three meetings with North Korean officials in 1999, but didn’t say whether Pyongyang had asked for $1 billion. Mr. Son, meanwhile, is now serving in the foreign ministry in Pyongyang, according to an official at the North Korean delegation to Unesco, where Mr. Son used to work.

Declassified State Department documents show that the U.S. and North Korea were holding talks over Pyongyang’s missile exports roughly around the time that Mr. Thae says he and his boss were in contact with Israeli officials.

In those discussions with the U.S., North Korea indicated it was ready to cease missile exports if economic benefits were forthcoming to make up for lost revenue, one of the documents says. U.S. diplomats encouraged the North Koreans “to understand that economic benefits came in many guises, including humanitarian assistance.”

North Korea has a history of selling dangerous technology, including helping Syria build a nuclear reactor, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel bombed the facility in 2007.

“Depending on the demand, we certainly cannot exclude the possibility that North Korea will sell its nuclear weapons for cash,” said Nam Sung-wook, a former South Korean intelligence official who teaches at Korea University.

The Kim regime has sold conventional and ballistic weapons to Iran since at least the early 1980s, said Bruce E. Bechtol Jr. , a professor of political science at Angelo State University and expert on Pyongyang’s military proliferation in the Middle East.

North Korea’s military sales in the Middle East and Africa “are directly related to Pyongyang’s need for funding for its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs as well as its conventional military,” Mr. Bechtol wrote in a book to be published this summer. “This need has not gone away—with or without sanctions imposed by the United Nations as well as the United States and its allies.”