https://madmimi.com/p/3c294f?pact=522126-154007720-7235361215-f8ab6d49db488d1618810b117c05cf6bb587e08a
I attach a very long piece below by Jay Solomon, the former national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
For those who don’t have time to read it in full, I have extracted some lines from it below and added one or two comments of my own.
One of the Trump administration’s point persons for the current US negotiations with North Korea is an Israeli-born American friend of mine, who travels regularly to meet with negotiators from the North Korean regime.
EXTRACTS AND COMMENTS
▪ North Korea and Israel, though separated by two oceans and 5,000 miles, have been engaged in low-intensity conflict and high-stakes spy games for more than five decades.
The so-called Hermit Kingdom in Pyongyang has been actively bolstering states hostile to Israel, and facilitating attacks on the Jewish state, since the 1960s. Despite occasional attempts to broker a truce between the two nations, the Israeli-North Korean relationship has been defined for decades by covert hostility and proxy conflict – a shadow war between the two nations. The pattern continues through the present day in North Korea’s alliance with Iran and Syria.
North Korea has long transferred military capabilities to Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Libya and Myanmar, including, in some cases, nuclear technologies or materials.
And yet despite this enmity, North Korea and Israel have also secretly engaged in intermittent diplomacy in recent decades to try and safeguard their national security, at times behind Washington’s back.
NORTH KOREA BEHIND ATTACK AT TEL AVIV AIRPORT
▪ For North Korea, confronting Israel emerged in the 1960s as a central plank in its campaign to fight U.S.-backed governments. The communist regime aggressively funded and trained Arab and other terrorists who targeted Israel in the 1960s and 1970s.