The CIA announced this week that it has established a “Korea Mission Center” at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia to focus on the threat of North Korea.
“The new Mission Center draws on experienced officers from across the Agency and integrates them in one entity to bring their expertise and creativity to bear against the North Korea target,” the CIA said in a statement.
“A veteran CIA operations officer has been selected as the new Assistant Director for Korea and presides over the Mission Center. The new Mission Center will work closely with the Intelligence Community and the entire U.S. national security community,” the statement continued.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the new center was an example of “the dynamism and agility that CIA brings to evolving national security challenges.”
North Korea explicitly threatened “war” against the CIA this week, having accused it of working with South Korean intelligence on a plot to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un with a combination of chemical weapons, biological weapons, nanotechnology, and lumberjacks.
Stars & Stripes notes the new center was announced just over a week after Pompeo visited South Korea to discuss the North Korean threat with his counterpart Lee Byung-ho.
The CIA has a number of other Mission Centers, but this is the first one dedicated to an individual country. (Technically, the name of the new Mission Center refers to a region, the Korean peninsula, much as other centers are named for regions such as Africa and the Near East).
Meanwhile, North Korea has posted a letter of protest to the U.S. House of Representatives, protesting the tougher sanctions leveled against it on May 4.
The letter, which came from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea, told the U.S. House it was “obsessed” with North Korea and warned it to “think twice” before taking further actions.
“As the U.S. House of Representatives enacts more and more of these reckless hostile laws, the DPRK’s efforts to strengthen nuclear deterrents will gather greater pace, beyond anyone’s imagination,” North Korea’s government declared, using its preferred name for itself.
The North Korean committee denounced U.S. sanctions as “the most heinous act against humanity that not only infringes upon the sacred sovereignty of the DPRK, but also arbitrarily violates universal principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries which run through the United Nations Charter.”
USA Today observes that such direct communications between the U.S. and North Korean governments are rare since the two countries have few official channels of communication and no formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, USA Today humorously observes that it’s not clear how the letter was sent, who it was addressed to, or if anyone in the House read it before it was reported by the media.
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