Sanctioned North Korean arms makers find new cover in Russia’s shadow

BERLIN – A notorious North Korean military manufacturer selling its wares internationally remains active and is expanding its catalog despite international sanctions, a Defense News investigation shows.

It is just the tip of a vast, global network of obscure front companies that Kim Jong Un’s regime uses to sell weapons abroad and procure components for his military programs at home. Following a Russian veto in the Security Council, North Korea may be trying to expand these operations significantly.

Global Communications Co., or Glocom, has been in the crosshairs of the United Nations and many Western governments since 2016. The company sells advanced military radio equipment, missile components and command-and-control systems. More significantly, it has also been identified by the UN as a front for Pyongyang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s central intelligence agency.

The website remains online today, continues to see changes, and, in 2024, was updated with a new product: a telemetry system for missiles. The product page boasts of the device’s technical specifications and presents a photograph of the aluminum-colored device superimposed over a stock photo of a rocket blasting off into space.

In a May 10, 2024, press release, Glocom referenced lessons learned in the Ukraine war as being crucial to the development of the new data transmitter. “In particular, as we can see from the war in Ukraine, surveillance and reconnaissance using various unmanned surveillance means, as well as attacks by drones and missiles, are becoming essential processes in all military operations,” the company wrote.

“Reflecting these demands, the GR-8422 broadband data transmitter was introduced.” According to the makers, “This data transmitter can be installed on various platforms such as fighter jets, drones … and ships, launchers, tanks, armored vehicles, etc.”

Nowhere, of course, is there any mention of the North Korea connection. In promotional materials, Glocom went to great lengths to expunge any signs of its true origin, even blurring Korean script on product photos and using fictional locations.

The North Korean regime operates a web of likely hundreds of similar entities stretching around the world to get around sanctions imposed by the international community, including the UN Security Council, in service of the Kim family’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

The target markets are countries embroiled in active conflict and are often themselves under arms embargoes, with North Korea supplying governments that quickly need cheap gear. Insurgency groups and even private military contractors are also would-be customers, said Robert Shaw, program director for the Export Control and Nonproliferation Program at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

“My impression is that the North Korean government has made an effort to increase its arms trade,” he added.

Branching out

Obtaining hard cash is assessed to be one of the regime’s top priorities, and the state runs various enterprises dabbling in arms sales, construction work in places such as Zambia, IT services for unwitting U.S. companies through impersonation of American citizens, or organized crime that involves hacking banks and making and selling drugs like heroin.

Shaw said Glocom’s new message of advertising high-tech devices is a significant step and a whole new ball game from assembling relatively simple radios. “Who are they marketing this to? This opens up a whole set of questions,” he wondered. “This is getting more into major customer territory.”

Glocom’s website claims that the company was founded in 1996, though this date is impossible to independently verify. According to the official chronology, it started out with the aim of modernizing antiquated radar systems at home. The company appears to be connected with an enterprise by the name of Pan Systems, operating out of Singapore and founded in the same year, according to a UN investigation and sanctions databases.

Pan Systems Singapore soon opened an office in the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang. In an interview by UN experts, cited in a 2017 report, as well as in public statements, the company’s owner said he had been approached by a North Korean representative in the late 90s and thought that it seemed like a good idea at the time to facilitate trade. Back then, North Korea was not yet subject to the extensive international sanctions that were imposed on it following its first nuclear test in 2006.

Pan Systems in 2017 claimed that it no longer had any ties to the North Korean office and had exited North Korea when sanctions were imposed in 2007. Indeed, experts assessed that Pan Systems Pyongyang is run by the North Korean intelligence agency RGB. However, Glocom’s director, Ryang Su Nyo – a woman in her sixties and herself an agent of the RGB – traveled to Singapore repeatedly from 2010 to 2016 to meet with Pan Systems’ boss, also making stops in Malaysia to meet with other representatives of Glocom, the 2017 UN report revealed, suggesting that a certain level of cooperation likely still existed around that time.

According to a UN panel of experts, which was established by the Security Council to investigate North Korea’s sanctions evasion and WMD programs, the head of Pan Systems said that Ms. Ryang’s visits to Singapore were related to a health condition.

Malaysian authorities have told the panel that “Glocom has never operated in Malaysia,” despite the company’s claimed address in Kuala Lumpur’s Little India district. However, the UN said it and Malaysian authorities tracked down several North Korean citizens connected to Glocom who were active in Malaysia at the same time, as well as associated front companies that were registered at the same address and had made bank transfers on Glocom’s and North Korea’s behalf.

Malaysia has served as a hotbed for North Korean sanctions evasion in the past. The countries historically had comparatively warm ties, and many DPRK nationals and front companies were based there. MKP, one of the largest networks of North Korean overseas companies doing everything from construction to running hospitals, was based in Kuala Lumpur.

However, in recent years, especially following the assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother with a nerve poison in Kuala Lumpur’s international airport in 2017, relations between the countries have cooled markedly. Malaysia has cracked down on North Korean activity within its borders since and implemented state-of-the-art export control laws to counteract illicit trade.

For a while in 2016, after the United Nations had reached out to Glocom’s front companies in Malaysia for information, it seemed like the company might descend into the wastebasket of history. Like many other North Korean front companies before it and since, its website was taken down and mentions of it were erased from the internet. Unusually, however, it returned just a year later with an updated product catalog and a revamped design. In the official company chronology, it is written that the “year 2016 was the most difficult, but innovative year for Glocom.”

Red flags

Glocom differs from other North Korean front companies in its persistence and the quality of its international presence. It has participated in trade fairs in Southeast Asia since 2006 and maintains a polished website, product catalogs written in reasonably good English, and, at one point, even had Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts – until the respective platforms suspended them as part of a crackdown on North Korean profiles. Its promotional videos, since deleted, showed dynamic animations of battlefield scenarios with explosions and military vehicles and touted the products’ advanced capabilities.

In contrast, many other North Korean front companies’ websites look dated, are riddled with spelling errors and broken links, lack depth and raise other red flags.

“I suspect many of the actual deals and transfers are being developed and conducted through personal networks and possibly with the assistance of embassy personnel,” Shaw said.

What purpose websites like Glocom’s serve is unclear, he added, saying that perhaps it was political signaling for domestic forces, or to show defiance on the world stage.

Over the years, Glocom managed to land a number of sales, including to Eritrea, Syria and Ethiopia, the latter as recently as 2022. It seems likely that more sales have occurred but simply flown under the radar thanks to North Korea’s extensive use of convoluted shipping and payment networks to obscure the origin of wares and the destination of money. Similar North Korean arms deals have occurred with Yemen, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Myanmar, Sudan, Iran and others.

In the 2022 sale of military radios to the Ethiopian army, an Indonesian company by the name of Advanced Technology Facility was involved with training the recipients in the equipment’s use. ATF had previously been exposed by the United Nations’ experts for selling Glocom’s equipment on their website under a different brand name, EDSAT. A photo published in Ethiopian media in November 2022 showed the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, using what appears to be one of the North Korean military radios.

Neither Ethiopia nor Advanced Technology Facility responded to the UN’s request for further information.

More sales may be forthcoming. Aside from the website being recently updated, in 2024, South Korea informed the UN that “Glocom persists in selling Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-manufactured military telecommunications equipment.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent shifting of international geopolitics has opened a new door for North Korean arms dealers that the country may be trying to exploit. Shunned by much of the international community, North Korea and Russia have grown closer in recent years, and Moscow has used its position in the Security Council to shield Pyongyang from any new sanctions – and to roll back enforcement of existing measures.

North Korean state enterprises and even government departments are often tasked with paying for their own operation and making money for the regime at all costs, said Shaw, of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “If I were an exec with one of those corporations, I would see this as a huge opportunity,” he said, referring to the budding “strategic partnership” between Pyongyang and Moscow.

Last year, Russia vetoed the continued existence of the United Nations’ panel of experts that had tracked North Korea’s sanctions evasion and WMD procurement efforts for over a decade and whose reports, published every half year and routinely hundreds of pages long, contributed significantly to shedding light on Glocom’s and other North Korean activities.

Russia itself increasingly came into the crosshairs of the reports as the country forged a military partnership with Pyongyang and started buying large quantities of North Korean weapons for its war in Ukraine.