The North Korean news agency has claimed that the CIA made an attempt to kill Kim Jong-un in the month of May. No proof has been presented but it is claimed that a man who has been identified only by name was paid to take out the dictator with a deadly biological or chemical substance. It claims the man has been arrested but no further details have been published, according to the BBC.
Preposterous claim?
On the face of it, the claim does look preposterous as no evidence has been presented. However, the Korean claim cannot be dismissed out of hand as over the decades the CIA has been involved in many killings and assassinations of political opponents of the US government.
One can remember the famous killing of the Chile president Allende and Che Guevara who were both killed at the behest of the CIA. The CIA also engineered the coup in Tehran in the fifties that put the Shah into power. It's another story that he was ousted and became a fugitive with nowhere to go when even the US abandoned him. The US also admitted to eight assassination attempts on Fidel Castro but all failed.
Hacking of information
Further damaging evidence has been reported by CNBC which claims that The North Korean intelligence had hacked into the South Korean Defense Integrated Data Center and stole a lot of classified military documents including a South Korean plan to "decapitate" North Korea's leadership.
This news was also reported by Yonhap news agency which has quoted South Korean Democratic Party Re. Lee Cheol-Hee that the South Korean data was compromised. The old saying that there can be no smoke without fire maybe true in this case.
North Korea is a threat
There can be little doubt that a nuclear-armed North Korea is a big threat and launching a strike against it could lead to a terrible retribution.
US ally DPRK and to a lesser extent, Japan, would suffer terrible consequences. It would be within the realm of reality for both the US and South Korea to try and get rid of Kim Jong-un in the hope that a new leader may be more conciliatory.
The battle lines are drawn as the US president Trump goes about threatening to destroy North Korea and heaping insults on the North Korean dictator by referring to him as " little rocketman".
Kim Jong-un has responded in similar fashion.
Double standards
With all these wars of words, one is constrained to note that the entire scenario looks unreal and one wonders why the US is so worked up about a small country like North Korea. Five decades back, it allowed China to go nuclear and build missiles and H- bomb warheads and did nothing.Why the double standard?
