Special Reports
North Korean missiles missing in Africa’s Horn
By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jun 10, 2009, 00:20

ASMARA, Eritrea -- With all the recent news about North Korean missile and even nuclear tests it would seem like a good time to revisit the story about the mystery of the missing North Korean scud missiles in the Horn of Africa.

Some readers might remember how in December 2002 the Spanish Navy intercepted a North Korean freighter carrying a load of Scud missiles in the Indian Ocean. At the time, the world was witnessing the approaching climax of the Western government/media fabrication of the non-existent WMD of Saddam Hussein that resulted in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The discovery of scud missiles, whose range and payload capabilities made them capable of delivering chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons to Israel and the many USA military bases surrounding Iraq made this story a potential bombshell.

So what happened? After a few hours, the Spanish Navy released the missile-laden freighter to go on its way to . . . Yemen? The story was completely gone from the Western media within 24 hours, consigned to the dead story bin apparently.

Not everyone accepted this fait accompli, for there were just too many unanswered questions for it not to really stink.

To start with, why would Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, be spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars buying Scud missiles from North Korea? Yemen wasn’t at war with anyone, wasn’t even being threatened by any other country and the only military conflict the Yemeni military was involved in was a low level counterinsurgency in some remote villages where the notoriously inaccurate Scud missiles would be of almost no use in.

So what really happened to these missiles? Fast forward to over a year later and some dogged investigative work by this writer. After quite a bit of investigation and eventual confirmation of our suspicions by some high level diplomatic/intel sources from the Horn of Africa, we had our story ready for publication. We approached a couple of the more prominent arms monitoring/control publications with our story outline and were awaiting which one was most likely to give us the best coverage.

Then all of a sudden, there appeared a story in a major Spanish newspaper claiming that the missing Scud missiles were not in Yemen after all but in . . . Libya? After calling the newbie, part-time reporter who wrote the story in Spain, it turned out that an “anonymous” NATO source had made an unsolicited contact with the green journalist and provided him with this story. The story was picked up by the IPS newswire, much to their discredit, and that seemed to be the end of my story.

But wait, a few weeks later Libya announced they were throwing open their country for international inspection of their weapons programs and voila, no missing Scud missiles were found.

So what is the answer to the mystery of the missing North Korean Scud missiles?

To start with, we knew that Yemen was not their real destination. The question was where were these missiles really headed for and why did the Western intel services and their minions in the media kill the story so quickly.

At the time, there was already considerable documentation of a military relationship between the USA client regime in power in Ethiopia and North Korea. During the Ethiopian invasion of Eritrea in 2000, it had been reported that North Korean technicians were maintaining and upgrading the Soviet-era radar network being used by the Ethiopian military. Some years later major Western newspapers, including The New York Times reported on how Western aid money was used by Ethiopia to pay for military support from North Korea, then still on the official USA “terrorist list.”

Ethiopia certainly had use for these missiles, mainly to threaten Eritrea with which it remains at an ongoing state of “no peace, no war.” Ethiopia has been reported to have used the Somali warlord/Ethiopian military controlled port of Berbera on the Indian Ocean to smuggle arms and other contraband. Ethiopia also has the largest best-equipped army in Africa, though this is a matter for another story.

Today our best guess is that most of the missing Scud missiles sit on the bottom of the Red Sea, thanks to some quick work by Eritrean commandos, as they were being smuggled from Yemen to Berbera in Ethiopian controlled Somalia. Some of these missiles may turn up someday in Ethiopia when the eventual departure from the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, by the present mafiosi backed by the USA takes place. One thing pretty much everyone agrees on and that is that they are not where the CIA/Western media claimed they were headed for, Yemen.

Only time will tell, but in the meantime, stay tuned to the Online Journal for more stories from the Horn of Africa that the so called “free press in the West” refuses to cover.