Today's New York Times has an interesting piece on North Korea's history of proliferating weapons and related material by registering its ships under foreign flags. It also shows how critical it is that Beijing aggressively inspect North Korean shipments coming across the Chinese border. Beijing's lackadaisical attitude on this point is not encouraging.
The incidents illustrated North Korea's adroit use of so-called flags of convenience to camouflage the movement of its cargo vessels as they engage in tasks that sometimes violate international laws. The North Korean ploy could both simplify and complicate the efforts to carry out the United Nations Security Council's resolution authorizing countries to inspect cargo entering or leaving North Korea to see if it includes illicit weapons, say shipping executives, lawyers and security experts…. But Mr. Pollack and other experts said that flags of convenience could still prove useful to North Korea in maintaining its arms trade despite the Security Council resolution. One possibility would be for North Korea to try to smuggle out weapons or weapons components across its land borders with China or Russia, and then to a Chinese or Russian port. The weapons could then be loaded on a vessel secretly owned by North Korea but flying another country's flag - and perhaps not be closely watched by Western intelligence services as a result. Or weapons could be loaded on a North Korean ship flying its own flag, and the registration of the ship could be altered after it left port. "In the middle of the night, they could change the name and change the flag," said Gary Wolfe, a maritime lawyer at Seward & Kissel, a New York law firm. Still another possibility, shipping and security experts said, would be for a North Korean-flagged ship to transfer cargo to a North Korean ship carrying another flag, either in port or in midocean if it were a calm day and the cargo small enough.