A former high-ranking North Korean intelligence agent who sought refuge in Japan a few years ago claims that drug smuggling is an important source of foreign currency for Pyongyang, a Japanese daily reported Saturday.
The former agent said the late Kim Il Sung visited the northeastern province of Yanggang in 1992 and ordered 3,000 hectares to be set aside to increase poppy cultivation, the Sankei Shimbun said in a front-page report.
Drugs produced in North Korea were often sold to the neighboring northeastern region of China for medicinal uses in the past, the daily quoted the 63-year-old agent as saying. The man served as a North Korean resident in Japan and requested asylum at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing in 1999.