Joey, you are mixing it up as well here- the media reports indicated that Sagarika was tested thrice but they did’nt mention that it was tested aboard the ATV- my guess is that they either confused it with the Dhanush or else the IN and DRDO have secretly tested the Sagarika aboard one of the upgraded Kilo subs.

They have clearly given in the article that it was tested before in the underwater launch tubes. So no submarine was used for testing purpose.

Yes I know its an animated image, do you also realise the booster falls off after the initial boost stage so the Babur would look like that.

Details of NDC manpower are not available im unable to help you there, but they have been the powerhouse of Pakistans missile (balastic missile development). Even if we assume they copied all the chinese/korean designs they have been around for a long time now how can you descredit their expertise.

There is enough information available on the Al Khalid program and the JF-17 to see Chinese companies have been at the forefront with the development of both of these. Im not discounting chinese help to other pakistan companies in developing Babur either.

There are over 1500 pictures there can you be more specific to indian related technology related with their cruise missile programs.

Outrage?? come again last I saw it was you who was using exclamation marks. You dont have any evidence to prove the babur is a chinese repaint, this is what I have been debating with you. Please prove otherwise. The kind of info your asking is not available this moment in time. I dont discount your theory as Pakistan has a strategic relationship with China its very much likly their chinese friends have assisted.

There was an sensational news few years ago i think, Indian Coast Guard intercepted a cargo ship on way to Pakistan with suspicious cargo on board. After inspection It was found that it contained missile components in various stages of assembly.

On North Korean Freighter, a Hidden Missile Factory By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 14, 2003; Page A01 NEW DELHI — Tae Min Hun, the dour captain of the North Korean freighter Kuwolsan, glared icily from the bridge as tempers around him soared in the midday heat. On June 30, 1999, as customs agents in India’s northwestern port city of Kandla waited impatiently to board the vessel, Tae received urgent instructions from Pyongyang: At all cost, let no one open the cargo boxes. The Indians tried to look anyway, and a melee erupted. Tae and his crew rained blows on inspectors and barricaded the doors with their bodies, according to witness accounts and video footage of the encounter.

A few agents who managed to slip into the cargo bay were horrified to find North Koreans sealing the hatches, trapping them inside. When the ship’s doors were finally reopened at gunpoint, the reason for the extreme secrecy became clear. Hidden inside wooden crates marked “water refinement equipment” was an assembly line for ballistic missiles: tips of nose cones, sheet metal for rocket frames, machine tools, guidance systems and, in smaller crates, ream upon ream of engineers’ drawings labeled “Scud B” and “Scud C.” The intended recipient of the cargo, according to U.S. intelligence officials, was Libya. “In the past we had seen missiles or engine parts, but here was an entire assembly line for missiles offered for sale,” said an Indian government official familiar with the discovery. “This was a complete technology transfer.” Today, the evidence from the Kuwolsan remains locked in a military warehouse in the Indian capital, where it has been scrutinized since being seized four years ago. The results of India’s investigation, shared among a small circle of intelligence and defense analysts, offer an extraordinary glimpse into the shadowy world of weapons proliferation, in which missile parts and bomb materials circle the globe undetected, secreted away in cargo containers and suitcases, concealed by phony ship manifests and fictitious company names, eluding customs agents and defying international treaties.

The Kuwolsan incident — described in detailed court documents and interviews with officials in the United States and India — also has reinforced a view of North Korea as the world’s most dangerous source of weapons proliferation. North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il, this year expelled U.N. inspectors, abandoned the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and declared plans to build an atomic weapon. Just as worrisome, according to U.S. intelligence officials, is North Korea’s continuing global trade in technology for weapons of mass destruction — including instructions for making advanced missiles. North Korea has defended its right to sell the weapons and has said it is not bound by international treaties restricting such trade. The latest beneficiary appears to be Libya, but other nations are known to have received similar help, including Iran, Pakistan and Syria. North Korea has also sold missiles and parts to Yemen, which received 15 Scud missiles after they were briefly intercepted by U.S. and Spanish naval crews off the Yemeni coast in December. The Kuwolsan cargo attests to the existence of a gray zone — a combination of weak states, open borders, lack of controls and a ready market of buyers and sellers of weapons of mass destruction. Small packages are sometimes delivered in the luggage of individual airline passengers, such as the Taiwanese businessman who was arrested at Zurich’s airport in 2000 with North Korean missile parts in his rucksack. Big-ticket items are moved in rusting freighters such as the Kuwolsan. Technical information and designs fly across the Internet. “It is difficult, but not impossible, to intercept weapons and equipment,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Korea specialist with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “But human exchanges — plans, data, intellectual property — these are hard to intercept.” Detour Into Detention In the end, a need for cash scuttled the Kuwolsan’s mission. The black-hulled, 25-year-old freighter would probably have avoided Indian customs officials had the captain not gone out of his way to earn extra money, according to documents and interviews with officials. Just 10 days after departing North Korea’s Nampo harbor on April 10, 1999, the ship made detours to two Thai ports to pick up 14,000 tons of sugar for resale along the way, records show. A deal to sell the sugar to some Algerians fell through, so the ship switched course again, to sell it to an Indian company. That meant a stop at the busy port of Kandla, in Gujarat province in northwestern India. “It was crazy,” one Indian investigator recalled. “If you’re carrying 200 tons of sensitive equipment, you don’t go picking up extra cargo left and right.” While the ship was somewhere en route, Indian customs officials were tipped off to its possible contraband.

The Kuwolsan was rumored to be carrying arms or ammunition, perhaps intended for India’s neighbor and rival, Pakistan. When the North Korean freighter steamed into Kandla on June 25, port officials were waiting for it. Within the first few hours, irregularities in the ship’s papers became apparent. The company in Malta listed as the intended recipient of the cargo was fictitious, Indian officials learned. That prompted questions about the cargo itself: Why would Malta, an island nation a short flight from industrial Europe, choose to buy “water refining equipment” from faraway North Korea? But as customs agents began to press for answers, Tae, the 61-year-old captain, turned defiant. He blocked every request with increasing pugnacity and threatened international reprisals if the Indians did not allow him to leave Kandla. Finally, on June 30, as customs agents demanded a look at the boxes, Tae turned up with what he said was a telex he had just received from North Korea. “As per the telex, he would not open any more boxes,” according to the official Indian after-action report. Afterward, “the crew members shouted at the [customs] officers and abused them.” “It got very physical. There were fisticuffs,” said an Indian official who was present and who spoke on the condition that his name not be used. “At one point, the crew began closing the hatches to the cargo hold, with the customs inspectors still inside.” Hours passed in a tense standoff. Then, on July 1, backed by armed troops and a group of government weapons experts, customs officers forced their way back onto the ship for a first look at what was really inside the Kuwolsan’s wooden boxes. ‘Only One End-Use’ True to the labels, some crates among the Kuwolsan’s cargo did contain equipment that could be used in a water treatment plant. Inspectors found pumps, nozzles and a few valves.

Everything else appeared to have been transported straight from a missile factory. Documents from the investigation contain a partial list: • Components for missile subassembly. • Machine tools for setting up a fabrication facility. • Instrumentation for evaluating the performance of a full missile system. • Equipment for calibrating missile components. In other boxes inspectors found personal items apparently intended for North Korean workers, including cookbooks in Korean, Korean spices, pickles and acupuncture sets. A separate cargo bay contained rocket nose cones, stacks of metal pipe and heavy-duty presses used for milling high-grade steel. Inspectors found a plate-bending machine capable of rolling thick metal sheets; toroidal air bottles used to guide warheads after separation from a missile; and theodolites, devices that measure missile trajectories. It was an intriguing mix, far different from other previously seized shipments because it contained more than just missile engines and spare parts. A technical committee of Indian missile experts concluded that the equipment was “unimpeachable and irrefutable evidence” of a plan to transfer not just missiles, but missile-making capability. The cargo “points to one and only one end-use, namely the assembling of missiles and manufacture of the parts and subassemblies of surface to surface missiles,” the technical panel wrote in a report. But more interesting by far to the investigators were the documents: box after box of engineering drawings, blueprints, notebooks, textbooks and reports. The blueprints were kept inside numbered plastic jackets and wrapped in brown paper. Some of the packets were labeled, in English, “Scud B” or “Scud C.” Nearly all the drawings showed rockets or sections of rockets, accompanied by notes and mathematical formulas handwritten in Korean. Native Korean speakers were brought in for translation, a process that continued long after the cargo was transported to New Delhi and the vessel and its crew were released.

The analysis was slowed by yet another language barrier: The documents were filled with a unique kind of technical jargon invented by North Korean scientists to replace scientific terms in Russian or Chinese. Over time, the investigation yielded a trove of new information about North Korea’s weapons program — details that India later shared with friendly governments. “The CIA went to town on those blueprints,” said Greg Thielmann, a retired director of the State Department’s office on strategic, proliferation and military issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “They used them to make full mock-ups of missiles, complete with decals.” For U.S. officials, the blueprints provided a rare look at the inner workings of North Korea’s missile industry, the focus of much of the contention between the United States and North Korea since the 1980s. Successive U.S. administrations have condemned North Korea’s missile sales to such countries as Iran and Syria. Fears of advanced North Korean designs capable of reaching the U.S. mainland were heightened by the launch on Aug. 31, 1998, of a three-stage missile. The first stage splashed down in the Sea of Japan, the second crossed Japan’s main island and a third broke up and traveled 3,450 miles downrange, falling into the Pacific Ocean. This ambitious test helped fuel the drive for a U.S. missile defense shield. The Scud B and Scud C designs found on the Kuwolsan were from older North Korean missile programs, which in turn were derived from Soviet missile designs of the 1950s. One Indian government official who studied the blueprints described the science as “old and dated,” though he added: “It still works.” “It may be your grandmother’s technology,” he said, “but grandmother still kicks.” The Kuwolsan’s cargo did not, by itself, include everything needed for missile production, suggesting that there may have been earlier shipments, and perhaps later ones. “This was a slice in time of a technology transfer from North Korea to Libya,” said Timothy V. McCarthy, a missile expert and senior analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies who has examined some of the blueprints and other evidence. “As an intelligence find it was unbelievable, because it helps us learn how they learn,” McCarthy said. “That’s so important because it gives you an idea of how capable they are of progressing to more advanced missiles. It also gives us insight into the most troubling part of proliferation: when one country attempts to transfer technology to another. Once Libya can make its own missiles, you can’t stop them.”

A striking feature of the cargo was the high proportion of foreign-made parts and machines, many of which still bore country-of-origin markings from Japan or China. Some analysts who saw the data were intrigued by design plans for a third type of missile, which the documents do not name. Weapons analysts described it as a modified Scud, altered to increase the range. “It uses an engine that we haven’t seen, one that isn’t used on any missile currently fielded by North Korea,” McCarthy said. “It shows that there are still parts of North Korea’s missile program we still haven’t figured out yet.” With the modifications, the missile was advertised as having a range of roughly 500 miles. Such a missile in Libyan hands, weapon experts noted, would give Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi something he has long professed to covet: the ability to strike Israel from his home turf. In India, defense and intelligence officials said they were convinced that the Kuwolsan’s cargo was intended for Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons and missile programs. The Kuwolsan’s captain acknowledged under questioning that he had planned to stop in Karachi, the Pakistani port city less than 300 miles west of Kandla, before heading to the Suez Canal and Malta. North Korea is known to have supplied missile parts to Pakistan in the past. But both U.S. and South Korean officials concluded that the cargo was intended for Libya, a conviction that grew stronger over time, said Gary Samore, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for nonproliferation at the time the Kuwolsan was seized. In fact, U.S. officials viewed Libya’s involvement as the single most surprising — and disturbing — aspect of the case. Since the incident, European officials have twice intercepted other North Korean missile materials bound for Libya. In January 2000, British police disclosed the interception of 32 crates of missile parts — mostly components of jet propulsion systems — at London’s Gatwick Airport as the parts were about to be flown to Malta, then on to Tripoli.

Three months later, a 44-year-old Taiwanese businessman was arrested at Zurich’s airport with three cast-iron parts for Scud missiles in his bags. The man, who was traveling to Libya, was released two months later and sent back to Taiwan. He told Swiss authorities he was only a courier and had no idea what the parts were used for. “We were not fully aware of the extent of North Korea’s dealings with Libya until that ship was intercepted,” said Samore, now a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Ties between the two countries were judged to be relatively modest until the Kuwolsan incident, Samore said, when North Korea suddenly was caught sending Libya a “full production kit for missiles.” Scuds for Yemen Last December, another ship and another destination drew attention to North Korean missile smuggling. The capture of the 3,500-ton So San, intercepted in the Gulf of Aden as it ferried 15 Scud missiles to Yemen, showed that North Korea, nearly four years after the Kuwolsan search, had seen no reason to change. The So San’s captain, Kang Chol Ryong, was confident enough to sail without a flag, and with the ship’s name and identifying markings covered up, when the vessel began its southward journey across the South China Sea in November.

The ship’s manifest listed a single entry — 40,000 sacks of cement — but spy agencies had known of its hidden cargo before it left its home port of Nampo. On Dec. 9, the Spanish naval frigate Navarra, part of an international flotilla then patrolling the Arabian Sea looking for Taliban fighters fleeing Afghanistan, spotted the So San about 600 miles off the coast of Yemen. When confronted, Kang refused to identify his vessel and even tried to outrun the larger Navarra. “The Navarra fired warning shots ahead of the ship; still he refused to stop, and continued sailing at the same course and speed,” Javier Romero, a commander in the Spanish navy, wrote in a report on the incident. Sharpshooters from the Navarra then blasted away the ship’s mast cables to allow Spanish special operations troops to rappel onto the deck from a helicopter, the report said. The So San’s crew gave up without a fight, and within hours U.S. Navy Seals and explosives experts had joined the Spanish sailors in moving sacks of cement covering the real cargo: 15 Scud missiles complete with high-explosive warheads. Elsewhere in the hold the searchers found two dozen tanks containing a rocket-fuel additive and nearly 100 other barrels of unidentified chemicals. Despite the high-profile interception, the Bush administration decided to release the ship and its cargo because Yemen is a strategic partner in the U.S. war against the al Qaeda terrorist organization. A few Scuds, administration officials explained, were judged as not worth the price of losing a critical ally. The So San returned to North Korea and remains in service, but is closely tracked by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Reports of other ships and other suspicious cargo have surfaced since then. Just last week, the 6,500-ton North Korean freighter Be Gaehung was seized in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung harbor after customs officials discovered crates containing 2,200 tons of aluminum powder, which can be used in manufacturing missiles. The Kuwolsan, meanwhile, vanished after it and its crew were released by India in 2000, and only recently has its fate come to light. According to shipping experts at Lloyd’s maritime division in London, the vessel’s name was quietly changed in the summer of that year, to Sun Grisan 9. As of last week, the renamed ship was still in active service, and was last reported headed to the Somalian capital, Mogadishu. The nature of its cargo was unknown. Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi and staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report. N. Korea Shops Stealthily for Nuclear Arms Gear Front Companies Step Up Efforts in European Market By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, August 15, 2003; Page A19 MUNICH — The French cargo ship Ville de Virgo was already running a day late when it steamed into Hamburg harbor on April 3, its stadium-size deck stacked 50 feet high with cargo containers bound for Asia. At the dock, harried German customs agents skimmed quickly through a fat manifest that included the usual Asia-bound staples — fertilizer, bulk chemicals, cheeses. A last-minute addition, 214 ultra-strong aluminum pipes purchased by China’s Shenyang Aircraft Corp., was one of the final items cleared before the 40,000-ton ship fired its engines again and headed to Asia. But within hours after the ship departed, the story of the manifest began to unravel. German intelligence officials discovered that the aluminum was destined not for China but for North Korea. The intended use of the pipes, they concluded, was not aircraft production, but the making of nuclear weapons. On April 12, in a dramatic but little-noticed intervention, French and German authorities tracked the ship to the eastern Mediterranean and seized the pipes. German police arrested the owner of a small export company and uncovered a broader scheme to acquire as many as 2,000 such pipes. That much aluminum in North Korean hands, investigators concluded, could have yielded as many as 3,500 gas centrifuges for enriching uranium. “The intentions were clearly nuclear,” said a Western diplomat familiar with the investigation. “The result could have been several bombs’ worth of weapons-grade uranium in a year.” The voyage and capture of the Ville de Virgo exposed one of the most ambitious attempts yet by North Korea to obtain materials for building nuclear weapons. But the episode also offers a glimpse into the shadowy world of weapons proliferation, in which missile parts and bomb materials circle the globe undetected, secreted away in cargo containers and suitcases, concealed by phony ship manifests and fictitious company names, eluding customs agents and defying international treaties. The story of the Ville de Virgo is a case study in the workings of the gray zone, a combination of weak states, open borders, lack of controls and a ready market of buyers and sellers for weapons of mass destruction. The attempt to import the aluminum tubes is being closely studied by intelligence agencies for possible clues about the design and origins of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program.

In January, North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the international treaty that bars it from making nuclear weapons, and the country is believed by intelligence agencies to be pursuing nuclear weapons through two different routes — bombs based on uranium and those based on plutonium. In recent months, North Korea’s attempts to seek parts and technology in Europe have increased dramatically, U.S. and European intelligence officials say. Lately, they say, the attempts are becoming ever more elaborately disguised. On April 4, just one day after the Ville de Virgo left Hamburg, a different cargo ship departed Japan’s Kobe Harbor carrying three devices known as direct-current stabilizers, which also are used in uranium enrichment, according to a Japanese government account of the incident. Just as with the aluminum shipment, the electronic parts were being routed to a third country — in this case, Thailand — where the cargo would be diverted to North Korea. In mid-May, a month after the aluminum pipes were seized, North Korea nearly succeeded in acquiring 33 tons of sodium cyanide, a chemical used in making the deadly nerve agent tabun, according to Western diplomatic sources. The chemicals were purchased legally from a German manufacturer who believed the buyer was a Singapore company. But in fact, a switch was planned that would have diverted them to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Both efforts were thwarted, but intelligence officials have little doubt that others succeeded. “There are countries in the world where you can pay $2,000 to a government minister and he’ll sign anything — and then confirm to you that he signed it,” said Rastislav Kacer, a former Slovak deputy defense minister who helped lead an investigation into a similar attempt by North Korea to buy sophisticated radar equipment. “Documents that are fake can be made to appear very real.” In such an environment, said Kacer, now his country’s ambassador in Washington, “no system is ever 100 percent leak-proof.” Special Aluminum Tubes The French-owned Ville de Virgo is a workhorse of the modern shipping trade, a floating warehouse that moves cargo along a circuit running from Hamburg and Rotterdam to Singapore and Pusan, South Korea. At each port, goods are brought to the ship in pre-packed steel containers, which are then stacked five high on the top deck. Only rarely are the containers opened and physically searched. On the morning of April 3, the Ville de Virgo was running a day behind schedule as it took on freight and awaited paperwork in Hamburg before setting off on a nine-week, round-trip voyage to China and Korea.

Local customs agents had visited the ship dozens of times in the past, and on this day, German officials say, there was nothing outwardly unusual about the ship or its cargo. But one container on the deck held aluminum tubes, and German intelligence officials had been watching these very pipes for months. Measuring nearly eight feet in length and nine inches in diameter, the tubes were made of a special alloy, 6061-T6, known to be both light and exceptionally strong. Similar tubes are used in a wide range of commercial products, from bicycle frames to aircraft parts. But they also are useful in the construction of machines known as gas centrifuges, which enrich uranium into the key material for nuclear weapons. Throughout the second half of 2002, intelligence agencies in the United States and Western Europe picked up multiple signals that North Korea was attempting to acquire such tubes, along with other specialized metals used in centrifuges, U.S. and European sources say. Germany’s top nonproliferation agency issued a warning in the fall that North Korean agents were known to be “obtaining sensitive goods” by using front companies or third countries as cover. Intelligence reports suggested that a large quantity of pipes — perhaps 220 tons or more — was being sought across Europe. The tubes are of a different type of aluminum than those that figured prominently in suspicions about Iraq. Despite the increased vigilance, North Korea may have already succeeded in acquiring hundreds of such tubes, using connections and routes developed over years. “All they need is help from one company — perhaps a small company, one that may never actually see the aluminum pipes, or have them in their hands,” said Eckhard Maak, a government prosecutor in Stuttgart, Germany, who helped investigate the case. “With only a phone and an Internet connection, you can send such materials across the world.” Export License Denied The unlikely supplier of the aluminum pipes was a tiny German export company called Optronic. Its owner, Hans Werner Truppel, made a living brokering sales of optical and electronic equipment out of his house, a modest one-story dwelling in a village 85 miles northwest of Munich. Three years ago, German law enforcement officials say, Truppel struck up a relationship with a North Korean businessman who claimed to represent an import-export company, Nam Chon Gang. At first, the North Korean company asked for help from Optronic in obtaining obscure machine parts and electronics, offering cash in payment. Truppel sold the firm vacuum pumps and machines known as angle grinders, in each case with the approval of German customs. Then, last fall, Nam Chon Gang approached Optronic with a new wish list: Could Truppel find a supply of aluminum pipes, made of a specific alloy and cut to precise dimensions? In this case, the North Korean businessman claimed to be brokering a deal on behalf of Shenyang Aircraft Corp., one of China’s top aircraft manufacturers. Later, a letter bearing Shenyang’s logo vouched for the purchase, according to a law enforcement official who has seen the document. The letter said the aluminum was to be converted into airplane fuel tanks. It all seemed legitimate, according to Truppel’s Frankfurt attorney, Egon Geiss. In September, Optronic located British-made aluminum pipes at a company in nearby Ulm, Germany, and paid the equivalent of just over $80,000 for 214 of them. Truppel then began the process of securing the needed export papers. To Truppel’s surprise, the German government balked. Officials in the Trade Ministry, aware of the potential uses for such tubes, looked closely at Optronic’s application and began picking it apart. The story about aircraft fuel tanks was dismissed as “not plausible,” according to Maak, the prosecutor. Moreover, German officials were skeptical that a major Chinese aircraft corporation would employ an unknown North Korean firm to do its shopping. “Why the North Korean middleman?” Maak said he wondered. “It seemed highly unusual.” The denial left Truppel baffled and financially exposed, according to Geiss. Now the businessman was stuck with 22 tons of aluminum, which he had paid for but couldn’t use.

Through the fall and winter, he tried to unsuccessfully sell the pipes to others at a discount. Meanwhile, the Ulm company that had sold the pipes to Truppel in September was still holding them in its warehouse and was pressuring Truppel to pick them up. Exactly how and why the pipes ended up on the Ville de Virgo remains in dispute. Geiss said Truppel received a call from Delta-Trading, a relatively small metals production, distribution and export firm based in Hamburg. Delta offered to take the pipes and promised to secure the necessary export papers, he said. Truppel “explained to Delta in writing that he was unable to export” the pipes, Geiss added. But in the end Truppel agreed to pay Delta about $6,000 — roughly half the profit he had expected to make on the deal — to take the matter off his hands. “He assumed that Delta, because of its connections, had other legal avenues for exporting the aluminum,” Geiss said of Truppel. “He understood that Delta was to take care of all the necessary arrangements.” Delta declined comment. German prosecutors say Truppel was not so naive. “He definitely knew what he was doing,” Maak said. “The important thing is, Optronic was denied permission to export, and it did so anyway.” German officials were wary enough to issue a warning urging customs agents to watch for outbound shipments of aluminum pipes. Sometime after April 4 came a report that 22 tons of aluminum had moved from Ulm to Hamburg to be loaded onto the Ville de Virgo. By the time the warning was issued, the ship and cargo were already on their way to the Mediterranean. A Trove of Evidence The North Korean man who drew Truppel into the aluminum scheme has never been publicly identified. But German and U.S. investigators say companies like Nam Chon Gang exist in cities throughout Europe, Japan and other regions that offer access to critical technology. Last August, police made a rare move against such a company in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. The company, New World Trading Slovakia, was founded in March 2001 by two North Koreans who apparently were seeking a quiet location for negotiating deals with customers on three continents, Slovak officials say. One of them, Kim Kum Jin, 51, had once served as an economic adviser at North Korea’s embassy in Egypt. Kim and his partner, Sun Hui Ri, 48, quickly grew fond of their new home. They bought a Mercedes-Benz and opened shop in a luxurious high-rise in one of Bratislava’s newest commercial districts, police investigators said in interviews in the Slovak capital. The couple even listed their company in the city’s business registry. But last summer, Slovak federal police, after months of surveillance, began to suspect the two were trading in weapons technology. Lacking sufficient evidence to file charges, the authorities ordered the couple to leave the country last August. Kim and Sun left behind a trove of documents, police said, including financial records, invoices and bills of lading. The papers described multiple deals by the pair to procure materials for weapons programs, as well as millions of dollars in sales of missile technology to Egypt, Libya, Iran, Syria and Vietnam. One of their major clients, documents revealed, was an Egyptian military-industrial concern. “They did it all by fax and computer,” said an investigator with firsthand knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition his name not be used. “None of the material ever crossed into Slovakia, which would have been a clear violation of the law. That’s why they were able to operate as long as they did.” This pattern is at the heart of how governments such as North Korea manage to traffic in weapons materials. Many countries have agreed to treaties and multilateral agreements, such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Missile Technology Control Regime, in an effort to restrict such dangerous transfers. But these efforts were defeated by North Korea using faxes and computers. North Korea has said it does not accept the treaties and defended its right to sell weapons abroad. “With North Korea you have a strange mix of impressive, extensively clandestine systems and sometimes incredible naivete about how things work,” said Greg Thielmann, recently retired director of the office on strategic, proliferation and military issues at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “But somehow they have found a way to operate in a world of export-control regimes and still buy the things they need, and still ship their missiles to other countries.” Logistical support along the way is provided by North Korea’s embassies and staff, whose activities and travel are protected under the rules of diplomacy, U.S. and European intelligence officials say.

Backing for complex weapons deals comes from North Korean banks, including the Vienna-based Golden Star Bank, Pyongyang’s only financial institution in Europe. The imposing red stucco building near one of Vienna’s busiest markets has no customers and no private accounts, yet its activities have raised alarms within Austria’s Interior Ministry. A report by the ministry’s office for the protection of the constitution included a list of activities the agency had connected to the bank. It included intelligence-gathering as well as “money-laundering, the distribution of forged currency and illegal trade with radioactive substances.” Unscheduled Stop French and German officials had little evidence in hand on April 10 when they pondered their options for dealing with the Ville de Virgo. By this time, the ship was in the eastern Mediterranean, far beyond the territorial reach of the two countries, steaming southeast toward the Suez Canal at 23 knots. One possible solution — letting the ship proceed to an Asian port and working through the host government — was ruled out as too risky. Another option, since the ship was French-owned and technically under France’s jurisdiction, was to stop the ship at sea and transfer the cargo to a French military vessel. Instead, it was decided that the aluminum pipes simply should be removed, quickly and quietly, at the first possible port.

The ship’s French owner endorsed the plan. When contacted by radio, the Ville de Virgo’s captain was unaware of any controversy involving the aluminum tubes. But he agreed to a request to make an unscheduled stop in the Egyptian port of Alexandria, just outside the Suez, to remove the tubes from his ship. As the ship arrived in Alexandria on April 12, a special crew and cargo crane were waiting at the dock. Another vessel returned the tubes to Hamburg on April 28. In Stuttgart, Truppel, the Optronic chief, was arrested for violating German export laws and was ordered held without bail. He remains imprisoned in Stuttgart awaiting trial. The company that acted as an export middleman, Delta-Trading, has not been charged. Geiss, Truppel’s attorney, plans to argue that his client was tricked by Delta and North Korea. Back at Hamburg’s harbor, the watch for aluminum tubes continues. Nam Chon Gang and its mysterious North Korean entrepreneur, thwarted in one attempt to obtain the metal, might be trying again: U.S. proliferation officials said they learned from European allies of “multiple” efforts to acquire aluminum tubes in recent months. The dimensions of the tubes suggest to nuclear experts that North Korea is attempting to build a type of gas centrifuge designed by the European consortium Urenco — a design stolen by Pakistani scientists in the 1970s. The Urenco centrifuge uses an aluminum casing that is roughly the same size as the tubes exported by Optronic, said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. But it takes more than aluminum to build a centrifuge, Albright noted. Highly specialized magnets, bearings and a metal known as maraging steel are also required. North Korea would probably have to import all those things, yet there have been no known interceptions of such materials. “There would have to be many more shipments,” Albright said. “Usually what you see is only the tip of the iceberg.” Stopping a single shipment of aluminum tubes from reaching North Korea was a setback for Pyongyang — but probably only a temporary one, he said. “You can hurt them badly,” Albright said, “but in the end you can only delay them from succeeding.” Special correspondent Shannon Smiley in Berlin and researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.

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