The United States announced yesterday it had blacklisted two firms suspected of assisting North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as part of a redoubled effort to derail the reclusive nation’s nuclear-weapon operations (see GSN, June 30).

The announcement came amid reports that a North Korean freighter being tracked by the U.S. Navy on suspicion of carrying contraband weapons had changed course and might be headed home.

The U.S. Treasury said it has frozen all the U.S.-held assets of North Korea’s Namchongang Trading Corp. and the Iran-based Hong Kong Electronics, Reuters reported. The value of the U.S. assets held by the two firms, or whether they have any, is not known. The Treasury has also forbidden U.S. companies from dealing with the targeted companies.

Namchongang Trading Corp. is suspected of buying aluminum tubes and other uranium-enrichment paraphernalia for the North for about a decade. Pyongyang recently confirmed suspicions that it has been pursuing uranium-enrichment technology. U.S. officials worry that Pyongyang might use a difficult-to-monitor enrichment program to produce nuclear-weapon material. The regime possesses a known plutonium-based program (Reuters, June 30).

Namchongang is also thought to have been instrumental in providing material used in construction of a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor that was destroyed in a 2007 Israeli airstrike (see GSN, June 18).

The Treasury Department said that Hong Kong Electronics “has transferred millions of dollars of proliferation-related funds” to North Korean entities that have already been targeted by U.S. and U.N. penalties. The Iranian firm “has also facilitated the movement of money from Iran to North Korea” for suspected ballistic missile equipment dealer called Korea Mining Development Trading Corp., the U.S. agency said (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 1).

“North Korea uses companies like Hong Kong Electronics and a range of other deceptive practices to obscure the true nature of its financial dealings, making it impossible for responsible banks and governments to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate North Korean transactions,” said Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey in a statement.

Washington hopes the move both will weaken the companies by cutting them off from the U.S. economy and prompt banks and companies in other nations, fearful of the consequences of breaking U.S. laws, to cut off contact with the sanctioned firms.

Philip Goldberg, the lead U.S. official on coordinating sanctions against North Korea, was scheduled to visit China this week to press officials there on carrying out the penalties (Reuters, June 30).

Meanwhile, a North Korean cargo ship that has been monitored closely since it left Pyongyang about two weeks ago appears now to be returning to its home port, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, June 23).

The ship Kang Nam 1 was thought to be carrying weapons — possibly small arms — to Myanmar in defiance of a June 12 U.N. resolution banning the North from exporting and importing munitions. The U.N. Security Council passed the embargo in response to North Korea’s underground nuclear test in late May.

The Kang Nam 1 is the first ship to be monitored in accordance with the embargo. North Korea had warned any undue interdiction of its trade vessels would amount to a declaration of war.

“Touching our ships constitutes a grave military provocation against our country,” Pyongyang reiterated today through the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun. “These acts will be followed immediately by self-defensive military countermeasures.”

Observers had said that Washington’s ability to inspect the ship’s cargo before it reached its destination — without provoking military escalation from the North — would serve as a litmus test for the efficacy of the U.N. sanctions, which several analysts and U.S. lawmakers have called into question.

Instead the ship, which had been heading south along the Chinese coast, on Sunday wheeled around several hundred miles south of Hong Kong and is now headed north. Its final destination remains unknown (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press/Yahoo! News, July 1).

Some high-level U.S.officials speculated that the freighter’s much-scrutinized trip was North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s way of testing U.S. President Barack Obama, the New York Times reported.

“The whole thing just doesn’t add up,” said a senior White House official before the Kang Nam 1 made its about-face. “My worry is that we make a big demand about seeing the cargo, and then there’s a terse standoff, and when it’s all over we discover that old man Kim set us up to look like George Bush searching for nonexistent WMD” (David Sanger, New York Times, July 1).

South Korea said yesterday it is formulating its own protocols for interdicting ships it believes are carrying WMD materials, the Korea Times reported.

Seoul’s Defense Ministry told a National Assembly panel that it is working out plans to enforce the U.N. sanctions against North Korea and fulfill its interdiction responsibilities under the Proliferation Security Initiative, an international effort aimed toward blocking the worldwide WMD trade.

The South signed on to the initiative following North Korea’s May 25 nuclear test (see GSN, May 26; Jung Sung-ki, Korea Times, June 30).