North Korean Special Forces

One of the last intractable vestiges of the Cold War, North Korea fields one of the world's largest armies, tasked with annihilating U.S. and South Korean forces and reuniting the two Koreas. At the tip of the North Koreans' spear is the largest special operations force in the world. In this startling tour-de-force, a leading expert on the subject fully exposes and analyzes this dangerous threat.

Nowhere, not even in classified sources, is there more information about the current status of these potent special forces. So much new information has been gleaned from debriefings of North Korean special forces defectors, interviews with South Korean and U.S. intelligence personnel, recently declassified intelligence documents, and Pyongyang itself that Joseph Bermudez's 1988 book was woefully outdated; so he started anew. This new, expanded volume details the organization and equipment of North Korea's commandos as well as their missions and capabilities and the threats they pose around the globe. An indispensable guide, it offers a gold mine of new material about the special units. It also fully describes the evolution from a small force in the 1940s to today's highly motivated, well-trained, and indoctrinated force of more than one hundred thousand troops and includes recently discovered material about their hidden role in the Korean War.

As up-to-date as today's headlines, this revealing work features exclusive interviews with the two captured North Korean commandos who in September 1996 eluded more than sixteen thousand South Korean troops for forty-nine days after grounding their intelligence submarine. Liberally illustrated with recently declassified maps, photos, and drawings, thebook also includes detailed information on the development and organization of the North Korean intelligence community.