In 1999, North Korea demanded Israel pay it $1 billion in cash to stop the planned sale of missile technology to Iran and other enemies of the Jewish state, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
The offer was reportedly made by then-North Korean Ambassador to Sweden Son Mu Sin to his Israeli counterpart Gideon Ben Ami.
A former Pyongyang diplomat, who in 2016 defected to South Korea, told the newspaper that the Israelis refused, and days later offered food aid instead, but nothing ever came of the talks.
Pyongyang and Tehran remain strong allies and the North is a steady supplier of conventional and ballistic weapons and nuclear technology to Iran and its ally Syria.
Israeli intelligence indicates that North Korea has supplied Syria with the technology to build its nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor, which Israel destroyed in 2007.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the account of the offer appears in the 2018 memoir of former senior North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho, who was the translator at the meeting. It illustrates Pyongyang's policy of trying to use the threat of weapons proliferation to blackmail its adversaries.
The Israeli government declined to comment on the report.
In a television interview last week, Ben Ami confirmed he had three meetings with North Korean officials in 1999, but he remained mum as to any demand by Pyongyang for $1 billion.
Son, who is now serving in the North Korean Foreign Ministry, was unavailable for comment, the report said.
Declassified State Department documents show that the U.S. and North Korea were holding talks over Pyongyang's missile exports roughly around the time that Thae said he and his boss were in contact with Israeli officials.
"Depending on the demand, we certainly cannot exclude the possibility that North Korea will sell its nuclear weapons for cash," Nam Sung-wook, a former South Korean intelligence official who teaches at Korea University told The Wall Street Journal.
The Kim regime has sold conventional and ballistic weapons to Iran since at least the early 1980s, said Bruce Bechtol Jr., a political science professor at Angelo State University and an expert on Pyongyang's weapons proliferation in the Middle East.
North Korea's military sales in the Middle East and Africa "are directly related to Pyongyang's need for funding for its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs as well as its conventional military," he said.
"This need has not gone away – with or without sanctions imposed by the United Nations as well as the United States and its allies."
An IAEA report from 2017 highlighted North Korea's ability to "manufacture and trade in sophisticated and lucrative military technologies using overseas networks" and its increasingly sophisticated attempts to avoid detection.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Israel has tried over the years to dissuade North Korea from selling arms exports to its enemies in exchange for economic aid.
Efraim Halevy, a former director of the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, wrote in a 2006 memoir that he had urged the Israeli government to end talks with the North Koreans in the 1990s, saying it was "ridiculous" to trust commitments from Pyongyang on nonproliferation.
