Iran bolstered by CRINK partner North Korea with offensive missiles, defensive tunnels

SEOUL, South Korea — Iran’s ongoing resistance to Israeli-U.S. bombardment is built on a solid foundation: Its relationship with a fortress state that defied one of the heaviest U.S. bombing campaigns ever, and which today boasts one of the world’s biggest missile armories.

North Korea’s mining entities have exported counter-bombardment know-how, digging a network of underground facilities for Iran’s defense. Its arms enterprises have supplied Iran with its key long-range offensive weapons class: ballistic missiles.

The relationship suggests that ties binding the so-called CRINK — unofficial Western shorthand for the alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — remain strong.

The ties defy recent setbacks. The sudden collapse of the Moscow-backed Bassir Assad regime in Syria in 2024 and the Jan. 3 U.S. ouster of President Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela, a key Chinese energy supplier, showed the limits of CRINK’s ability to defend like-minded leaders.

However, CRINK states themselves remain securely networked.

Moscow, bogged down in Ukraine and massively sanctioned by the Global North, has received millions of shells, rockets and missiles, as well as deployments of elite light infantry, gunners and engineers from Pyongyang. Tehran has sold drones and drone technologies, while imports of Beijing’s dual-use industrial components have soared.

Now Iran is using three key assets to expand the war around its energy-rich neighborhood, generating global economic chaos; to strike its Israeli and U.S. enemies; and to protect its own assets.

One is its homegrown supply of Shahed drones, a weapons-class that is cheap and easy to build en masse.

Another is its missiles — North Korean-produced weapons that outrange drones, carry heavier payloads and come with warheads packed with cluster munitions.

Finally, there are Iran’s North Korean-inspired and North Korean-built underground facilities that hide drones, missiles, engineering plants — and possibly fissile materials.

U.S. Marines, paratroops and special forces are converging on the Gulf, potentially heralding a new phase in the war. Their targets are unknown, but may include seizing key islands in the Gulf, occupying stretches of strategic littoral on the Strait of Hormuz and hunting for hidden uranium.

In all cases, the hideous realities of tunnel fighting beckon — making Iran’s “come closer” invitation last week to U.S. ground forces truly chilling.

North Korea’s arms bazaar

“North Korea has supplied Iran with most of the missile systems that hit its Arab neighbors, Israel and U.S. bases,” Bruce Bechtol, a former U.S. Marine and current professor of political science at Angelo State University told The Washington Times. “They also supplied them with underground facilities that they hide their missile systems in, and between 1996-2006, the North Koreans — and China too, but North Korea more so — provided 46 fast attack craft to the Iranian Navy.”

In addition, North Korea has supplied Iran with a flotilla of “Yonho” (“Salmon”)-class mini-submarines, he said. A Yonho is believed to have sunk the South Korean corvette Cheonan in the Yellow Sea in 2010.

Mr. Bechtol, co-author of “Rogue Allies” The Strategic Partnership Between Iran and North Korea” (2025) has long has eyes on the two states. He served as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency from 1997-2003 and as senior analyst for Northeast Asia in the Intelligence Directorate of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

Virtually all Tehran’s missiles are sourced from North Korea, he stated. Trade began with Soviet-style Scuds supplied in the 1980s, then what Iran calls the Qiam, the North Korean Rodong, a modified Scud with a range of some 930 miles, in the 1990s.

“The Iranians liked them so much, they asked the North Koreans to build factories,” Mr. Bechtol said.

That was followed in the 2000s, by the Musadan, or Hwasong 10, an intermediate range ballistic missile, dubbed the “Guam Killer” for its range. Known in Iran as the Khorramshahr, it can cover 2,500 miles.

Mr. Bechtol is convinced that it was a brace of Khorramshahrs Iran launched March 20 and March 21 against the joint British-U.S. base on Diego Garcia.

“They have the range, and they often break up in flight,” he said — as one Iranian missile reportedly did. “They are not very stable,” he said.

The most formidable technology transferred is the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, propelled with an engine with 80 tons of thrust, Mr. Bechtol said.

Iran and North Korea are both heavily sanctioned by, and postured against, the U.S., factors encouraging bilateral relations date back decades.

North Korea’s trade with energy-rich Iran earned it an estimated $3 billion annually in recent years, Mr. Bechtol said. Exports not only went to Iran, but also to Iran’s regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. The loss of Syria as a supply channel has cut off Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

“Iran paid for all that stuff,” he said. “It’s much bigger than helping Iran with missiles.”

Though Pyongyang assisted Tehran’s arms factory builds, it still sends specialized components and personnel, Mr. Bechtol said.

Pyongyang has deployed “hundreds of guys over there, they rotate them — technical guys, engineers, business guys,” he said. “Around eight years ago there was a South Korean undercover agent running a guy working at the airport in Tehran, and that guy reported how many people were coming in from North Korea.”

Personnel traffic “intensified after the 12-day war,” Mr. Bechtol said, referencing the June 2025 Israeli-U.S. aerial campaign. He is uncertain if North Koreans remain in-country: They could have escaped across the Caspian Sea to Russia.

Weaknesses are built into North Korean missiles: Unlike Chinese, Russian and U.S. strategic projectiles, none are launched from silos.

“The stuff built by the North Koreans can’t be launched from underground: They have to roll them out on a transporter erector launcher,” Mr. Bechtol said, referencing slow-moving, long-flatbed vehicles that move and elevate missiles.

When they trundle out of underground bases, or from under, say, a bridge, a window of opportunity exists to spot and destroy them, pre-launch.

That assumes comprehensive oversight and high-speed kill chains. Oversight is complicated by Iran’s underground facilities.

“I’m sure they have a lot of imagery, the people looking for these sites,” said Mr. Bechtol. “My guess would be we still don’t know where a lot of them are.”

’Nightmare ant’s nest’

Mr. Bechtol cites various North Korean entities being engaged in the Middle East, including Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, described by the U.S. Treasury as “Pyongyang’s premier arms dealer” and Green Pine Associated Corporation, a body linked to mining, trade and sanctions evasion.

“Most of Iran’s underground facilities — including Isfahan [uranium storage site] — were built in the early 2000s by North Koreans, who are better at underground facilities than anyone else on earth,” Mr. Bechtol said. “They have done it since the Korean War.”

North Korea initiated the 1950-53 Korean War, invading South Korea. When the U.S. entered the fray, North Korea had to find responses to massed U.S. fire.

Veterans recall North Koreans concealing self-propelled guns in hillside tunnels and caves while the regime and its people dug in under one of the heaviest bombing campaigns ever.

Postwar, the rubble of capital Pyongyang was bulldozed to create the square made famous on TV news spots, over which leaders watch troops goose step and TELs roll.

Today, the country boasts probably the world’s largest per-capita range of bunkered facilities. These include heavy artillery positions and even air bases dug into mountainsides.

“They have focused on it so long, they’ve even dug tunnels for Hezbollah,” Mr. Bechtol said.  

Both Hezbollah and Hamas have shown expertise in tunnel combat.

Tunnels lead attacking troops into claustrophobic traps. Unable to maneuver or call in air or armored strikes, they are channeled onto enemy defenses.

“North Korea is like an ant farm, a very challenging place to fight in,” said a retired South Korean senior officer.

“It is not the kind of tunnel a tank would fit into, many are narrow — like we see in Gaza — with lots of turns, multiple vertical layers, you don’t know what’s there, lots of booby traps,” he said. “It’s a nightmare.”

Potential solutions include flooding tunnels with water, or gasoline, which can be ignited. Both methods are frowned upon.

“That’s humanitarian b———-!” said the officer, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “It is more probable that [U.S. troops] will use robots and drones, and in Gaza war dogs were used extensively — and a lot were killed.”

Whether it will come to that is unknown. So, too, is the outcome of a clearly troubled campaign.

Both Tehran and Pyongyang have track records of resisting U.S. aerial assault. Absent total victory and regime change in Iran, bilateral relations will resume, Mr. Bechtol warns.

“If we allow the current Iranian regime to continue to exist, the North Koreans will go right back in and rearm them as soon as the war is over,” he said. “It’s what they did after the 12-day war; I am hopeful our decision makers will keep that in mind moving forward.”