Monday, Jun. 09, 2003
In the dark chambers of South Korea's notorious spy agency, Kim Nak
Joong paid the price for consorting with the enemy. As a young scholar
with an idealistic desire to see the Korean peninsula united, Kim
traveled to the communist North as a self-styled peace broker. In South
Korea 40 years ago, that made him a North Korean spy. The agency's
interrogators beat him with a metal pipe, screaming at him to confess
that he'd been sent by Pyongyang to foment revolution. "When I passed
out, they'd throw ice water on me," recalls Kim, now a frail
grandfather. "Or they'd put a wet towel over my face and pour water on
it so I couldn't breathe. When I passed out, they'd beat me again."
Kim, who was convicted of spying and spent a combined 14 years in jail
before being released in 1998, is just one of thousands of South Koreans
who ran afoul of the country's National Intelligence Service (NIS).
Founded in 1961, the agency was infamous during the cold war for its
ruthless pursuit of enemies—real and perceived—of the
country's right-wing, authoritarian leaders. As South Korea has evolved
into a progressive democracy, however, the agency's vicious methods and
anticommunist agenda have increasingly become an outdated national
embarrassment. Now, the reform-minded administration of South Korean
President Roh Moo Hyun has set about rehabilitating the agency—or,
as some believe, castrating it.
Since taking office in February, Roh, a former human-rights lawyer, has
filled top NIS posts not with professional spy chasers but with
left-leaning protégés who, like him, favor peaceful dialog
with militaristic North Korea. The agency's new director is former
human-rights lawyer Ko Young Koo, who fought to get Kim Nak Joong, the
aforementioned scholar, released a decade ago. "We need someone who will
set the agency straight," Roh told his Cabinet in late April. New
management is just the beginning. Under a reform blueprint announced
last month, the agency's domestic-spying operations will be curtailed
and its anticommunist bureau abolished, according to an NIS spokesman.
Hundreds of operatives whose jobs were to infiltrate "subversive"
groups, including labor unions, now have a more prosaic mission:
lawfully gathering intelligence on foreign-business competitors
overseas.
The overhaul is overdue. Latter-day corruption scandals involving the
NIS, agents of which have been routinely called upon to do powerful
politicians' dirty work, have crippled presidencies and dragged the
agency's name through the mud. But conservative lawmakers are worried
the housecleaning comes at an inopportune time, during a period of
heightened tension over North Korea's nuclear-weapons development. The
NIS will still ferret out North Korean spies. But the job of catching
domestic sympathizers will be passed to the country's police. The fear
is that the shift in responsibilities, as well as efforts to make the
NIS more accountable, will make the agency a toothless tiger—giving
freer rein to the thousands of North Korean agents believed to be
operating in the South. "We seem to have forgotten that North Korea is
communist and is still eager to reunify the two Koreas under communism,"
says lawmaker Hahm Seung Heui, a member of the bipartisan National
Assembly's Intelligence Committee.
Critics see Roh's appointment of liberal lawyers and activists to run
the NIS as a political gambit to further his policy of engagement with
the North. With Ko at the helm, "the agency will be pro-North Korean,"
fumes Chung Hyung Keun, a conservative lawmaker and former spy catcher.
Chung defends some of the NIS abuses, saying that too much focus on them
has made martyrs of men like Kim Nak Joong, who Chung says was indeed a
spy and accepted money from North Koreans. Adds Lee Dong Bok, a former
intelligence official: "The agency is our last bulwark against North
Korean aggression. It must be viewed by North Korea as a foe to be
reckoned with."
Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae Jung—who said South Korean agents tried
to kill him three times in his days as a democratic activist—also
vowed to clean up the agency. But by the end of Kim's presidential term
in February, he was embroiled in a scandal over charges that the NIS
illegally funneled money to Kim Jong Il to buy the North Korean
dictator's participation in a June 2000 summit. "Every new government
promises to make the spy service neutral," says Ahn Chung Si, a
political scientist at Seoul National University. "But they all end up
abusing it." Roh may fare better. That would satisfy Kim Nak Joong, who
admits meeting North Koreans but denies spying for them. "What I went
through was beyond description," he says. "No one should have to go
through it again."
—With reporting by Mingi Hyun
From the Jun. 16, 2003 issue of TIME Asia Magazine
Naming the Dead: With hopes of finding survivors fading, relatives and scientists turn to the grim task of identifying victims
Race Against Time: As global charity surges, aid workers hit the ground in Asia. An inside look at the rush to beat disease, hunger and the destruction of the tsunami
