If my hypothetical daughter made a great show of buying an extra cellphone purely for calling that boyfriend I hated, and then kept announcing, with remarkable equanimity, that he wouldn’t answer because he was angry at her for siding with me, I’d smell a rat.
But no sooner was an inter-Korean hotline established with fanfare in 2018 than the commentariat began thinking it vital to communication between the two governments. Forgotten was the fact that Moon’s first appointee as spy boss had said his mission lay in bringing about a Kim-Moon summit, read: in conducting secret diplomacy. Forgotten a little later was the fact that his successor Park Jie-won had done prison time in connection with the illicit transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Kim Jong Il.
The old rivalry and ill will between Moon and Park is well-known; he was appointed because the North is known to trust him. The intelligence agency has since handed off much of the work of spy-catching to the under-equipped police, so as not to complicate the secret inter-Korean diplomacy that now constitutes its core function. By secret I mean primarily: secret from the country both governments regard as the main obstacle to the “peace system.”
Even Americans who believe Alger Hiss was innocent wouldn’t necessarily want his calligraphy to enjoy pride of place at CIA headquarters. But the ROK intelligence agency now has a state-loyalty-slogan slab in front of it inscribed, as a wink to the nationalist left, in the distinctive “font” of Shin Young-bok, who did several years for belonging to a North-funded underground party committed to toppling the ROK. (Moon and Kim Yo-jong posed in front of Shin’s calligraphy in 2018.) In short, the last thing these two co-ethnic neighboring states either want or need to depend on are formal liaison lines Uncle Sam knows about.
But because many Americans consider secret diplomacy immoral, sinister, and behind the global-transparent times, and therefore prefer to believe it’s rare, especially among their country’s allies, they respond warily to mentions of it, as if to outlandish conspiracy theories. Perhaps the greater problem is that, as the German Sinologist Harro von Senger has put it, Westerners tend to be “stratagem-blind” — obtuse to the employment of tricks and ruses by countries that do not share our moral disapproval of them.
So when the South said the North wasn’t answering hotline calls, it could only mean the peace drive was “back to square one,” even if Moon seemed to take the setback remarkably well.
In various interviews with KBS World Radio I differed strongly with this consensus. I also warned (here too) against taking the demolition of the liaison office at face value. To sum up what I said then: The two Koreas’ outward relationship must never get too far ahead of the US-DPRK relationship, lest the Americans doubt that Pyongyang would respond to a US strike by flattening Seoul. The ostentatious freeze of inter-Korean relations after the Hanoi summit (2019) served the same security purpose as the one that followed George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech (2002).
The Biden administration having since allayed Kim’s fears to a certain extent, inter-Korean communication can again be admitted to; the ROK government announced that Kim and Moon have been in epistolary contact for the past three months. We’re to believe that the younger man was moved in some way by an unremarkable-sounding letter Moon sent on 27 April 2021, the third anniversary of their first summit in 2018. The two Koreas needed a plausible reason for his purported change of heart and this was all they had. If the anti-Moon fury the dictatorship displayed last year had been genuine, neither a letter nor the passage of so little time would have assuaged it.
Of course, admitting to discussion is one thing, and filling America in on the things discussed another, as we should remember from the Roh government’s assurances that the maritime border hadn’t come up at the 2007 summit in Pyongyang.
The Biden administration gamely welcomed the restoration of inter-Korean liaison lines, but it must have known for months about the Moon-Kim letters, if not about the “underwater” or mulmit’ talks we can assume went on all along. Last May, when our president first expressed support for inter-Korean agreements that commit our ally to the pursuit of confederation with our enemy, I wondered if he’d done so in the innocent confidence that Kim would never answer Moon’s calls anyway.
Now I find his endorsement even harder to understand, though perhaps he and his people merely skimmed the relevant ROK-DPRK declarations; Washington has always had the collective philological instinct of a block of wood. In an interesting NK News interview the other day Wi Sung-lac, who was the ROK’s nuclear envoy under Lee Myung Bak, said that no US president but Trump could have signed a deal as obviously bad as the Singapore agreement. I sure hope he’s right.
Pak Byeong-seok, the speaker of the National Assembly, responded to the hotline news by saying that “a meeting of the North and South Korean assemblies is always possible.” For years now nationalist-left thinkers — including Moon’s mentor Paek Nak-cheong — have advocated just such a coming-together of the South’s elected lawmakers and Kim Jong-un’s rubber-stampers as a crucial step on the road to confederation.
It would indeed be hard to promote confederation without first presenting the Kim dictatorship as something within hailing distance of the South Korean political system. (Not that some people here — including election officials in what conservatives wryly call A Certain Region — don’t already argue that it’s a democracy.) The ROK intelligence agency’s effort to arrange a papal visit to North Korea, thereby creating an impression of religious freedom, is another part of the endeavor to legitimize the regime as a partner. By the way, it was that same agency which handled the technical side of restoring the hotline, and not its front organization the Unification Ministry.
Prominent conservatives here have been saying that the alleged resumption of dialogue is of no great importance; there may be another empty “peace show” or two staged (as the 2007 summit was) with a view to boosting the Minjoo candidate in the presidential election, but the North will not disarm. Well, of course it won’t, as Moon knows fully well, but asserting the unbridgeable distance between the two governments is very different from warning against their dark collusion, which was the opposition strategy in the Sunshine Years.
Why the change? Because the unprincipled parliamentary right and the three conservative newspapers want to see the patrimonial feeding-trough widened through constitutional revision, which cannot be negotiated with the ruling party in an atmosphere of fundamental ideological conflict. Taking these people for staunch defenders of the US-ROK alliance would be as foolish as taking the Moon camp for liberals.
UPDATE: 3 August 2021: Park Jie-won resigns?
For what it’s worth the conservative Youtube channel Garosero Research Institute has just announced (9:46 am) that Park Jie-won has resigned from his post as director of the National Intelligence Service. Yet Park is to address the National Assembly this morning.
Six hours later (3:45 pm) there is still no confirmation of Garosero’s story, though it may be relevant that a ruling party lawmaker at this morning’s hearing characterized Park’s testimony, in which he called for a “flexible response” to Pyongyang’s demand for cancellation of US-ROK military exercises, as the director’s personal position and not the official one of the NIS. On the other hand it is common for the ruling camp to try to have things both ways; the government has in the past responded to Moon Chung-in’s provocative brusqueries by claiming the special envoy was speaking as a private citizen. If Park has indeed handed in his resignation, it would seem that President Moon has yet to accept it.
UPDATE: 5 August 2021: NIS denies reports of Park’s resignation
The National Intelligence Service has dismissed Garosero’s report as “groundless,” but the Youtube channel, which has quite a good track record over the past year or so, has since altered its story only to the effect that Park handed in his resignation some time ago. We should perhaps keep in mind here that Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae handed in her resignation weeks before Moon finally let her go.
What I found interesting was the government’s contradiction of Park’s rather obvious assertion in the Tuesday hearings that the impetus to reconnect the hotline came from Kim Jong Un. It was, we’re told, a decision made in mutual consultation. This seems an odd correction, inasmuch as the South had allegedly been asking for re-connection for some time; surely it was Kim’s decision that then made it reality. But as the election nears, the government is growing more sensitive to the charge that it takes orders from the North.
As for the official emphasis on Park’s having spoken as a private person, it may have resulted largely from his undiplomatic disclosure of the North Korean elite’s urgent need for imported liquor and suits. (The usual strategy in DPRK-sympathetic circles is to argue that sanctions are only felt by the poor.) We’re reminded here that while Park has hitherto got on famously well with the Kim clan — first the Dear Leader and more recently Kim Yo-jong — he’s not a true-blue nationalist leftist, but a former US-based businessman who became involved in inter-Korean relations through his connection to Kim Dae Jung. In contrast the de facto # 2 in the NIS, Park Seon-won, led the Yonsei branch of the revolutionary pro-North group Sammintu, and did a few years in prison in the 1980s for his role in the occupation of the US Cultural Center in Seoul. That, combined with his more recent record of loudly denying the North’s role in sinking the Cheonan, makes for a superior background from the ruling camp’s perspective — and perhaps now from Pyongyang’s too.
Update: 10 August 2021: The Cheongju Four
Predictably enough, some Moon-supportive Korea watchers on Twitter have been trying to present the news of the recent arrests in Cheongju as a sign that their man is security-conscious after all. The first and most obvious thing to be said here is that the rank and file of the NIS did not sign up to provide support for “underwater” inter-Korean diplomacy and are still more conservative than their top officials. Second, the green light to investigate at least one of the Cheongju suspects was allegedly given before Moon took over in May 2017, and considerable evidence was amassed before Park Jie-won became NIS chief last year.
Considering its penchant for appointing people who did prison time for violating the National Security Act, and its determination to have the police take over all the work of spy-catching by 2024, the Moon administration is unlikely to have had much interest in seeing this investigation carried to term. Especially not a) with an election in the offing, b) the accused having been active in a formal capacity in Moon’s campaign in 2017, c) their North Korean handlers having exhorted them to whip up support for the official “reform” drive, and d) a lot of the sleuthing having been of a kind the police couldn’t have done.
This last is usually the case in ROK counterintelligence, for the simple reason that most illicit inter-Korean encounters take place in China. Which I suspect is why the police must get the job in the nascent “peace system,” though the official spin, as I understand it, is that the intelligence agency has too notorious a record of abusing power. (As if the police’s record weren’t just as bad.)
But it isn’t easy yet to kill an official investigation of illegal activity once it’s well underway and yielding incriminating evidence. The police’s new “security investigation office” had no choice but to get involved in January 2021. The main charge against the Cheongju Four, apparently, is “accomplishment of purpose,” the carrying out of North Korean instructions by, among other things, delivering information about members of the (pro-North) Minjung Party.
The irony is that while Park Jie-won naturally tried to keep all this from becoming a big news story, the openly pro-North press complained while the suspects’ domiciles were being searched on 27 May; it even named all four, as the mainstream media are yet to do, and left online an older article with a photograph of one of them protesting (as allegedly instructed by the North) against deployment of the F-35A Stealth. What’s more, the man in question was bold enough, or confident enough of support in high places, to use his own little news outlet (since shut down) to criticize Park Jie-won. Even at that late time, allegedly, reports were still being sent to the North, including — a sign of disunity in the NIS — the names of the agents investigating the group.
If the rumor of Park’s having tried to resign is true, his failure to impress the “people’s will” on the NIS might have something to do with it, as some on the right have already asserted. All this takes me back to how the intelligence agency ruined the Roh administration’s plan to install Song Du-yul at Seoul National University by letting the South Korean public know that he was, in his other life, a Workers’ Party official of some importance.
The question now, according to Yeom Don-je, a former NIS man who’s been very critical of the government, is whether anything is heard in the next several months about the dozens of other people allegedly investigated in connection with the Cheongju Four. As for our Korea watchers’ claims that the Blue House remains committed to counterintelligence despite wanting the police to do it, I suppose I’ll believe this when people are caught who came under suspicion after the first Moon-Kim summit.
UPDATE: 12 August 2021: Sure enough?
The Kookmin Ilbo reports that the National Intelligence Service’s investigation into the Cheongju spy group was downsized and put on a back burner by Moon’s first NIS chief Suh Hoon, a man appointed in large part, as I said at the time, for his famous rapport with North Korean officials. The article says too little about that alleged downsizing, and deals too heavily in the word atmosphere, for me to ascribe much weight to it. The “atmosphere of inter-Korean reconciliation” in 2018 resulted, both in the NIS and the prosecutors’ office, in an “atmosphere of trying to block the investigation,” but the responsible team kept amassing evidence regardless, and this year it took advantage of the shift in public perceptions of inter-Korean relations (or was it the decline in Moon’s poll numbers?) to speed up things.
I see nothing at all in this report to indicate that Suh Hoon or Park Jie-won obstructed the investigation. Doesn’t every bureaucracy intuitively shift its priorities when a new administration comes in? Then again, the NIS would likely have encountered more than just a discouraging atmosphere had it focused on people of more importance. Anyone conversant with a) East Berlin’s complete infiltration of the West German power elite and b) the ideological leanings of South Korea’s ruling camp will understand that the extent of infiltration is likely to be far greater here. Seeing as how the North Koreans were able to afford $20,000 for the relatively trivial services of the Cheongju Four, and that’s only the payment the NIS found proof of, they still have as large a budget for covert operations as ever. (The dictatorship was throwing spy money around even in the famine years.) If the NIS needed so much time just to catch this amateurish quartet, it’s hard to see how the police could do a much worse job.
17 August 2021: The plot thickens
The prosecutors only have about a month left in which to bring charges, which is very little time to ascertain the full extent to which the suspects carried out instructions allegedly received from the Kim regime. Now seen as more important than the order to protest against F-35 deployment are the instructions to the group to a) make use of its contacts in the ruling party and b) recruit some 60 people into serving the North.
The natural assumption is that at least some of the targets of recruitment were members of the Minjoo Party and the administration. But the last thing the Moon camp wants in the run-up to presidential elections in 2022 are any embarrassing revelations on this front.
Since the Druking affair was uncovered in early 2018, candlelight-revolutionary strategy has been to slow all unwelcome prosecutorial and judicial proceedings down to a crawl, so that cases drag on until after the public has lost all interest. See for example the keywords: Ulsan mayoral race; embezzlement of donations to former “comfort women,” Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor. When trials finally get underway they are adjourned at the drop of a hat for weeks at a time. The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce pace is in sharp contrast to the speed with which veterans of the last two administrations (aka “forces of accumulated ills”) were whizzed through the courts and into prison in 2017-18.
It’s not all that surprising, then, that Seoul has apparently denied the Cheongju prosecutors’ request for reinforcements. Nope, not a single extra prosecutor with relevant experience shall the sleepy provincial city get to handle the biggest spy case since Wangjaesan in 2011. (I have a hunch this will change if the newspapers raise a big enough fuss.) The man now expected to lead the investigation is one Song Gang. Formerly of Seoul, he was only recently relegated to Cheongju after helping investigate — bad career move — a particularly embarrassing ruling-camp scandal: the illegal imposition of a travel ban on a veteran of the Park administration.
UPDATE: 11 October 2021: BBC report on former North Korean intelligence official
The BBC’s Laura Bicker has interviewed Kim Kuk-song, a former North Korean official who defected to South Korea several years ago.
“I can tell you that North Korean operatives are playing an active role in various civil society organisations as well as important institutions in South Korea.”
The BBC has no way of verifying this claim….But NK News data suggests that far fewer people have been arrested in South Korea for spy-related offenses since 2017, as the North turns to new technologies, rather than old fashioned spies, for intelligence gathering. (Laura Bicker, “Drugs, arms, and terror: A high-profile defector on Kim’s North Korea,” BBC, 11 October 2021.)
I can think of a more plausible reason why far fewer spies have been caught since 2017, and I dare say Kim Kuk-song — whose statement was in the present tense after all — would have given it, had he been asked.
