Several years ago one of the big Washington think tanks hosted a forum at a hotel in Seoul. The audience consisted mostly of officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but I’d had been invited (by one of the co-sponsors, I think) along with about a dozen other foreigners.
The head of the think tank, an elderly American, got things rolling with a long and leisurely speech. In it he informed his elite South Korean listeners that their ancient nation had endured decades of Japanese colonial rule, only to be divided in two when it ended. Then a terrible war had broken out, leaving great destruction in its wake; and although the republic was rescued by its foreign friends, it languished in poverty for years, before going through one of the most remarkable economic transformations in world history… cars, semi-conductors, cellphones; Samsung and Hyundai, household names… North Korea, meanwhile, famine, nuclear program… but together, an alliance forged in blood, the US and South Korea, etc, etc.
No doubt I’m misremembering some parts, but that was the gist. Having read more Juche texts than the average person I can lay claim to a high boredom threshold, but twenty minutes in I thought I was losing my mind. I’d come up from Busan for this? Yet the South Korean officials in my row, arms folded, eyes half-closed, were letting the speech wash over them with a kind of somnolent approval.
Later I asked a native how South Koreans could possibly look to such people, such institutions, for analysis of this part of the world. He answered that it wasn’t about analysis. It was about giving the Washingtonians face and stature here, in return for their opening doors for ROK officials over there.
True or not, that assertion came back to me the other day upon reading the allegations against Sue Mi Terry, a CFR member and former CIA agent who until a week ago was an even more common fixture at Beltway Korea events than Victor Cha. If the indictment is correct, Terry spent at least 10 years working for South Korea’s intelligence agency: taking requests for op-eds on particular topics, conveying information and documents acquired at meetings with top US officials, and letting into that exalted company the South Korean “wolf” (her choice of words) in diplomat’s clothing. All this without having registered as a foreign agent.
As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, our foreign policy establishment (henceforth: FPE) generally leans softline on North Korea, while accommodating a minority of hawks for hedging purposes. Hence the curious note of indulgence that has long characterized Beltway discussion of the dictatorship. While journalists and experts play up the autocratic power that Putin and Xi allegedly enjoy, the North Korea spin goes in the opposite direction: toward downplaying Kim Jong Un’s power, and pretending that this is an actual socialist party-state, with a second and third in command, following set procedures. A somber fuss is made about party conferences, as if we hadn’t learned after the Cold War how unimportant even the Soviet ones had been. It wasn’t long ago that a State Department official assured us in a well-received book that North Korea is a budding pluralist order, its Rodong Sinmun newspaper a lively forum for hawk-dove contention over foreign policy.
Ri Il-gyu, the latest defector from North Korea’s diplomatic corps, tried to set the record straight a few days ago by making clear that Kim’s giant fiefdom is hardly a state at all, but as Ian Robinson said, “it is the nature of fallacies to survive refutation.” Although the tone of our North Korea commentary has hardened since last year’s Putin-Kim summit, it will likely soften again next year. South Korean conservatives who think Trump is their only problem need to understand that Foggy Bottom was as furious with him after the Hanoi summit as the Blue House was.
So I’m not surprised that the first Korea watcher indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act wasn’t one of the activists in the diaspora “peace movement” who meet with North Korean operatives, or one of the dovish Americans whom the Kim Jong Il regime helped to a lucrative expert status through repeated invitations to special-access tours, but was instead a relative conservative or hardliner. Relative, because no principled conservative would have hosted, as Terry did, that Jeju conference at the Woodrow in 2022, which I suspect had been conceived during the Moon administration. But fear of a wider crackdown seems to have gripped the entire commentariat, judging from the refusal of doves and hawks alike to go on record about this case.
The indictment is interesting. I’m surprised that someone can be virtually forced out of the CIA for excessive coziness with foreign spies and still pass the security clearance needed to work in the White House. Did no one think to ask Terry why she’d left? Even then, ROK intelligence was known to be heavily infiltrated by people working for Pyongyang or Beijing. I also infer that no great urgency attaches to investigations like these, Terry having steadily become more prominent for years after the authorities had amassed quite significant evidence against her.
More nuggets: 1) some think-tank analysts get an unrestricted “gift” account which they can draw from at their discretion, 2) even foreign governments are aware of such accounts, 3) ROK intelligence, despite a famously huge budget, pays a paltry $500 for a bespoke op-ed, and 4) the idea for the Nuclear Consultative Group originated in Seoul and not Washington.
It’s only right that Uncle Sam should care deeply whether a Beltway Korea expert is consciously spreading propaganda on behalf of our FPE or on behalf of a foreign government. From an intellectual or academic standpoint, however, the distinction is trivial. No researcher taking cues from anyone else can be regarded as a disinterested source of information or analysis. This isn’t to say that we can’t derive benefit from such people’s work (which is usually very well funded) if we approach it critically, just as we can learn much of value even from North Korean texts. But nothing they say should be taken on trust.
Unfortunately the tankies aren’t the only ones “in the tank.” Remember that North Korean Studies as an academic field didn’t branch out organically from Korean Studies; it sprang straight out of the FPE, which funded, groomed and promoted our first “academic ward boss.” Not for nothing do invitations to Washington events carry a special cachet for North Korea scholars, including non-American ones. Make that: especially non-American ones. Stature in our field has always derived more from such badges of power-elite approval or patronage than from original insight or research.
Which is why our second “academic ward boss” continued to appear at university and think-tank events for 3 years after being exposed as the most prolific fabricator of sources in US academic history. Only when the FPE university par excellence announced it was forcing him into retirement did the Beltway and academia simultaneously cut him loose. (Terry studied at Columbia’s Weatherhead Institute during Armstrong’s time there.) Although the NYT and Wapo show great interest in academic scandals, they kept deathly quiet about that one, which might otherwise have undermined public faith in the foreign-policy expertocracy.
“Treating former intelligence officers as disinterested sources of news is highly problematic,” as Stephen Marmura has written. Problematic for us, certainly, not least because we know how little weight attaches to former in that context. But the FPE, wanting to keep this discussion “in house” so as to guard against heterodox expression, wants us all to accept a record of CIA, State or NSC service as the mark of a supremely authoritative Korea analyst.
By far the worse problem is that the commentariat’s academic wing, the wing with the better language skills, meekly accepts this hierarchy. When Harvard University hosted a Korean security “summit” in 2022, did it call on any of the young and promising American scholars in the field, of whom even I could name a dozen?
Of course not. It called on Sue Mi Terry.
UPDATE: Greenwald on Terry: 28 July 2024:
If you have time, listen to Glenn Greenwald’s podcast about Terry and her husband, Wapo journalist Max Boot. Among other things, it highlights the couple’s recent criticism of Trump’s “obsession” with reducing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea. Greenwald:
Just to be clear, Trump’s point of view is that South Korea is a booming, thriving economy, and their citizens have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, and so Trump’s argument is, “Why are we paying to protect you, when you’re not contributing economically at all, and we’re paying for everything,” and he forced them to increase the amount of subsidies like he’s trying to do with NATO, and Max Boot and his spy-wife, his ex-CIA wife…[are] here to say that Trump is evil for even pressuring the South Korean government to do anything.
I’d never heard of Boot before this business, but apparently he was in the vanguard of the Russiagate rumormongers later refuted by the Durham Report. Greenwald makes no secret of his dislike for the fellow, and I think it gets the better of him here. South Korea had hardly been paying nothing, and nowhere in the piece is the former president called evil.
Perhaps more importantly: our very own FPE always opposed Trump on the point in question. Anything smacking of a desire to cut military spending is anathema to those people, because anathema to the capital class they answer to. Throughout Trump’s term, our media and think tanks used the troop-costs issue to misrepresent him, as I noted critically at the time, “as a wanton sower of disunity in the alliance,” with nary a word about Moon’s pursuit of a North-South confederation. (Here, for example, is a Wapo article of Anna Fifield’s from 2017.)
So Boot and Terry might well have written an op-ed in much the same vein even without prompting from the NIS. But there can be little doubt that South Korean inducements have done much to keep the relevant Beltway consensus firm over the years. (Even conservatives here have had to acknowledge that the Moon government’s lobbying blitz in Washington helped save South Korea billions of dollars.)
Enforcement of FARA won’t do a whole lot for the quality of our Korea reporting and analysis, then, but it’s a start. I tip my hat to Glenn Greenwald for making clear that the indictment isn’t the puzzling overreaction to “small potatoes” that other news outlets have been presenting it as.
