HOW SOUTH KOREA'S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE QUIETLY PUSHES PEACE TALKS
By Tim Shorrock, Deep State Blog.
November 1, 2020 | CREATE!
Above photo: South Korean president Moon Jae-In and Donald Trump.
Tensions between the two Koreas escalated again last month after a South
Korean fisheries official, possibly attempting to defect, was shot dead by
North Korean army troops after he swam across their disputed maritime border
known as the Northern Limit Line.
A shocked President Moon Jae-in, who has made engagement with North Korea
the centerpiece of his administration, demanded an explanation. Some US
"experts" boldly predicted that North Korea had killed off Moon's peace
initiative.
Within days, however, the tables were turned. On September 25th, Kim made an
unprecedented public apology to South Korea for the "unsavory" killing,
which he admitted (rightly) had "delivered a big disappointment" to the
people of the South." Moon responded that Kim had reaffirmed "his hope that
inter-Korean relations will not fall apart," and his ruling Democratic Party
proposed a joint investigation with Pyongyang (that has yet to happen).
Another crisis on the Korean peninsula had apparently been averted.
Why Spies?
Significantly, Kim's apology was not sent through diplomatic channels but
came from the United Front Department (UFD), an arm of the North Korean
intelligence service that has historically overseen North-South relations
and operations. The letter was transmitted to President Moon through Park
Jie-Won, the newly appointed director of South Korea's National Intelligence
Service (NIS).
Those relationships, and South Korea's alliance with the United States, will
be seriously tested by the upcoming US election. Ever since the collapse of
the US-DPRK talks in Hanoi in March 2019, the Moon government has been
trying to convince Trump and the US national security establishment to be
more flexible on the issue of sanctions so North and South can move ahead on
inter-Korean economic projects they agreed to in 2018. That was the topic of
recent meetings in Washington between Moon's top nuclear envoy and the Trump
administration. Another key issue is the US pressure on South Korea to join
its anti-China alliance, which Moon has resisted.
With Joe Biden promising to work more closely with allies while being
tougher on both North Korea and China, Seoul - and the NIS - face difficult
choices in the months ahead.
Architects Of 'Sunshine'
How the NIS - the successor to the KCIA, once one of the most feared spy
agencies in the world - came to play a central role in the Korea peace
process is a little-known story that explains much about South Korea today
and its progressive leadership under President Moon.
At the same time, it reflects the precarious state of North-South relations
since earlier this year, when Kim's government cut off most communication
with Seoul, blew up a joint liaison office just north of the DMZ, and
sharply criticized Moon for being too dependent on the United States.
Since the failure of the Hanoi Summit in February 2019, President Trump has
lost interest in the North Korea issue, leaving South Korea to strategize
about how to keep the possibility of peace and reunification alive.
In July, Moon appointed Park Jie-won as NIS director as part of a shakeup of
his national security team designed to get his stalled talks with the North
back on track. Park is widely known as the architect of the "Sunshine
Policy" towards the North initiated and championed by former President Kim
Dae Jung. (Kim, who led the democratic opposition for many years was once
kidnapped and nearly executed by the KCIA; in 1998 he was elected
president.)
At the NIS, Park replaced Suh Hoon, a longtime NIS officer who is now Moon's
national security adviser. Suh, too, has been involved with inter-Korean
affairs for many years. During the 1990s, Suh was a top official with the
consortium organized by the US, South Korea and Japan to build a light-water
reactor in the North as part of the 1994 "Agreed Framework" with Kim Jong
Il. Signed by President Clinton, the agreement averted the first nuclear
crisis.
According to NK News, Suh "has probably lived in North Korea longer than any
other South Korean since the end of the Korean War."
Getting Trump To The Table
Because of his many contacts with the North, Suh was pivotal to President
Moon's peace overture in 2018. That initiative began during the Winter
Olympics, when the new president invited North Korea to participate in the
games and Kim Jong Un sent the highest-level delegation from Pyongyang ever
to cross the DMZ into the South.
A few weeks later, Suh and Chung Eui-yong, then Moon's national security
adviser, met secretly in Pyongyang with Kim, who communicated to them his
willingness to meet with Trump as a way to defuse tensions over their
confrontation over North Korea's nuclear and missile tests.
Not long after, Suh and Chung flew to Washington, where they passed Kim's
request to Trump at the White House. In the months leading up to the
Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, Suh and the NIS, along with Andrew Kim, then
the director of the CIA's Korea Mission Center, remained in close touch with
North Korea's intelligence officials.
When Kim sent a representative to Washington to pave the way for Singapore,
it was Kim Yong Chol, the former head of the UFD known (and feared) for
directing North Korea's top spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau.
Once these discussions got into the realm of establishing a formal end to
the war and building a peace process, the spies stepped back and the
diplomats took over.
As I reported in The Nation in 2018, that process was just beginning in the
wake of Singapore. And after the US-DPRK talks collapsed in Hanoi in 2019,
it was back to the spies. Suh went to Pyongyang to discuss how to get the
process back on track.
CIA Vs. NIS
Yet, even as the NIS works in tandem with the CIA, their goals are very
different. US intelligence views North Korea only in adversarial terms.
During Trump's talks with Kim, the agency has consistently argued that the
DPRK is "unlikely" to give up its nuclear arsenal. For the NIS, however, the
purpose of dialogue and engagement is to reconcile and fulfill the national
goal of eventual unification with the North.
The difference between the NIS and the CIA is not just one of policy but of
the very conception of the North Korean issue.
One of the clearest explanations of the South Korean perspective comes from
Lim Dong-won, a former NIS director-general and Minister of Unification. He
played key roles in the 2000 and 2007 summits with Kim Jong Il, and has
consistently described his goals as an intelligence chief as ending "the
legacy of the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula."
In a 2012 speech at Stanford University based on his memoir, Peacemaker, Lim
described South Korea's engagement with North Korea as an effort to
"establish a new relationship of reconciliation and cooperation" aimed at
"removing the hostile relationship between North Korea and the United
States." Now 86 and still advising President Moon, Lim is highly critical of
the unilateral demands for immediate denuclearization made by the US
government in its talks with the North.
"A comprehensive, step-by-step approach is essential," he said in a speech
last July. That is the same gradualist approach that Kim Jong Un has
embraced and is seen by many peace advocates as the only way forward in
Korea. He added: "South and North need to cooperate as parties to peace on
the Korean Peninsula" and "transitioning from a military armistice system to
a peace regime."
Some Korean analysts now credit Lim and the NIS for convincing the Clinton
administration to launch the remarkable negotiations with Kim Jong Il in
1999 that nearly succeeded in ending the enmity between the US and the DPRK
in 2000 (those talks, which began while the Agreed Framework was still in
effect, were abruptly cancelled by President George W. Bush in 2001).
Back Ki-chul, the executive editor of the progressive Hankyoreh newspaper,
recently wrote that Lim's most important contribution to inter-Korean ties
may have been the concept of "open autonomy" first adopted by Kim Dae Jung.
This approach, he said, was designed to "create an independent space for
inter-Korean negotiation and compromise and to seek the support of the US
and other related countries, without relying solely on the US."
He urged President Moon to adopt Lim's strategy. "South and North Korea need
to reconsider their dependence on Trump, who doesn't have the slightest
interest in peace on the Korean Peninsula," he wrote.
Politics Of Intelligence
South Korea's reliance on its intelligence services might appear unusual in
a world where diplomacy is the defining method of settling disputes. But
it's a natural outgrowth of Korea's history as a divided country in which
each half claims jurisdiction over the other.
The secrecy, however, has sometimes backfired. After the 2000 summit, Park
Jie Won was jailed for three years for funneling $450 million from the giant
Hyundai Group to the North ahead of the meetings. And in 2006, Lim Dong-won
was convicted for illegal wiretapping during the Kim Dae Jung
administration.
More recently, the NIS admitted to conducting an illegal campaign to promote
the election of conservative Park Guen-hye in 2012 when she defeated Moon
Jae-in. Park, who was impeached in 2017, was later convicted of accepting
nearly $27 million in bribes from the NIS during her time in office.
Such abuses have prompted the National Assembly to consider sweeping reforms
to the NIS that would weaken its domestic investigatory powers and restrict
its role to spying overseas.
Bloody KCIA
The Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) was founded by former
President Park Chung Hee in 1961 "with the advice and assistance of the
American CIA." Park was a general who took over in a military coup in 1961,
when he crushed a brief movement for reunification with the North that swept
the country after its first democratic revolution in 1960 (Park Guen-hye,
now in prison, is his daughter).
In 1972, Lee Hu Rak, Park's intelligence chief, stunned the country by
meeting secretly with Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founding leader, and
setting up the first meetings between the ROK and the DPRK since the end of
the Korean War. A few months later, Park expanded martial law and instructed
the KCIA to launch a massive crackdown on dissent to ensure national "unity"
as he negotiated with Kim.
Over the next seven years, Park's repression and torture state worsened,
leading to an explosion of protests in the fall of 1979 (the KCIA's "room of
death" at its headquarters in downtown Seoul is now a museum). That October,
in the midst of the largest demonstrations since 1960, Park was shot to
death at a dinner party by Kim Jae-gyu, one of Lee's successors at the KCIA
(Kim, who claimed that he acted to save Korean democracy, had close ties to
the CIA, but that's another story).
Six months later, another general, Chun Doo Hwan, seized power after taking
personal control of the military and the KCIA. But he, too, was toppled in
1987 by nationwide protests that led, finally, to democratization. As South
Korea came to terms with its authoritarian past, the KCIA was reorganized
and reformed as the NIS, and its repressive powers were gradually - but not
completely - diminished. Yet its influence remained pervasive, especially as
a conduit for discussions with the DPRK.
Beyond Trump
Why intelligence officials and not diplomats lead the talks has to do with
factors related to the 1953 armistice. While the shooting stopped the North
and South have lived in a technical state of war ever since. Moon Chung-in,
President Moon's adviser, has defined the inter-Korean process since South
Korea's democratization in the 1980s as "unconventional summit diplomacy
that grew out of the "inconclusive" ending of the war.
In a fascinating 2018 article in The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Moon
explained that both North and South consider themselves the legitimate
rulers of all of Korea. But since they signed a "basic agreement" on
reconciliation in 1992 - which was negotiated by former NIS Director-General
Lim Dong Won - they have defined their on and off discussions as "temporary
transitional special relations" of two countries "striving towards
unification."
According to this compromise, Moon Chung-in explained,"relations between the
two Koreas are not interstate relations, but intra-national special
relations of a kind that have prevented the adoption of formal diplomatic
intercourse."
Thus the use of intelligence officials, who can speak and negotiate with the
direct support of their leaders but aren't beholden to the rules of
state-to-state diplomacy.
With Park Jie-won, the new NIS director, leading the interactions with Kim
Jong Un, Korean intelligence is once again in the lead. According to
Hankyoreh, his appointment was "a message that signals a strong commitment
to improving inter-Korean relations while urging the US government to adopt
a more forward-looking stance."
The importance of his initiative was underscored this week after Trump was
sidelined with a serious case of coronavirus and Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo cancelled a visit to Seoul to discuss North Korea policy.
Still, no matter who the next US president turns out to be, Moon will
continue his quest for a peaceful solution to the nuclear crises that have
plagued US-Korean relations for over two decades. It's clear from his recent
moves on the international stage that South Korea, thanks in part to the
NIS, will be steering its own course. For once, Seoul's tainted intelligence
services may be on the right side of Korean history.
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based journalist who was partly raised in South
Korea. He has been writing about the Korean Peninsula since the late 1970s
and is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence
Outsourcing.
North Korea Peace South Korea US Foreign Policy
