Until recently, Kwon Young Hae was considered the second-most powerful man in South Korea. He ran the nation’s formidable intelligence agency.
Now Kwon is out of office, under police investigation and recuperating in a hospital bed after trying to commit suicide last weekend in a bathroom of the prosecutor’s office. Officials said he slashed himself in the abdomen with a small knife that was hidden in a Bible.
Kwon’s suicide attempt is the focal point in a bizarre cloak-and-dagger tale that includes allegations of a clandestine relationship between South Korean and North Korean politicians and spies who concocted plans to manipulate South Korean elections.
Revelations of the sensational story probably say more about South Korea’s dramatic transition to democracy than any evil intent by its arch-enemy North Korea, but it has all the trappings of a first-rate spy thriller.
There is an alleged South Korean double agent (possibly a triple agent) working under the code name Black Venus. There is a suitcase filled with $3.6 million. There also is a 200-page intelligence report that is supposed to be top secret but keeps getting quoted in the newspapers. The scandal even has a title: Operation Northern Wind.
The most explosive aspect of the story has members of South Korea’s parliament secretly meeting North Korean agents in Beijing to seek the North’s help to manipulate the outcome of South Korean elections in exchange for payoffs.
North Korea supposedly cooperated by orchestrating military incursions into the demilitarized zone that separates the sides.
The incursions happened. Several times in recent years, small groups of North Korean troops have violated the armistice by entering the DMZ.
In one instance, an incursion occurred just before 1996 parliamentary elections, setting off a panic in the South Korean electorate that benefited ruling party candidates.
Whether the timing of that incursion was a coincidence, a North Korean miscalculation or part of a conspiracy now being unraveled is not known. It is true that North Korea has used terrorism to try to destabilize South Korea. In 1987, North Korean agents blew up a South Korean jumbo jet, killing 115 people, in an attempt to frighten nations out of participating in the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics.
The Northern Wind allegations add a new layer of intrigue and mystery to the Cold War machinations that prevail on the divided Korean peninsula.
They also give an almost farcical tone to what is usually a deadly serious business.
At one point last week, American officials grew so concerned at leaks to the press of sensitive intelligence information that the CIA’s station chief in Seoul is said to have scolded South Korean lawmakers. He warned that the United States would stop sharing intelligence with the South Korean government unless it could prove it can keep a secret. In the next strange twist, that episode also was reported in the press, with the CIA officer, Arthur Brown, identified.
American diplomats still are trying to sort out fact from fiction, but they do not deny that the CIA station chief gave a warning. They say the U.S. government is concerned that South Korean security has been jeopardized by a political squabble.
“If you have an information-exchange agreement, you want to be sure the integrity of the process holds,” said a senior American diplomat in Seoul.
The Northern Wind scandal has its origin in the cat-and-mouse espionage game played by North and South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
It is assumed that South Korea is crawling with North Korean provocateurs such as the military squad that was caught in a small submarine along the South Korean coast in 1996. What South Korea does in the North is less known, but its security apparatus, the Agency for National Security Planning, must be active.
Defense analysts are concerned about the Northern Wind affair because so many details, verifiable or not, have become public. While almost everything has been denied, one of the main players is said to be a young Korean-American who did business deals with North Korea and may have had ties to South Korean intelligence.
Depending on who tells the story, the man was paid more than $200,000 by South Korea’s spy agency either to spread lies about Kim Dae Jung during his successful presidential campaign last year or as compensation for espionage work while making business trips to North Korea. Another player is Black Venus, a former South Korean military intelligence officer said to have passed messages between North and South Korea.
“This is a total disaster for South Korean national security,” said Moon Chung In, a political science professor at Yonsei University. “You have the organization becoming transparent. North Korea can now detect all patterns of infiltration.”
Details of Northern Wind are almost impossible to sort out. The stories include dealings between North and South Korean agents, which seems highly unlikely, and covert meetings in Beijing between South Korean and North Korean officials, which seem plausible.
What has become clear is that the episode came to light during a housecleaning operation at the security agency since the inauguration of Kim last month.
Kim, the first opposition leader elected president, is a former
dissident who escaped several assassination attempts by the Korean CIA, the predecessor to the Agency for National Security Planning.
Kim remained a target of the agency because of political rivalries and allegations–now refuted–that he once had contacts in North Korea.
Since taking office, he has shaken up the agency and vowed to remove the elements responsible for domestic political suppression. He will also change its name.
It was during the shakeup that news began to leak out about a supposed plot to damage Kim’s reputation, including spreading lies that he took money from North Korea.
You Jong Keun, a South Korean governor and presidential adviser, said the suicide attempt by Kwon is evidence that changes are taking place within the agency and democracy is being strengthened.
“He found himself unable to protect himself,” You said. “Within a short period, all the dirty tricks are being uncovered.”
