hankyoreh

A North Korean refugee who testified as a witness in the high-profile Yoo Woo-sung espionage case filed a complaint with prosecutors on Apr. 7 demanding action against the people responsible for leaking his petition letter to the press. His claim is that his family members in the North have been out of contact since the report. He also hinted strongly that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) may have provided the petition to particular news outlets. If true, this would mean that the NIS risked the lives of a refugee’s family members for the sake of a press campaign aimed at drawing attention away from its evidence falsification scandal.

What the refugee described at his press conference was positively shocking. On Dec. 6, he appeared as a witness in the closed-door trial of Yoo, a former Seoul Metropolitan Government employee and North Korean refugee accused of espionage. The following Jan. 6, he received a phone call from his daughter telling him she had gone to the State Security Department in North Korea for questioning about him, and had lied to cover up his role. Then, on Jan. 14, he presented a petition letter to the court explaining this situation and saying he was unable to help find the person responsible for the leak because of his children. The petition letter also asked for a guarantee that no further leaks would happen.

At that point, the only information that had been leaked was that he had appeared as a witness. It was after an Apr. 1 report in the conservative Munhwa Ilbo newspaper, which included both the petition letter and a photograph of it, that the refugee reported being unable to reach his family at all. As shocking as it is to see closed-door courtroom information finding its way in front of North Korean authorities, the bigger problem here is the question of how an entire petition letter came to be leaked.

The refugee claimed to have evidence on the circumstances of the leak. In February, after the petition letter had been submitted, he reported receiving several requests from NIS agents asking for him to give interviews about it with, among others, the conservative Dong-A Ilbo. The requests came right around the time the evidence fabrication scandal was erupting, with the Chinese government sending a letter claiming that documents submitted by the NIS in the Yoo case were forgeries. The circumstances strongly suggest that an under-fire NIS tried to arrange the interviews as a way of drumming up the case against Yoo and drawing attention away from its own scandal.

The report on the petition came on Apr. 1, which was around the same time concrete evidence about the falsification was coming out and people began demanding an investigation to see how far up the NIS line the scandal reached. The refugee reported a senior Munhwa Ilbo reporter as saying that someone had told them he, the refugee, had signed off on the article. If he is right and the NIS is responsible for the leak, then it would mean the government basically sacrificed the safety of an important and scrupulously guarded intelligence asset for its own immediate interests.

We need to get the bottom of how this happened and who is responsible. It‘s also necessary to mention the behavior of certain news outlets. If the refugee’s allegations are true, then it means they were guilty of relying on NIS intervention and intelligence to deliver the made-to-order articles it requested.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]