hankyoreh

By Park Byong-su and Ha Eo-young, staff reporters

The government plans to go ahead with its military intelligence protection agreement with Japan, but many are raising questions about just how much such intelligence exchanges would actually help national security.

Analysts have argued that South Korea has little to gain from the agreement, which they said only satisfies Japan‘s demands for human intelligence (HUMINT) from the South Korean side.

The government is maintaining that the exchanges will help deter North Korea, thanks to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces’ (JSDF) state-of-the-art reconnaissance intelligence assets.

“Japan has four airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircrafts, while we don‘t have any”, said a military official. “It has outstanding, state-of-the-art intelligence assets, including six Aegis-equipped ships, two optical satellites, and two radar satellites.”

But many experts said the JSDF assets are unlikely to produce much in the way of worthwhile intelligence. A former senior national security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said, “The AEW&C aircrafts have major tactical significance in wartime, where they can accurately distinguish and control things when there are dozens or hundreds of friendly and enemy aircraft in the sky at once, but other than that they have no role in military intelligence collection.”

Noting that South Korea is already obtaining satellite intelligence through exchanges with the US, the same former official said, “While there may be intelligence the US is not providing to South Korea, there’s no saying Japan’s necessarily going to give it to us.”

Some analysts questioned Japan’s intelligence capabilities. Kim Jong-dae, editor-in-chief of the military affairs journal Defense 21+, said, “The problem is not whether or not you have state-of-the-art intelligence assets, but whether you have the ability to interpret the intelligence you gather. We can‘t count the number of intelligence failures Japan has had.”

Indeed, while South Korean immediately detected North Korea’s rocket launch in April, Japan took twenty minutes to confirm it. A day before North Korea launched a rocket in April 2009, the Japanese government issued an evacuation order for citizens, claiming North Korea had fired a missile. The order was later canceled.

With the agreement, Japan now stands to have new access to North Korean intelligence; Tokyo appears particularly interested in HUMINT. Sources said it showed interest in South Korean HUMINT in August 2008 after Seoul was the first to learn about then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s stroke.

But many observers said any intelligence sharing with Japan should be done with caution, since a HUMINT leak could risk the source’s life, and time and effort would be required to rebuild a human network once it collapses.

“Reconnaissance intelligence is ‘money,’ but HUMINT is ‘people,’” said one expert. “It is going too far to equate the two.”

Another concern is the possibility that South Korean HUMINT on North Korea could be abused for political ends.

“Japanese politicians have often exaggerated the North Korea threat for political purposes,” said Kim Jong-dae. “Sensitive North Korea intelligence might provide them with a perfect means of doing this.”

The argument is that such intelligence could be dangerous in light of past cases where unconfirmed North Korea-related reports in the Japanese media ended up being blown up by the domestic press and stirring up antipathy toward Pyongyang and national security worries.

Some analysts said the government’s rush to pass the agreement without the public’s knowledge is itself evidence that its purpose is not simply the sharing of intelligence with Tokyo.

Another former senior national security official said, “We did fine without Japanese intelligence when the military standoff with North Korea was worse than it is now, and it’s unclear what more we need in the way of military intelligence when being under the US nuclear umbrella already provides us with enough of a deterrent.

"It’s difficult to find any explanation for this except as a way of beefing up trilateral military cooperation with the US against China, rather than as a North Korea deterrent," the former official said.

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