Police make a less-than convincing case for New Zealand spy

Posted on : 2012-06-08 15:57 KST Modified on : 2012-06-08 15:57 KST
Hankyoreh investigation shows that alleged sharer of privileged info may be a pawn in a larger political game

By Jung Hwan-bong, Ha Eo-young and Jin Myeong-seon, staff reporters

On May 30, the Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office issued a press release stating that it had arrested two people on charges of gathering military secrets on orders from a North Korean agent. One of them, a 74-year-old identified by the surname Lee, had previously served a long prison term for refusing to renounce his communist beliefs. At the time of his arrest, he was involved in trade with North Korea.

Now, evidence is surfacing to suggest the police misrepresented the facts of the case.

The case was an odd one from the outset. After taking pains in their investigation, police avoiding giving a press briefing when delivering the case to prosecutors.

The press release didn’t come until after a television network announced it as a major story. The television report, which said the North Korean agent and former prisoner had conspired to deliver high-level military secrets to Pyongyang, spread rapidly through conservative news outlets.

But reporting by the Hankyoreh found some problems with the police investigation. More and more observers are suspecting that the police deliberately exaggerated the facts of the case to feed a push by the government, ruling New Frontier Party, and conservatives to accuse opponents of allegiance to Pyongyang.

“Military secrets”?

According to the police announcement, Lee and his alleged accomplice, an ethnic Korean New Zealander identified as Kim, 56, had gathered eight secret military documents, which included information on a GPS scrambler, an experimental rocket antenna communications apparatus called the NSI 4.0, radar equipment, stealth fighter paint, aerial observation radar, flight simulators, underwater scooters, and the SH-2G helicopter.

But a senior military official said the documents in question were not military secrets.

The police responded to this claim with a June 5 press release stating, “We commissioned two military experts and two civilian experts to conduct an examination. They concluded that all eight documents were military secrets.”

The Hankyoreh asked the military officials who had reportedly examined the documents at the police’s request. Both agreed that the information presented by police “included nothing that you would call ‘documents.’”

One said, “What they presented as documents were just a few lines from an e-mail.”

Police said they had obtained an email sent by Lee to Kim ordering him to gather documents. This is thought be the email that the military official reported seeing.

The official said, “The text just contained the words ‘aerial observation radar,’ and there was no original or hard copy.”

The evidence suggests that the police may have inflated their claims about the gathering of eight secret documents by counting all the technical terms that appear in Lee’s email.

Another military official said the police primarily asked about the NSI 4.0, the technology that police view as most crucial in this case. But the only documents shown by police to the official were an email and brochure.

A different account was given by one of the civilian experts who examined the materials. Korea Defence Network president Shin In-kyun reported the police as saying that the documents would “be of considerable aid to North Korea if they fall into their hands.” But when he asked them how specific the documents shown by police were, he was told, “We can’t tell you exactly what kind of documents they were.”

While speaking in an interview with a conservative news outlet on June 1, right after the police announcement on the espionage case, Shin said, “The technology Mr. Lee attempted to acquire may be related to GPS scrambling attacks last April in the North Korean capital region.” This is quite a leap from the results of the police investigation, which failed even to verify that the documents had reached North Korea.

Shin previously ran a photography studio before turning his attention to military affairs some time around 2006.

The “unconverted prisoner” and the phantom North Korean agent

In their first announcement on the case, police described Lee as having served a long prison sentence due to his refusal to renounce communism. Several conservative news outlets picked up on this to criticize previous administrations’ North Korea policy, which allowed an unconverted former prisoner to trade with North Korea, or denounce such former prisoners in general as “capable of turning into spies at any moment.”

But an investigation by the Hankyoreh revealed that Lee did in fact renounce communism in a January 1988 written statement. He was paroled in February 1990. After the report was printed, police responded in a briefing that they “only talked about him being an ‘unconverted prisoner’ because people don‘t really use the term ‘converted prisoners’.”

Meanwhile, news reports stating that Lee was able to come and go freely between North and South Korea and engage in espionage after receiving approval to do business there in 2005, when the Roh administration was in power, also appear to have been distorted.

A Unification Ministry official said that Lee had been granted permission to be in contact with North Korea as far back as the mid-1990s.

“His company did receive approval to cooperate with North Korea in 2005, but Mr. Lee received case-by-case approval for visits to North Korea both before and after that,” the official said. This means his 2005 approval for cooperation only allowed him to trade goods without requiring separate permission, and had nothing to do with allowing him to freely visit North Korea.

This suggests that conservative news outlets were incorrect in both their premises and conclusions in stating that Lee was permitted to work with North Korea as an unconverted former prisoner, which allowed him free interchange with North Korea and made it easy for him to engage in espionage.

In their investigation announcement, police said an agent working in North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau had met Lee and Kim at the former’s apartment in July 2011 to give a list of eight types of state-of-the-art military equipment and order the collection of secret documents on them.

However, police currently have no leads as to who the agent in question was.

A police official who met with the Hankyoreh said there was evidence that Lee had been present in the company of someone suspected of being a North Korean agent. But when asked whether the person’s name was included on a list of North Korean agents compiled by the National Intelligence Service, the official said, “That’s for the prosecutors to determine.”

Without proof that the person who supposedly met Lee is in fact a North Korean agent, the investigation announcement accusing Lee of espionage becomes even less convincing.

“Implicated parties”?

Lee first began trading with North Korea in 1994, when the Kim Young-sam administration was in power. He is known to have earned a small fortune importing agricultural products including bracken and bellflower.

Another former long-term unconverted prisoner said Lee stopped attending meetings with other former prisoners after his release.

“My understanding is that he was very interested in business matters and wasn’t someone who would do that sort of ideological thing [espionage],” the former prisoner said.

A 53-year-old woman named Kim who worked as an executive director at Lee’s company between 2000 and 2007 said, “After his release, Mr. Lee wasn’t really interested in the reunification movement. His mind was usually on his business.”

Kim also said, “I don’t see why the North would ask an old man in his seventies who knew nothing about military intelligence to deliver military secrets to them.”

The second detainee, Kim, is believed to have met Lee while trading with North Korea from New Zealand. In a telephone interview, his wife, who is currently in New Zealand, told the Hankyoreh that Kim had worked providing utensils to the military while he was in South Korea and immigrated to New Zealand around 2001 for their children’s education.

“He never handled material or anything like that,” she said. “It’s just baffling that he’s being accused of giving North Korea documents on state-of-the-art weaponry.”

Police also said documents had been collected by a GPS expert identified as Jeong and passed along to Kim, who then delivered them to Lee. But Jeong, who has over two decades work experience at a South Korean airline, founded and managed a business that made subway testing equipment in the early 2000s. After the initial announcement on the espionage case, reports claimed he had worked at a defense company, but a Hankyoreh investigation found no evidence for this.

Police have yet to even book Jeong, despite him being fingered as the one who appropriated the secret documents.

A police official explained, “We haven’t booked him because we haven’t been able to verify that he knew beforehand that [Lee and Kim] were delivering the documents to North Korea.”

 

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

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