A Life Amid Spies: The Two Koreas
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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National Intelligence Service (South Korea)
10 min read
The NIS is central to this article as the agency that attempted to recruit the author. Understanding its history, structure, and controversial operations (including past scandals involving influence operations abroad) provides essential context for the recruitment tactics described.
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Human rights in North Korea
12 min read
The author's advocacy on this issue is what made her a target for recruitment. This article details the prison camps, famines, and systematic repression she was writing about, providing the substantive background to understand why both Korean governments were so interested in her work.
THE ONLY SPY AGENCY THAT EVER TRIED TO RECRUIT ME was South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the NIS. It started sometime in 2009, when a young man from Seoul’s embassy in Washington asked to talk with me about articles and Op-eds I’d been writing in the New York Times, Washington Post and various journals advocating stronger responses by the U.S. and the United Nations to North Korea’s appalling human rights record.
“What motivates you to write these articles?” he asked. I explained my prior service as a human rights advocate at the State Department and private organizations and said that, although I was formally retired, I felt too little attention was being paid to the situation in North Korea.
That evidently interested those he reported back to at the embassy, because soon thereafter, a more senior officer, presumably from the NIS, became involved.
I began to receive invitations to lunch and on one occasion was asked to brief a group of visiting Korean diplomats and other officials on the perspectives of the U.S. and nongovernmental organizations on North Korea’s human rights situation.
We sat around a table in a dimly lit restaurant, where it was easy to identify which ones were intelligence officers, since they uttered not a word nor offered me their business cards, a standard practice with the Koreans. They were nonetheless paying close attention. A CIA friend told me later that they were probably sizing me up as a potential “agent of influence” for them in Washington on the subject of human rights in the north—an issue of extreme sensitivity to the high command in Pyongyang.
Some time later, the attitude of the senior NIS officer toward me began to change. He became more assertive, almost instructing me to write additional Op-eds and articles. Although our viewpoints were very similar, I told him firmly that I was “an independent scholar” and wrote only “on my own steam.”
He wasn’t deterred. He next showed up at a public meeting on North Korea at the Brookings Institution, from which I’d recently retired, and in front of a group I was talking with interrupted to ask whether or not I was going to write another article on North Korea. The damaging impression he left, intended or not, was that he would have some role in what I would be writing. Afterward, when he asked if we could meet alone, I
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