South Korea’s espionage agencies generally operate in the shadows, but recent failures have cast their operations in an unflattering light just as Seoul seeks to deepen its security co-operation with western partners.
Last month, the FBI exposed a years-long effort by Korean intelligence operatives based in Washington to cultivate a former CIA analyst, who US authorities accused of working illegally as a foreign agent for Seoul.
Soon after, it emerged that an employee of South Korea’s defence intelligence command had been charged by a South Korean military court with leaking lists of names and locations of undercover agents in North Korea and other countries to a Chinese citizen.
The two events, and the partisan recriminations they have provoked in Seoul, have raised questions as to whether South Korea’s spies are adequately equipped to navigate a mounting North Korean threat and intensifying US-China tensions.
“The country was already feeling on edge because of the deteriorating global security situation, US tensions with China and the prospect of a second [Donald] Trump presidency,” said Jeongmin Kim, lead analyst at Seoul-based information service Korea Pro. “Now it has to worry about the basic competence of its security services as well.”
She added that while the FBI’s publication of photos and transcripts of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service gifting luxury goods and wining and dining former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry at high-end restaurants had been an “ego-shattering moment”, the consequences of the KDIC leak were “potentially disastrous.”
“We are concerned that South Korea’s human intelligence gathering operation in North Korea could collapse,” Lee Seong-kweun, a conservative member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee, told the Financial Times.
South Korea’s intelligence agencies have spent decades engaged in a largely unseen struggle with the North, with the civilian NIS tasked with preventing infiltration by Pyongyang as well as running its own intelligence networks deep inside Kim Jong Un’s regime.
But counter-espionage efforts are hamstrung by an outdated legal framework, said Jaewoo Choo, a professor of foreign policy at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. South Korean law only criminalises activity conducted in the service of North Korea — meaning that anyone found to have leaked secrets to any other country, including China, cannot be charged with espionage.
Korea Pro’s Kim said that in a polarised environment in which South Korean politicians routinely accuse each other of acting in the interests of foreign powers, many were reluctant to expand the law’s scope for fear it could be deployed against them.
“Leftwing politicians are worried they will be accused by their opponents of spying or working on behalf of China, while conservative politicians are worried they will be accused of spying or working on behalf of the US and Japan,” she said.
Reform efforts are also complicated by the NIS’s long history of being used by South Korean governments to monitor and intimidate political opponents. As recently as 2017, the agency assigned “information officers” to government bodies, companies and media organisations — a practice leftwing critics argue was used to gather compromising material on domestic dissenters.
Park Sun-won, who served as a high-ranking official in the NIS between 2018 and 2022 under then-president Moon Jae-in, said Moon’s administration had sought to professionalise the service by shifting its attention from domestic to foreign intelligence gathering and counterterrorism efforts.
“Our achievements meant that MI5 and MI6 wanted to work with our side, and we levelled up co-operation with the CIA and other players including the Australian, French and German intelligence services,” said Park, who rose to the position of NIS deputy director and now serves as the ranking member of the South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee from the opposition Democratic party.
He accused the current government led by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol of “wanting to use the NIS for political ends again”, describing the agency in its present state as “defunct”.
But conservatives including intelligence committee member Lee argue that Moon’s “dangerous and reckless” reform efforts stripped the agency of expertise and important investigative powers, leaving it toothless and demoralised.
A security expert with close ties to South Korea’s national security establishment said the lack of bipartisan consensus surrounding the NIS’s proper role had left the agency riven by factionalism and suffering from low levels of public trust.
“In the past, the NIS was not adequately supervised and frequently over-reached its authority,” they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“Now we have the opposite problem. Whether the left or the right is in power, because the NIS is so directly subordinate to the president and lawmakers, it is extremely vulnerable to politics. The result is an excessive turnover of officials, infighting, leaks and questions about their competence.”
Choo said South Korea’s outdated espionage laws also left the country highly vulnerable to Chinese industrial espionage, which in turn threatened to complicate Seoul’s efforts to collaborate more closely with western partners on cyber security and joint defence technology development.
South Korea has expressed an interest in participating in part of the trilateral Aukus security pact between the US, UK and Australia focusing on advanced technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
But western diplomats in Seoul privately express reservations about South Korean practices for protecting sensitive information. Concerns range from the resilience of the country’s cyber defences, to the security software installed on Korean officials’ devices to the fact that South Korea’s political class operates principally on the Russian messaging app Telegram.
“South Korea does not yet have the legal or institutional foundations to protect its most sensitive information, which is damaging its prospects of being welcomed into the inner circle of the western alliance,” said Choo.
Additional reporting by Kang Buseong
Read the full article here
