An official at South Korea’s high army intelligence company leaked categorized knowledge, together with an inventory of undercover brokers, to a suspected Chinese language intelligence agent for years in trade for money, protection officers stated Friday.
The 49-year-old civilian worker of the Korea Protection Intelligence Command was arrested last month and was formally indicted on Tuesday on prices together with bribery and the transmission of delicate knowledge, by paperwork or voice messages, 30 instances since 2019.
The leaked data included an inventory of undercover brokers from the command who operated in China, Russia and different nations, army prosecutors stated at a briefing this week, in accordance with the Protection Division. The command focuses on spying on North Korea, a extremely militarized nation that usually threatens its southern neighbor.
The leak raised uncomfortable questions for South Korea because it comes because the nation expands army intelligence exchanges with the USA and Japan to assist defend towards North Korea and China. South Korea and the USA have relied on one another to spy on North Korea, combining assets similar to satellites, cyber intelligence and human brokers similar to these working for the command.
The leak, first disclosed in June, prompted the Navy Intelligence Command, considered one of South Korea’s most secretive authorities businesses, to recall undercover brokers primarily based overseas again house.
Undercover brokers have been energetic in China, the place they’ve tried to recruit spies and collect intelligence amongst North Koreans who’ve traveled there, or amongst ethnic Koreans in China who’ve continuously traveled to North Korea. However their undercover identities had been typically uncovered they usually grew to become targets of authorities in China in addition to undercover North Korean counterintelligence brokers working there.
Investigators are nonetheless assessing the extent of the injury accomplished to South Korea’s decade-long intelligence warfare towards North Korea, as South Korean lawmakers and media have expressed suspicions that the info could have finally gone to Pyongyang.
The accused official, whose id was not launched by prosecutors, was secretly detained and blackmailed into working for the suspected Chinese language agent in Yangji in northeastern China in April 2017, in accordance with army prosecutors. He was within the metropolis, close to the North Korean border, to examine his intelligence-gathering community there, they stated.
He prints paperwork and takes notes or screenshots of categorized paperwork, in addition to taking photos of them with a cell phone. He exported and despatched them by China-based password-protected cloud companies or by a voice messaging characteristic in a web based gaming app. In return, he acquired at the very least $120,000 from his Chinese language contact, army prosecutors stated.
“Test the file I despatched,” the official was quoted as saying in a message to his Chinese language contact. “For those who pay me extra, I will share extra.”
Felony prices towards the official embrace accepting bribes and violating legal guidelines defending army intelligence. Prosecutors stated they had been nonetheless investigating whether or not the suspected Chinese language agent had ties to North Korea.
South Korean intelligence businesses first realized of a attainable leak on the command after their hacker found an inventory of South Korean undercover brokers whereas snooping on North Korean laptop networks, in accordance with the workplace of Kim Min-seok, a senior lawmaker in South Korea’s predominant opposition Democratic Occasion. , which first alerted the media to the breach.
The final time a significant leak was reported on the command was in 2018, when a associated active-duty army officer was discovered to have bought categorized data to international brokers in China and Japan by a retired South Korean intelligence officer. The data he bought reportedly included particulars in regards to the command’s brokers in China and about North Korean weapons.
“The newest case raises critical questions in regards to the ethics of an agent — this type of leak has endangered the lives of different South Korean brokers overseas — and in regards to the system that didn’t catch him for therefore lengthy,” stated Yoo Dong-ryul, a safety analyst and head of the Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy, which research the intelligence warfare between the 2 Koreas.
It isn’t but clear how in depth the newest leak is. Investigators didn’t cite any of the uncovered brokers or informants as working in North Korea. The leak included details about the command construction and operational strategies, they stated.
Kim Yong-hyun, who was appointed protection minister earlier this month, vowed to take “extraordinary measures” to deal with any issues discovered through the investigation.
Undercover brokers of the Protection Intelligence Command have carried out a few of the most harmful espionage actions in South Korea. In contrast to different brokers who operated with diplomatic immunity, many didn’t carry diplomatic visas and posed as businessmen, making them susceptible to arrest, threats and extortion in nations similar to China.
One such agent helped the supervisor of a North Korean restaurant in China defect to South Korea with a dozen waitresses in 2016.
However in 1998, a lieutenant colonel from the command who was working undercover in Dandong, a Chinese language metropolis close to the North Korean border, was kidnapped in North Korea. After he was launched six months later, he revealed throughout his debriefing that North Korean interrogators had tortured and blackmailed him with threats to kill his household within the South.
The officer was launched solely after he recognized different South Korean undercover brokers in northeastern China and promised to work as a double agent for the North, in accordance with “Covert Operations,” a 2018 e-book about undercover brokers.
