In the dark chambers of South Korea's notorious spy agency, Kim Nak Joong paid the price for consorting with the enemy. As a young scholar with an idealistic desire to see the Korean peninsula united, Kim traveled to the communist North as a self-styled peace broker. In South Korea 40 years ago, that made him a North Korean spy. The agency's interrogators beat him with a metal pipe, screaming at him to confess that he'd been sent by Pyongyang to foment revolution. "When I passed out, they'd throw ice water on me," recalls Kim, now a frail grandfather. "Or they'd put a wet towel over my face and pour water on it so I couldn't breathe. When I passed out, they'd beat me again."
Kim, who was convicted of spying and spent a combined 14 years in jail
before being released in 1998, is just one of thousands of South Koreans
who ran afoul of the country's National Intelligence Service (NIS).
Founded in 1961, the agency was infamous during the cold war for its
ruthless pursuit of enemies—real and perceived—of the
country's right-wing, authoritarian leaders. As South Korea has evolved
into a progressive democracy, however, the agency's vicious methods and
anticommunist agenda have increasingly become an outdated national
embarrassment. Now, the reform-minded administration of South Korean
President Roh Moo Hyun has set about rehabilitating the agency—or,
as some believe, castrating it.
The overhaul is overdue. Latter-day corruption scandals involving the NIS, agents of which have been routinely called upon to do powerful politicians' dirty work, have crippled presidencies and dragged the agency's name through the mud. But conservative lawmakers are worried the housecleaning comes at an inopportune time, during a period of heightened tension over North Korea's nuclear-weapons development. The NIS will still ferret out North Korean spies. But the job of catching domestic sympathizers will be passed to the country's police. The fear is that the shift in responsibilities, as well as efforts to make the NIS more accountable, will make the agency a toothless tiger—giving freer rein to the thousands of North Korean agents believed to be operating in the South. "We seem to have forgotten that North Korea is communist and is still eager to reunify the two Koreas under communism," says lawmaker Hahm Seung Heui, a member of the bipartisan National Assembly's Intelligence Committee.
Critics see Roh's appointment of liberal lawyers and activists to run the NIS as a political gambit to further his policy of engagement with the North. With Ko at the helm, "the agency will be pro-North Korean," fumes Chung Hyung Keun, a conservative lawmaker and former spy catcher. Chung defends some of the NIS abuses, saying that too much focus on them has made martyrs of men like Kim Nak Joong, who Chung says was indeed a spy and accepted money from North Koreans. Adds Lee Dong Bok, a former intelligence official: "The agency is our last bulwark against North Korean aggression. It must be viewed by North Korea as a foe to be reckoned with."
Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae Jung—who said South Korean agents tried to kill him three times in his days as a democratic activist—also vowed to clean up the agency. But by the end of Kim's presidential term in February, he was embroiled in a scandal over charges that the NIS illegally funneled money to Kim Jong Il to buy the North Korean dictator's participation in a June 2000 summit. "Every new government promises to make the spy service neutral," says Ahn Chung Si, a political scientist at Seoul National University. "But they all end up abusing it." Roh may fare better. That would satisfy Kim Nak Joong, who admits meeting North Koreans but denies spying for them. "What I went through was beyond description," he says. "No one should have to go through it again."