South Korea steps up efforts to root out the North's agents

Authorities in South Korea have arrested a number of activists on suspicion they were working with North Korean agents to further Pyongyang's political ambitions on the peninsula, with analysts suggesting it is highly likely that more people sympathetic to North Korea are still active in the South.

Arrest warrants were issued by a court in Seoul for four members of a group known as The Vanguard of the People's Independent Unification on suspicion that they met with North Korean agents in Cambodia and Vietnam in 2016 before returning to South Korea to organize rallies against US military presence in the country and promote far-left politicians and ideologies.  

Members of the group, who have not been named, also greeted North Korean athletes when the city of Changwon hosted the ISSF World Shooting Championships in 2018, according to Yonhap News, and were seen waving flags promoting the unification of the peninsula.  

Cells across South Korea 

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) believes that the group helped to set up other cells in at least three other cities, Jeonju, Jinju and Jeju.  

In January, intelligence officials and police on the island of Jeju, off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, searched the homes and workplaces of a former senior member of the Progressive Party for allegedly violating espionage laws.   

In statements, the authorities said the suspect had traveled to Cambodia in 2017 to meet with an official of the Workers' Party Cultural Exchange Bureau, a well-known front organization for North Korea's spy agency. The South Korean, whose name has not been released, was allegedly trained over the course of three days in how to form an underground group and ensure its security from the police, and how to send and receive coded messages.  

The police said they had been monitoring the suspect's movements for seven years before they were able to gather sufficient evidence to obtain search warrants.   

Another local politician and his wife are also being investigated as part of the probe.  

In Seoul, meanwhile, police arrested Ha Yeon-ho, head of the Jeonbuk People's Movement, for allegedly violating the National Security Law, which forbids unauthorized contact with North Korean nationals. The authorities claim Ha met North Korean agents in Beijing and Hanoi on several occasions between 2013 and 2019.  

Activists for the North are 'naive'  

"For some people in the South, this is the ideology that they choose to follow," said Rah Jong-yil, a former diplomat and head of South Korea's intelligence agency. "They believe they can work with people in the North to ultimately bring about reunification of the two Koreas through some form of rapprochement, but they do not realize they are just being used by the North.

"They are naive," he told DW. "It's actually curious to think that trade union members would fight for North Korea because while unions are accepted in the South and the rest of the democratic world as a right for workers, they don't even exist under totalitarian regimes." 

Pyongyang is attempting to "use stooges for their own political purposes, which are to destabilize South Korean society, weaken the government and damage our security alliances, primarily with the US," Rah said.  

Kim Sang-woo, a former politician with the left-leaning Congress for New Politics and now a member of the board of the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation, said the recent crackdown on North Korean sympathizers comes after relatively few arrests under the administration of President Moon Jae-in, who stepped down in May 2022 and was replaced by the more hawkish Yoon Suk-yeol. 

"There were not any large espionage cases uncovered during the Moon government, with critics suggesting that he was quite lax in this area as he did not want to do anything that would antagonize the North or jeopardize the possibility of better relations with Pyongyang," Kim said.  

"The obvious downside of that was that it endangered national security and reduced awareness of the threat among ordinary South Koreans," he added. "And that has made this wave of arrests something of a wake-up call to society here." 

The Moon administration has  also drawn up controversial plans to transfer investigations into cases of espionage or other collaboration with the North away from the National Intelligence Service to the police. The transfer is scheduled to take place next year, with the NIS announcing on February 6 that it is setting up a joint team with specialist prosecutors and the police to liaise on ongoing investigations of suspected violations. 

There are suggestions that the Yoon administration may attempt to scrap the transfer, although his government faces an uphill battle as the opposition Democratic Party of Korea has a majority in the National Assembly and relations between the two main parties are fiercely hostile.  

South Korean politician Kim said that the South Koreans who agree to work for Pyongyang are being deceived by the North. These people also believe that they are still living under an authoritarian regime that is closer to the military juntas of the past than a thriving, modern democracy, he added.  

Brainwashed by the North? 

"They are living in the past and that way of thinking is just absurd, but we also have to say that the North has done very well in convincing these people to work for them, to do their bidding," he underlined. "It's almost as if they have been brainwashed." 

Kim stressed that such underground cells that are committed to destabilizing the South are extremely dangerous.

Hwang Jang-yop, a senior member of the North Korean leadership who defected to South Korea in 1997, claimed in an interview shortly before his death in 2010 that no fewer than 50,000 North Korean agents were acting on behalf of Pyongyang in the South at any time.   

"It is very likely that there are a lot more of their agents here," Kim said. "All we can do is to remain vigilant."

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru