Yu Woo-sung, a defector from North Korea, in 2014 in Seoul, South Korea. Mr. Yu, who was cleared after his arrest in 2013 on spying charges, is featured in the film “Spy Nation.” Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — They were beaten and forced to make false confessions. Many spent years in prison. Some were executed. Most were forgotten for decades.
Over six decades, scores of people were arrested by the South Korean authorities and accused of spying for North Korea, only to be exonerated, sometimes decades later, long after many of them had served lengthy prison sentences.
There has never been an official tally of the exact number of people affected, but a new film has documented almost 100 cases, some of which involved alleged spy rings with multiple people.
The cases have mainly disappeared from public memory, but the new documentary, by the investigative journalist Choi Seung-ho, is lifting a veil on what he sees as one of the most shameful legacies of South Korea’s counterintelligence authorities.
Just before the closing credits of the film, “Spy Nation,” a list of the names of the falsely accused scrolls down the screen. It is an eloquent indictment of the abuse of power engaged in by South Korea’s counterespionage agencies, especially the National Intelligence Service, in the name of fighting the Communist threat from North Korea.
In the 100-minute film, Mr. Choi stresses that “manufacturing spies” cannot be dismissed as a distant memory in South Korea, where critics say the veneration of security above all else allows the spy agency to continue to operate with a vast, abusive power.
“With this film, I wanted to ask the N.I.S., ‘What have you done?’” Mr. Choi said after a recent screening of the documentary, which is scheduled to reach local theaters next month. “It did what it did because it could get away with it.”
Mr. Choi, a former TV producer now affiliated with the independent investigative news website Newstapa, accosted or ambushed interrogators and former top officials from the N.I.S., as well as state prosecutors who worked with them in espionage cases. He challenged them with questions in front of courthouses, at elevators and in airport lounges. All refused to answer, some running away.
South Korea created the N.I.S., initially known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1960s to catch spies from North Korea, with which it remains technically at war.
But under successive military dictators, including Park Chung-hee, the father of the current president, Park Geun-hye, the intelligence service and other state agencies were also accused of concocting fake spy cases to arrest and discredit dissidents and divert attention from domestic crises.
Over the past decade, many of the cases were retried after the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found them to be built on fabricated evidence and confessions extracted through torture.
But even as many of the victims were cleared of spying charges, some posthumously, the intelligence service was accused of fabricating new cases.
“Spy Nation” chronicles one such case, the story of Yu Woo-sung, an ethnic Chinese from North Korea who defected to the South in 2004.
Mr. Yu, 35, was considered a rare success story among defectors from the North, who often have trouble adapting to life in the South. He was working as a welfare official at Seoul’s City Hall in 2013 when the N.I.S. arrested him on charges of spying for North Korea.
The agency based its accusation largely on confessions it said Mr. Yu’s sister, Ga-ryeo, had made after entering South Korea from the North in 2012.
At the time, the agency was being plunged into a major scandal. A team of secret agents was accused of running an online smear campaign against Ms. Park’s rivals before her election in December 2012. The agency’s former director, Won Sei-hoon, was later convicted on charges of meddling in domestic politics.
Mr. Yu’s arrest made headlines, a coup for the intelligence service, which was desperate to salvage its image.
“One day I was a model defector, and the next they made me an evil spy,” Mr. Yu said in an interview in 2014.
But Mr. Yu’s sister later testified in court that officials had beaten and coerced her into making false confessions against her brother while they held her without legal representation in solitary confinement at the agency’s interrogation center for 179 days.
The agency denied using coercion at the center, south of Seoul, where it screens fresh arrivals from the North for up to six months to ferret out spies.
Photos that the agency presented as evidence in court, saying they had been taken while Mr. Yu was secretly visiting North Korea in 2012, turned out to have been taken in China. The Chinese immigration documents that the agency said had recorded Mr. Yu’s border crossings into North Korea were found to have been faked.
A Korean-Chinese man stabbed himself in a Seoul hotel room after leaving a suicide note saying the agency had promised to pay him to fabricate the documents. The officer who hired him also tried to kill himself by inhaling carbon monoxide in his car. (Neither man died.)
The court threw out the espionage charge against Mr. Yu.
While all this was unfolding in 2014, the agency announced the arrest of another suspected spy, also a defector from the North. But the man, Hong Kang-cheol, walked free after a court declared his confessions invalid because he had not been informed of his right to remain silent and consult a lawyer.
Mr. Hong said he had been held in solitary confinement for 84 days and forced to write draft after draft of a confession until a fictional version emerged that satisfied his interrogators.
“I had no freedom to meet visitors, no freedom to move, completely isolated from the outside,” Mr. Hong said after an appeals court upheld his acquittal in February.
Over the years, the intelligence agency has repeatedly pledged not to abuse its power or act as a political tool of presidents. But scandals at the secretive agency have frequently rocked the country, with several of its directors ending up in jail.
The agency declined to comment on “Spy Nation,” which won the top documentary award at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea in May.
Ms. Park apologized for the agency’s fabrication of evidence against Mr. Yu and replaced the N.I.S. chief in 2014. The agency has also promised to make its operations at the interrogation center more transparent.
But scrutinizing the N.I.S. remains highly delicate in South Korea, where right-wing activists consider any criticism of the agency a “pro-North Korean” attempt to undermine national security.
No multiplex chain has come forward to screen the film. Mr. Choi was able to schedule its theatrical release for October only after 35,000 people paid for tickets in advance through an online campaign. He also plans to take his film to Japan and to the Sundance Film Festival.
Mr. Choi said he hoped his movie would spark reform of the agency, adding that its abusive practices were not properly scrutinized by the country’s Parliament or mainstream news media.
Driving his message home are the voices of the unjustly accused.
Lee Cheol, 68, one of the former political prisoners interviewed in “Spy Nation,” was sentenced to death in 1977 on spying charges. He was freed after 13 years, but was exonerated only last year in a retrial.
His memory of torture remains raw.
“They made me naked and beat me randomly, threatening to burn my genitals with cigarettes,” Mr. Lee said. “They threatened to rape my fiancée and even her mother. In the end, I told them I would confess to whatever they wanted me to.”
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A related news from VOA News: http://www.voanews.com/a/south-korean-documentary-alleges-mistreatment-of-north-korean-asylum-seekers/3510096.html
‘Spy Nation’ Film Alleges Abuse of N. Korean Asylum Seekers
In South Korea, a new documentary is attempting to make the case that the Seoul government’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) is engaging in abusive and coercive techniques to falsely uncover North Korean spies posing as defectors.
The film Spy Nation focuses on one case in particular involving North Korean defector Yu Woo-sung, who was arrested in 2014 on charges of espionage but was acquitted a year later after it was discovered that incriminating documents in the case were fabricated, allegedly by the NIS.
Yu’s case became a widely reported scandal that forced the NIS director Nam Jae-joon to apologize and a high-ranking official with the intelligence service to resign.
The director of Spy Nation, Choi Seung-ho, uses Yu’s case and others documented in the film to argue the NIS’s over-zealous pursuit of spies is a symptom of a powerful and secretive agency reporting only to the president, that operates with little outside oversight or control.
“We need to change legal system so that the NIS is prevented to be involved in all these political things and allow the National Assembly total control over the NIS,” said Choi.
Coercion
Part of Yu’s case also involves allegations of physical and psychological coercion during the NIS interrogation process.
Prior to his arrest, Yu worked for the Seoul city government assisting recently arrived defectors.
The NIS suspected he was also sending back to North Korea lists of defector names and other sensitive information.
When Yu’s sister, Yu Garyeo, arrived in South Korea to request asylum, she was interrogated by the NIS about her brother’s activities.
Director Choi conducted an interview with Yu Garyeo in which she claimed that the NIS kept her in isolation for weeks at a time, with only her interrogator to talk to, and hit, threatened and harassed her until she agreed to make a false confession implicating herself and her brother in spying for North Korea.
Yu Garyeo was deported and though her brother was acquitted of spying, he lost all claims to government aid for North Korean defectors, after it was discovered that he lived in China and became a Chinese national before attempting to defect.
Over 1,000 North Koreans defect to South Korea every year. They all must undergo debriefings at NIS facilities to weed out potential spies and to gather information on the situation inside the secretive and authoritarian Kim Jong Un government.
North Korean defector and analyst Ahn Chan-il, with the World Institute for North Korean Studies, said the debriefing process can at times be harsh but it is overstated to imply that abuse is both widespread and a generally accepted practice.
“It is true that (NIS officials) may talk in loud voices during the process of checking the status of defectors, and they may use some coercive action if (the defectors) seem suspicious, but this applies only to some specific defectors,” said Ahn.
Real threat
The threat of espionage has become even more dangerous to national security in this era of cyber-terrorism.
Earlier this year, South Korea’s police cyber investigation unit reported that the North had hacked thousands of computers at South Korean firms and government agencies.
There have been cases of North Korean spies posing as defectors. The North Korean intelligence service reportedly uses threats of punishment and imprisonment against the families of defectors to force their compliance.
Independent journalism
Choi, the film’s director, is also affiliated with the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism, a non-profit organization funded by small donations from 350,000 people.
The group stresses its journalistic independence to stand up against political pressure, in contrast to established news organizations that he claims have not held government officials accountable for abuses of power.
The Spy Nation director is also featured in the film as he questions defectors and relentlessly badgers government officials on the street and on one occasion at a crowded airport.
The NIS, Choi said, tried unsuccessfully to level both criminal and civil defamation charges against him for his reporting of the case.
“We completely won the civil charge and they sent us a subpoena once for criminal charge but did not send it anymore, so we were acquitted,” Choi said.
Choi expects Spy Nation to be released to a number of South Korean theaters in September.
Youmi Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.