Search Results for: Fifth Column

September 13, 2013

Fifth Column Watch

The arrest of Lee Seok-Ki and his merry band of fifth column plotters is also uncovering a lot of the United Progressive Party’s publicly funded rackets: The ministry cited the Suwon Self-Support Community Center as an example. The center’s job is to support people receiving government welfare; it received 1.7 billion won ($1.6 million) from the city government this year. But this center also urged its clients to join the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) and demanded that workers at the center...

Categories The Fifth Column
May 30, 2012

Fifth Column Watch

I haven’t really had time to follow the story of the United Progressive Party as carefully as I’d have liked; South Koreans who are avowedly pro-North are a constant source of fascination to me. In South Korea, political parties break up, re-form, and re-brand every election season. During the most recent National Assembly election, the far left was represented by the UPP, which occupies approximately the same position as the former Democratic Labor Party. The largest UPP faction is openly...

Categories Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
May 25, 2009

Fifth Column Update: Pyongyang Orders a Hot Summer for Seoul

I certainly don’t believe for an instant that North Korea’s infiltration of the South was suspended during the DJ or Roh administrations; rather, I think stories about that infiltration were less likely to be leaked or reported under the former left-wing administrations unless they were just too newsworthy to suppress.  But if North Korea’s agents had ever gone to ground, they’ve come back up to prepare for the summer riot season: The North Korean regime recently ordered officials and organizations...

Categories Refugees/The Fifth Column
December 12, 2006

Fifth Column Update

Prosecutors have identified additional suspects in the Il Shim Hue cell, who they think provided the following types of information to the North Koreans: The suspects reportedly provided information on the six-nation talks and the internal split of the Grand National Party over the National Security Law to Mr. Jang starting early last year. Internal conflicts in the army and developments in the judicial and media communities were also provided to Mr. Jang. That information was delivered to Pyongyang, sources...

Categories Six-Party Talks/The Fifth Column
October 27, 2006

S. Korean Spymaster Resigns; Fifth Column Scandal Widens

Here, as foreshadowed in Update 6 to this post.   Like Lee, NIS  Chief Kim Seung-Kyu  must be  resigning to celebrate the success of his tenure. Following Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, who expressed his wish to quit in mid-November to prepare for his new job as the U.N. secretary-general, Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung and Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok offered to resign earlier this week, holding themselves responsible for “confused” policies on the North Korean nuclear crisis and the Seoul-Washington military alliance....

Categories Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
September 30, 2006

Fifth Column Watch: The USFK, Free Speech, and Subversion

Nothing really surprising here: North Korea on Tuesday criticized the U.S. military for giving American names to certain areas in South Korea, arguing that it is part of a ploy to “permanently Americanize South Korea.” Americanize South Korea? Perhaps you can be forgiven for suggesting that if you live in an oppressed, suffocated, isolated tyranny where reading up on current events can get you killed. Since we’re on the subject, where has the U.S. military given an American name to...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
August 7, 2006

Fifth Column Watch

Conspiracy theories always labor against a presumption of neurotic inspiration, but even paranoid people have real enemies, and some conspirators make the error of supporting such theories with their own words. (In the conspiracy business, Rule Number One is, “Be discreet.”) Recently, I finally got around to compiling some of the public statements by leaders of South Korean labor unions and political groups that would support a reasonable inference that those groups were either willing servants of the North Korean...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
August 27, 2018

New head of S. Korea’s ruling party once said North’s abuses were “not something other countries can intervene in”

ON SATURDAY, SOUTH KOREA’S RULING “DEMOCRATIC” PARTY PICKED LEE HAE-CHAN as its new Chairman. Lee, who previously served as Prime Minister under Roh Moo-hyun, promised “unwavering efforts toward … inter-Korean peace.” The Joongang Ilbo calls him “a staunch liberal.” Lee replaces Choo Mi-ae, another “liberal” who was fond of making public threats to sue opposition politicians for criminal libel. In South Korea, the term is also broad enough to include the President’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, who as far...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights
December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Categories Fiskings/Korean War II
December 4, 2017

Korean War II: What the Joint Statements tell us about Pyongyang’s strategy

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell On June 15, 2000, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il signed a joint statement agreeing to seek “independent” reunification and an inter-Korean coalition government. It was not the first joint statement between North and South. This relatively modest one from 1972 calls for “both parties [to] promote national unity as a united people over any differences of our ideological and political systems.” In retrospect, this...

Categories Diplomacy/Korean War II
November 6, 2017

Why Trump’s itinerary in Japan hints at re-listing N. Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism

Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson missed a statutory deadline to decide whether to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism (SSOT). Asked about this, State said it told members of Congress that Tillerson “expects to conclude his review and announce a decision within the month.” The Washington Times claims that “[t]here were rumors this week in the back hallways of the State Department that the administration was weighing a state sponsor designation.” National Security Advisor H.R....

Categories Abductions/Japan/Terrorism (NK)
March 10, 2016

Convicted N. Korean spy now protesting against sanctions in front of the Pentagon

Years before the Democratic Labor Party lawmaker Lee Seok-ki was recorded on a wiretap plotting violent attacks in support of a proposed North Korean invasion, the DLP was rocked by another North Korean fifth column scandal — the alleged Il Shim Hue spy ring. On October 24th, 2006, South Korea’s state intelligence agency, the NIS, arrested three men: Michael Jang, former Democratic Labor Party (DLP) central committee member Lee Jeong Hun, and the head of a private education institute, Son Jeong...

Categories The Fifth Column
March 9, 2016

Beyond sanctions: S. Korea should open direct, people-to-people cell service for N. Koreans

With much of the North Korea policy debate understandably focused on sanctions this week, I hope North Korea watchers won’t miss this new report from Amnesty International on the efforts by “Swiss-educated reformer” Kim Jong-un to seal off all unauthorized contact between his subjects and the outside world. In recent years, the principal medium for such contact has been the use of Chinese cell networks whose signals penetrate a few miles into North Korea. Those calls had become an important lifeline...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
December 31, 2015

On His Corpulency’s Secret Service: N. Korea has had a lot of car not-accidents (updated)

Kim Yang-gon, the head of the North’s United Front Department, has become the latest top North Korean official to assume ambient temperature. As head of the UFD, Kim was North Korea’s nearest analogue to the South’s Unification Minister, but he was also responsible for North Korea’s influence and subversion operations inside South Korea. It is one of my ruder habits to point out that the UFD has a rather substantial fifth column at its service in the South. For more...

Categories Anju Links
December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Categories Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine
March 4, 2015

Breaking: U.S. Ambassador to S. Korea slashed by guy who really hates bloodshed

Here’s a link to the story, and here’s a picture: Picture released of injured U.S. ambassador Lippert on YTN pic.twitter.com/ztxS3QzwmH – Mark Broome (@mark_arirang) March 4, 2015 Hat tip to Sung Yoon Lee. More to follow, but initial word I’m hearing suggests a political motive. ~ ~ ~ Update 1: AFP’s report has more details. Seoul (AFP) – The US ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was injured in an attack by a razor-wielding assailant Thursday in Seoul, police and...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
November 26, 2013

Open Sources, November 26, 2013

~ 1 ~ U.N. UPDATE: “The United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution that denounces North Korea’s worsening human rights violations, including its brutal treatment of political prisoners in the communist country, Seoul’s foreign ministry said Wednesday.” China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela did not participate, which I suppose is less bad than voting against or abstaining. The vote by the Third Committee is not a vote by the General Assembly or the Security Council, nor does it adopt the findings...

Categories Anju Links