The spy who wrote me

Choe Sanghun of the New York Times writes about a book penned by a former North Korean spy that lifts the veil on the inter-Korean spy game. The article, at least, makes an interesting read, but I haven't gotten hold of the actual book yet.

Some will say that this book is just part of President Park's anti-North propaganda campaign, but to me, the recruitment and utilization of chinboistas rings true — and goes a long way toward explaining the anti-US and anti-government moves of the left when they bring us things like the Mad Cow protests. (And I will not fault President Park for her intransigent stance against the DPRK since, after all, it was their operatives who killed her mother.)

An excerpt:

In May 1990, he and a colleague left the port of Nampo aboard a vessel disguised as a Japanese fishing boat, stopping in China to pick up supplies from a North Korean cargo ship before entering international waters. There, the agents set off in a submersible to the South Korean island of Jeju.
The pair operated in the South for the next five months, sending coded reports to Pyongyang, using radios hidden in a mountain by earlier agents. At midnight, an announcer on Pyongyang Radio would read their handlersf instructions in a series of five-digit numbers. Mr. Kim and his bosses used the text of a popular South Korean novel to decipher one anotherfs messages.

In October, the two agents returned to Pyongyang by submersible, carrying with them one of the two South Korean dissidents they had recruited as spies, whiskey and wristwatches as gifts for their bosses, and far more precious cargo, a North Korean woman who had operated as an agent in the South for 10 years.

Read the rest on your own.

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