Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — A former agent for South Korea’s multi-tentacled National Intelligence Service (NIS) has defeated an intensive United States government bid to have him extradited to Seoul and imprisoned for revealing the payoffs to North Korea that led to the historic June 2000 North-South Korean summit and the Nobel Peace Prize for South Korea’s then-president, Kim Dae-Jung.

Kim Kisam’s victory in the immigration court of the U.S. Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review was extraordinary for two reasons. The first is that Kim Kisam was not a refugee or defector from an oppressive regime. Rather, he was a patriotic Korean who saw his expose of the payoffs — and Kim Dae-Jung’s relentless pursuit of the Nobel — as doing his duty.

Second, the U.S. invested the time and resources of a top attorney from the Department of Homeland Security to fight Kim’s application in a prolonged process that went on for eight years before ending in a humiliating rebuff at the hands of veteran judge Charles M. Honeyman in Philadelphia.

Spurning the impassioned appeal of the U.S. government, Honeyman granted asylum in the U.S. to Kim Kisam, his wife and two teenaged children. In his ruling, the judge found “a reasonable possibility” that Kim “will suffer the alleged persecution upon his return to South Korea” and was “statutorily eligible for asylum based on his well-founded fear of persecution by the South Korean government and the NIS based on his political opinion”.

The ruling ended years of uncertainty that began when Kim Kisam left South Korea for the U.S. in 2002 and applied for asylum after revealing much of what he knew to the Korean media. The bottom line of his revelations is that hundreds of millions of dollars, at least $1.5 billion, flowed into North Korean coffers to grease the path to the June 2000 summit.

At the same time, the NIS and other agencies, expending countless resources and precious time that might have been used for picking up intelligence information on North Korea, lobbied hard for the Nobel that Kim Dae-Jung finally won in December 2000 after years trying to wangle the trophy.

One cannot blame the NIS for having brought charges against Kim Kisam for revealing its innermost secrets. Nor can one necessarily blame Kim Dae-Jung for having wanted to bring about North-South rapprochement in the June 2000 summit. He doubtless had no idea that the untold millions that paid for the summit would finance a nuclear program in which North Korea has by now conducted two underground nuclear tests and is probably planning a third one while Kim Jong-Un, his late father’s chosen heir, asserts himself at the behest of a coterie of aging generals.

Kim Kisam’s view is the world had a right to know the summit was bought at enormous cost in terms of money and, finally, the security of a region facing the prospect of nuclear holocaust. I personally got involved in the drama when Kim Kisam poured out his notes to me for a book, Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae-Jung and Sunshine, published shortly after Kim Dae-Jung’s death in 2009.

The information Kim Kisam gave provided a perspective on modern South Korea that was sorely lacking in all my research on Kim Dae-Jung’s life and times. The sad paradox was that Kim Dae-Jung battled heroically for democracy in South Korea while glossing over or totally ignoring North Korea’s strategy.

Shortly after Kim Jong-Il died, the Workers’ Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, cited the nuclear program as his “greatest legacy”. Kim Jong-Il could not have nurtured that program as he did without tremendous funding from South Korea that he should have invested in food and medicine for his own people, who are still suffering from hunger and disease on an unimaginable scale.

In view of the information and insights that Kisam gave me, I was glad to testify as an “expert witness” at his immigration hearing before Honeyman. The judge in his ruling summarized my testimony, saying that I believed “Korean authorities were most angered that a former NIS member betrayed the service by revealing state secrets …” Officials did not blame me “as an enemy of the state”, the judge noted in his summary of my testimony, but “objected to the fact” that Kim Kisam had “provided secret information to Mr Kirk”.

Moreover, the judge noted, I had “provided testimony that individuals sympathetic to North Korean refugees in China have been targeted by North Korea”. There was, said the judge, “at least a 10% chance” that Kim Kisam “will be targeted by North Korean agents for his highly public criticism” of the North Korean regime.

One puzzling aspect of the case was the extent to which the U.S. government fought against asylum for Kim Kisam. An experienced “assistant chief counsel” for the Department of Homeland Security was deputized to fight the application. Kim had an equally experienced “accredited representative”, Janet Hinshaw-Thomas, who has stood by a number of applicants for asylum over the years.

Besides calling me as a witness, Janet also called on Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, whom the judge quoted as saying that “anybody who speaks out for the human rights of North Korean people becomes an enemy” of the North Korean regime. “Kim Kisam”, she said, “would be a credible danger to the North Korean government because he exposed the flow of money” from South to North Korea.

Why, then, did the U.S. government invest such resources into a vain attempt at denying asylum to Kim Kisam? The judge, in his summary of my testimony, said that I believed “the United States government objected” under “political pressure from the South Korean government”.

Clearly, in my view, South Korean officials, while Kim Dae-Jung was president, wanted to go after the person who had done the most to expose the dark side of his “Sunshine” policy of reconciliation. They appeared to have no trouble enlisting the support of their friends in the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and the State Department.

The judge wound up his summary of my remarks by saying that I had “testified” that I was “not being paid to testify”. Nor did I pay Kim Kisam for any of the great information he gave me. I was glad to have done whatever I could to support his case, just as he aided me.

The material he provided, as Honeyman quoted from my testimony, “gave a whole point’ ” to my book.

The mystery, though, is what the South Koreans were telling their American friends about Kim Kisam. Who among the Americans pressed to carry the case into an immigration court where the U.S. government rarely loses?

The answers to those questions may be as elusive as the exact amount South Korea gave the North to get the late Kim Jong-Il to invite the late Kim Dae-Jung to Pyongyang in June 2000.

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