It all started when Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi reportadly told a group of visiting Korean lawmakers that Japan had trouble sharing intelligence on North Korea with South Korea because Seoul had lost Washington’s trust:
The lawmakers quoted Yachi as saying, “The U.S. and Japan are sharing intelligence about the North Korean nuclear issue, but because the U.S. does not trust South Korea, it’s hard for Tokyo to share the intelligence it has gathered about [the matter] with Seoul.” The vice minister reportedly used frank language to criticize South Korea.
He apparently had some critical things to say about the Roh administration’s desire to turn Korea into a “Northeast Asian balancer,” as did Vice Admiral Gary Roughead of U.S. Pacific Command:
The committee members also met with Vice Admiral Gary Roughead of U.S. Pacific Command, who equally had reservations about a balancing role for Korea, asking where Seoul???s alliance with Washington came into the equation. Roughead was also reportedly miffed that the Cheong Wa Dae National Security Council pulped a joint military plan for contingencies including natural disasters and mass defections in North Korea dubbed OPLAN 5029.
Officials in Seoul denied everything, of course:
The official scoffed at reported remarks by Japan???s Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi to the effect that Tokyo is unable to share intelligence with Seoul because Washington ????can???t trust South Korea.???? “It’s below my dignity as a Korean official to ask the Japanese why they said something like that,???? he commented. He also dismissed reports in the Japanese press that Seoul???s unceremonious scrapping of a Korean-U.S. military plan for contingencies in North Korea, dubbed OPLAN 5029, would be a key topic when President Roh Moo-hyun and U.S. President George W. Bush meet next month. The matter had not made its way on the summit agenda, he said.
Cheong Wa Dae is demanding that Tokyo discipline Vice Minister Yachi for his less-than-subtle comments:
South Korea on Thursday urged Japan to take a disciplinary measure against Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi who triggered a controversy by talking about a chasm between Seoul and Washington on security issues.
“We urge the Japanese government to take a due measure against the responsible Japanese official who made irresponsible remarks,” Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Kim Man-soo said.
…
“The remarks of Vice Minister Yachi not only contradict the facts involved but are also rude in diplomacy,” Kim said.
But alas, if you’re willing to believe some serious “he said some unnamed sources said”-style reporting, then Yachi wasn’t the only one sounding off:
They say the Japan Defense Agency expressed surprise in that South Korean ruling party legislators appeared to justify North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons at a time when Seoul needed to take a firm stand against it. The agency’s leadership also reportedly said there was definitely a problem in the relationship between South Korea and the United States. “It appears the United States has come to distrust South Korea,” they said.
Japan’s outspoken Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi reportedly said, “The South Korea-U.S.-Japan relationship is very important in resolving the North Korean nuclear dispute, but the problem was South Korea… It’s questionable whether South Korea stands with us. On the contrary, I wonder if the South is moving in the opposite direction.
The most interesting comments, however, came from an unnamed high-ranking U.S. administration official who told the affable Rep. Park Jin that South Korean appeasement of North Korea was preventing China from taking a tougher line on Pyongyang (see also Yonhap):
Grand National Party lawmaker Park Jin, who is on the Defense Committee, went off on his own to meet a high-ranking U.S. official, who told him the Chinese government was divided between pragmatists and hardliners on the North Korea issue. Park said the official told him Chinese President Hu Jintao supported the pragmatists, but again South Korea was the problem. According to the official, Chinese pragmatists were telling the U.S. that as long as Seoul continues to “appease” the North and take a low-key approach, Beijing cannot take the lead in persuading Pyongyang. According to the official, South Korea held the key to resolving the issue, Park said.
Fact or disinformation? You decide.
The nameless official also bitched about OPLAN 5029 (you remember OPLAN 5029, right?):
Park also quoted the unnamed official as saying, “After Korea and the U.S. agreed in 2003 on OPLAN 5029 [a joint military plan for contingencies in North Korea including mass defections and natural disaster], Seoul belatedly called for it to be cancelled, and the South Korean government intentionally leaked this to the press.” Park said the U.S. official called this “a slap in the face for an ally” which had damaged the bilateral relationship.
Leaking agreements with the U.S.? Tell me it ain’t so!
Anyway, it’s hard to get a fix on what exactly happened with OPLAN 5029. Whatever happened, it would seem National Security Council deputy chief Lee Jong-seok was involved, and ordinarily, I’d say read this month’s edition of Monthly JoongAng for the goods, but apparently, the goods have been removed.
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Why would anyone scrap a contingency plan? I just hope that that contingency doesn’t come up because I have a feeling that if it does, and things screw up, Koreans will blame Americans for not having planned things.
Of course tey would and then they would deny that they ever had any knowledge of the contigency plan and that they ever asked Washington to scrap anything. The ranting would probably continue that this is the help that Korea gets from a long time ally like the US-proof they cant be trusted. In fact, it is the will of the US, Japan and China that a unified Korea not succeed because they all know a unified strong Korea would be the number one economic power…
Rhetoric, nothing more.
It makes sense that the parties involved, especially South Korea and the United States, would not share the most powerful intel they gather.
South Korea and China both have a primary emphasis on avoiding a collapse in North Korea. So, they would be cutting their own foot off if they gave the US very damaging information about North Korea, because they not only know the US wants to apply more pressure (which would push toward collapse), they have decided to work against US pressure to apply more pressure to North Korea.
The US, for its part, would be stupid to share its best intel on North Korea, because it is highly likely the South Korean government has backdoor (and even frontdoor) ways to tip America’s hand to the regime in Pyongyang before the US is ready to announce the information as part of a new push to call for tougher measures against NK.
And even if that were not the case, giving South Korea a heads up on the most damaging intel gathered simply gives the South Korean government a better chance to devise strategies to weaken the intel’s potential impact on moving the involved nations toward sanctions or taking NK to the UN or such things.
I’m wondering, has the US ever trusted SK like an ally should?
That’s an honest question, one someone else will be better qualified to answer, but the impression I get is that it has not.
Was not Robert Kim giving his contact information about NK that the US had but was not giving to SK back when he was arrested in 1996 (which predates KDJ presidency)?
And - another honest question - did not the US spend a lot of time over the years spying on SK governments (in an espionage/eavesdropping and not just “newspaper reading” kind of way)?
Legend has it that Park Chung Hee would sometimes go into the bathroom and turn on the water before having sensitive conversations there out of fear of US eavesdropping, and that a couple of floors of the Naeja Hotel (now gone, used to be near Cheong Wa Dae and owned by the US military) was used for such activities. Anyone know more?
oranckay,
Ally or no ally, espionage is actively conducted by all countries against all countries of importance. Alliances were never and never will be one of complete trust between governments.
It is not surprising to hear of the US gov’t spying on South Korea. In turn, it isn’t a surprise South Koreans are spying on the US.
The South Korean government wire taps the US embassy in Seoul, and the embassy sweeps the building for wires constantly. There’s also rumors about the South Korean NIS wire tapping non-governmental American organizations in South Korea last year. The organization gave the wire tap to the CIA, who analyzed it and returned it to the South Korean embassy in Washington.
Also, with regards to Robert Kim’s actions, this was an act of espionage by South Korea. Sensitive American intel was obtained by someone on the payroll of the South Korean government and handed over to the South Korean embassy in Washington. The US reserves the right to hold intel that was obtained by American sources. Obviously, considering the light sentencing of seven years, information on North Korea obtained by Kim wasn’t of the utmost importance, and America wasn’t hiding alarming information. However, smuggling intel to foreign governments is a grave crime. In turn, Kim deserved the sentencing he received. He is an American who broke American law.
Just because espionage is conducted, that doesn’t mean relations between two governments are unhealthy. Healthy or unhealthy, espionage happens all the time. It is not the best measuring bar for US-ROK relations.
I’d agree with the gist of what usinkorea and Mingi are saying. I would suspect that no two countriesno matter how tight their alliancewould share all intelligence. At the end of the day, in even the most multilateral countries, national interests trump everything else.
This isn’t to gloss over this news, but I would bet that there’s some intelligence that the US and Japan don’t share, because it conflicts with one or another country’s interests….
I have no doubt that there differing opinions in China on how to deal with the North. That’s true among governments in almost all international relationships. It seems a bit disingenuous to me to say that China is taking the position it is because of SK’s position, however….
Thanks Mingi for that elementary school lecture on spying, allies, and common knowledge.
Allies spy on each other, that’s just what countries do, but rarely to the degree that a head of state has to fear what he says (in direct conversation, not even on a telephone) in his official residence. “Just because espionage is conducted” doesn’t mean much, but it was an issue of degree.
“Obviously,” the US “reserves the right to hold intel obtained by American sources,” even when it’s not of “utmost importance.” Why you need to discuss Robert Kim’s actions is beyond me; the point was not that what he did was right or justifiable, it was that as a result of his case becoming public news it came to be known the US had intel on NK it wasn’t sharing with the “blood ally,” SK. Of particular note would be documentation outlining that the US knew of an NK submarine infiltration into SK and didn’t tell SK. The fact that Kim handed over intel that the US knew and didn’t inform SK alone may not be of the “utmost importance” and “alarming information,” but the fact that the US did not tell SK is, I would think, quite alarming. (Those are two different things: (1) intel obtained well after the fact outlining how the US didn’t tell SK, and (2) the fact that US didn’t tell SK.) I’m not in intelligence work and so only know what I read in the papers, but the US didn’t tell SK about an NK sub in its waters, one that eventually landed on shore, and we just happen to know about that because of Robert Kim. I’m don’t mean to say anyone needs to thank him.
And so for crying out loud, if “blood allies” are not going to share intel when an enemy sub is landing to extract infiltrators and unload new ones, what kind of “intelligence cooperation” exists for presidents harmful to the alliance like Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun to ruin so irresponsibly?
I don’t want to waste time arguing that KDJ and RMH have been responsible or that they haven’t been harmful in one way or another to the “alliance,” but I do think the rhetoric mostly coming from Korean newspapers that served the Japanese colonial government and military dictatorships saying that the two have hurt “intelligence cooperation” with the US is what is irresponsible and I think they’re doing it to advance their own (domestic) agendas. Let’s assume that both presidents have indeed been bad for the alliance - the question I’d like to ask is when, if ever, has there really been healthy “intelligence cooperation” between the US and SK? Maybe had there been any KDJ and RMH would’ve harmed it, but I’m not sure there ever was that kind of sharing in the first place.
If I were the US I could think of lots of reasons not to have been sharing intel on NK with SK over the years, one of them being the fact that SK often used information about NK to bolster the domestic “public security” apparatus instead of to be better prepared for NK behavior. One line you hear from the newspapers saying there’s a problem is that the US is not sharing intel on NK with SK currently because of fear it would land in NK’s hands. That’s a little much, but if true would be a reason, and one likely different from whatever reasons there were in the past. Another reason, one that would be consistent over the decades, is that the US has not considered the entity that was once its nation-building project a true partner in the relationship (and I don’t wish to argue one way or another about whether it had grounds to think that way).
Given the degree to which the US was long rumored to be spying on the presidential residence and what became known as a result of Robert Kim’s actions I do indeed doubt there was ever a real healthy working relationship on intelligence between the two allies. All I know is what I’ve read in the Korean papers over the years, however, so I did want to ask, and not as a rhetorical question, if anyone out there in the English speaking world knows if a relationship of “intelligence cooperation” ever existed. There’s a lot of nonsense in the air in Korea about Robert Kim, too, so I do have my doubts about the “US didn’t share intel about NK sub” story, too, and would love to be set straight.
I don’t trust the Korean media much in cases like this, especially given the Chosun’s 24/7 search for material to portray Roh as unfit for rule because he can’t maintain the US alliance. But I assume Yachi thought he was having a candid conversation with Korean lawmakers, only to have it all blabbed to the Korean media. This amateurism in high places does not bode well for South Korea getting ANYONE to share confidences with them.
All that follows is sheer speculation.
I’ve heared it said by others that back during the days of hard-core ROK military dictatorship (60’s and early 70’s) the US was concerned to prevent the ROK from starting a war in order to “liberate” the North. If so, maybe this was the reason for any “spying” by the US then on ROK officialdom, particularly during the Vietnam war when the US accepted an extraordinary amount of provocation by the North (to include the death of many of its servicemen) in order to avoid having a “second front”.
One suspects that the wholesale gutting the US CIA took during the Carter administration (77 through 81, following the famous Church Committee (US senator from Idaho) in 1975) put an end to any US “spy” efforts on the ROK.
Indeed, maybe that’s why Pres. Carter wanted to withdraw US forces from ROK? If he learned from any residual intel info of the belligerent intent of ROK toward the North, he may have wanted to avoid having the US drawn into another Korean war. As I recall he actually got as far as having one infantry battalion withdrawn from ROK back to CONUS; I remember reading about it in Army Times and being puzzled by his attitude at the time (since then I’ve become less puzzled, indeed I regard my vote for him in 76 as a great blunder).
I’ll have to read more about this period, maybe it’s covered in Oberdorfer’s book (?)
As I recall the famous “tunnel crisis” (my phrase for it) occurred in the last year or so of his administration (discovery of the infiltration tunnel under the DMZ, 3 total (?) ended up being found to date, they suspect there are at least several more still undiscovered).
If I’m right about this, how times have changed. If indeed the US failed to share intel recently about a NorK infiltration submarine, then one suspects the reason is that the sharing of such info would mean compromising the source (probably US technical means). And that the US intel community’s operating assumption nowadays is that elements in the ROK government would immediately “leak” any shared US intel to the North in order to curry favor.
Perhaps also the US suspects that the ROK has access to many sources of human intelligence regarding NorK nuclear program not available to the US, which it in turn is not sharing in fear that this would “provoke” the US. I certainly can’t imagine that the US has the ability these days to run any sort of resident human intelligence network in the North without the active assistance of ROK intelligence (ROK calls its agency “CIA” too, correct?)
If things have reached this level of discord then that is indeed ominous. The contingency plan discussed earlier almost certainly involves as one key element the detailed planning of joint ROK and US special forces operations, to seize and disable NorK nukes during a time of NorK collapse.
Indeed, one imagines that in such a hypothetical time of extreme crisis and internal collapse in the North, possibly PRC military liasion would be invited to join such teams at the last minute, in order to secure PRC support. But if the US and ROK can’t get their act together first this would be impossible.