People come to teach in Korea for many reasons: some just enjoy teaching while others need something temporary to tide them over until they decide what they want to do with their lives. Others teach in order to finance their travels around Asia; some just like Korea, and others are trying to hide from their past. Albert A. Hakim’s reasons may have been the latter two. Prior to his death in 2003, he and his wife quietly operated an English hagwon in Incheon for several years, but who was Albert Hakim? For those who remember the Iran-contra affair, Hakim’s name should be very familiar as the banker who handled the affair’s finances.
Hakim’s relationship with Korea goes back long before he opened up his own English academy in Korea in the late 1990s or early 2000s — it even predates his role in the Iran-Contra affair:
In 1983, San Jose’s local media became aware of Hakim when he built a small fort, complete with an electronic fence and gun turret, at an abandoned gas station across the street from his office. When questioned about what kind of business Stanford Technology was in, Bernard Siner, a lawyer for Hakim, described it as “remote supervision or surveillance equipment, to protect things like energy plants or Air Force bases from sabotage or invasion.”
Hakim later stated: “The nature of my business is such that — dealing with security — it attracts a lot of attention.” The attention he was referring to was his neighbors’ and “all kinds of nonsense” from the local media. Hakim explained that the site was only a testing and training location for a “very simple perimeter security [system] for a nuclear power plant in Korea.” Hakim’s neighbors were not convinced and due to their continued complaints and the gun turret’s violation of zoning laws, Hakim was forced to move his test site elsewhere.
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