Word: joong
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...diplomatic price for any kind of agreement has probably gone up. At worst, it may mean what pessimists about the North have long been saying: that Pyongyang, under this regime, anyway, has no intention of ever giving up its nukes. The North's "strategic goal," says Park Hyong Joong of Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification, is to be accepted as a nuclear power...
...dark chambers of South Korea's notorious spy agency, Kim Nak Joong paid the price for consorting with the enemy. As a young scholar with an idealistic desire to see the Korean peninsula united, Kim traveled to the communist North as a self-styled peace broker. In South Korea 40 years ago, that made him a North Korean spy. The agency's interrogators beat him with a metal pipe, screaming at him to confess that he'd been sent by Pyongyang to foment revolution. "When I passed out, they'd throw ice water on me," recalls Kim, now a frail...
...former human-rights lawyer, has filled top NIS posts not with professional spy chasers but with left-leaning prot?g?s who, like him, favor peaceful dialog with militaristic North Korea. The agency's new director is former human-rights lawyer Ko Young Koo, who fought to get Kim Nak Joong, the aforementioned scholar, released a decade ago. "We need someone who will set the agency straight," Roh told his Cabinet in late April. New management is just the beginning. Under a reform blueprint announced last month, the agency's domestic-spying operations will be curtailed and its anticommunist bureau abolished, according...
...engagement with the North. With Ko at the helm, "the agency will be pro-North Korean," fumes Chung Hyung Keun, a conservative lawmaker and former spy catcher. Chung defends some of the NIS abuses, saying that too much focus on them has made martyrs of men like Kim Nak Joong, who Chung says was indeed a spy and accepted money from North Koreans. Adds Lee Dong Bok, a former intelligence official: "The agency is our last bulwark against North Korean aggression. It must be viewed by North Korea as a foe to be reckoned with...
...North Korean dictator's participation in a June 2000 summit. "Every new government promises to make the spy service neutral," says Ahn Chung Si, a political scientist at Seoul National University. "But they all end up abusing it." Roh may fare better. That would satisfy Kim Nak Joong, who admits meeting North Koreans but denies spying for them. "What I went through was beyond description," he says. "No one should have to go through it again...