Word: nis
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...Since taking office in February, Roh, a 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...
...overhaul is overdue. Latter-day corruption scandals involving the NIS, agents of which have been routinely called upon to do powerful politicians' dirty work, have crippled presidencies and dragged the agency's name through the mud. But conservative lawmakers are worried the housecleaning comes at an inopportune time, during a period of heightened tension over North Korea's nuclear-weapons development. The NIS will still ferret out North Korean spies. But the job of catching domestic sympathizers will be passed to the country's police. The fear is that the shift in responsibilities, as well as efforts to make...
...Critics see Roh's appointment of liberal lawyers and activists to run the NIS as a political gambit to further his policy of 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...
...Jung?who said South Korean agents tried to kill him three times in his days as a democratic activist?also vowed to clean up the agency. But by the end of Kim's presidential term in February, he was embroiled in a scandal over charges that the NIS illegally funneled money to Kim Jong Il to buy the 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...
...Scholar Tsche Chong Kil is found dead at NIS (then called the Korean Central Intelligence Agency) headquarters. Agents say he jumped from a seventh-floor window after confessing to spying for North Korea...