Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH


	November 24, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Spies R Us, 3: More tales from behind the lines
By Aidan Foster-Carter

An earlier column focused on South Korean agents who infiltrated North Korea: a story much less well known than the other way round. Here we return to what I for one find a fascinating twilight zone, on which the Seoul daily Korea Times has recently shed rare light.

So, if you remember HID (Headquarters Intelligence Detachment), South Korea's top secret special ops agency, then here's another acronym - all too revealing, surprisingly, of its job. UDU stands for Underwater Demolition Unit: a special ROK undercover body said to have mounted as many as 200 missions into North Korea during the 1950s and 1960s - both on its own, and in tandem with partners who allegedly included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and Taiwan.

Obviously, veracity is an issue in areas like this. Unlike the aggrieved old operatives of HID, fighting for recognition and compensation, former UDU agents are unwilling to be named. But they have described what they got up to in intriguing detail - and the Korea Times says that it has seen documents which log UDU activities in detail, and which name names. So I see no reason to doubt that these claims are broadly true.

Unlike the HID, which dates back to the founding of the ROK in 1948, the UDU was founded in July 1954, one year after the Korean War officially ended. Initially controlled by an unnamed US intelligence agency, it was created to fill a vacuum caused by the disintegration of wartime guerrilla units set up behind enemy lines. As such, UDU operations included infiltrating North Korea, reconnaissance, wiretapping communications of the Korean People's Army - and even actual attacks on the North's military targets, although examples are not given.

The most detailed account is of helping a US agent into North Korea on June 15, 1963. Setting off from Paengnyong island, which abuts the North, a UDU boat reached Kumbok-ri on the lower Taedong river less than three hours later. Six UDU agents took pictures of KPA radar stations and checkpoints from the beach - were the coastguard asleep, one wonders? - while the US agent slipped into North Korea. What his mission was exactly, the Korea Times' informant, now in his 60s, claimed not to know. All equipment - stereoscopes, infrared cameras, 30 caliber machine guns - was provided by the US. Two "white" US agents - was the infiltrator an ethnic Korean, perhaps? - were on the UDU mother ship off Paengnyong.

By then, in fact since 1958, the UDU had passed formally into the control of the ROK navy. But evidently he who paid the piper still called the shots - or could at least hitch a ride. Another more unexpected user of UDU ferry services was Taiwan, then a close ally of South Korea. On September 5, 1964, three UDU operatives took a Taiwanese agent into North Korea - mission again unspecified. Both Koreas contain small and largely invisible Chinese communities. Another agent has claimed that South Korea used to employ ethnic Chinese as spies in North Korea because they were less suspect.

At least some of what the UDU did might be called terrorism, to coin a phrase. On another of the agency's 30-odd joint operations with the US during the 1950s and 1960s, to help a CIA agent infiltrate the northeastern port of Rajin (now part of the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone), on their way back the team encountered a DPRK fishing boat. They sank it and took the four-man crew to the South. Small beer, compared to the 407 South Korean fishermen kidnapped and still detained in North Korea over the years. But it does no harm to remind ourselves that neither side in Korea has a monopoly of virtue, or vice.

Using the present tense begs an obvious question. As with the HID, the party line in Seoul - insofar as they admit these embarrassing outfits ever existed at all - is that UDU missions into North Korea ceased when the two Koreas first started talking, in 1971-72. But apparently both bodies continued to exist right into the 1990s, when they were integrated into the ROK's Defense Intelligence Command. One can hardly help but wonder what they got up to in the 1960s and 1980s. Did they really and truly never ever pop back for a peek at their old haunts north of the DMZ? Or perhaps by then the arrival of satellites meant that this kind of old fashioned cloak-and-dagger work increasingly became obsolete.

It was certainly hazardous to health, particularly if the UDU's rate of no return was anything like the HID's 75 percent. You can imagine what the DPRK did to any Southern agents it caught. In fact you don't have to imagine. The crew of the captured US spy ship Pueblo - now a tourist attraction in Pyongyang - who themselves got more than a little roughed up during their year of captivity, recalled the constant screams of what they were told were South Korean spies getting what was coming to them.

Lately, some encounters have been friendlier since it became easier for both Koreas to meet on neutral ground - especially China, after the ROK unceremoniously ditched Taiwan for Beijing in 1992. Things got so cosy that in 1996 an MP used rogue elements in intelligence to pay North Korea to stage a border incident just before an election - to scare people into voting conservative. Bizarre as that sounds even for the looking-glass world of espionage, ROK courts had accepted this - but on November 9 another court claimed a key document was forged. The means may have changed, and the facts will always be murky. But one way or another the twilight world of spies and agents lives on, as it always has and always will.

Part 1: Inter-Korean infiltration
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Part 2: Seoul's old spooks tell all
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