Pyongyang Soju Story Takes a Strange Twist

There’s more news about Steve Park, a/k/a Park Il Woo, the importer of the foul-tasting  Pyongyang Soju, who was charged with acting as an unregistered agent for South Korea by giving its agents off-line intel about his business trips to Nouth Korea.

Park has since pled guilty to lying to FBI agents.  When FBI agents asked Park whether he’d had any contact with South Korean officials Park not only denied it, but denied that he’d had any contact within the last 20 years. The FBI agents then showed Park a picture of a South Korean agent, whom I infer the FBI had seen with Park. Park denied contact with that person, too. And naturally, he then offered himself up as a volunteer ambassador to North Korea. He has since been sentenced, but the terms are bizarre:

Despite the serious nature of the charges, Park, 59, has received substantial lenity — something that is often in short supply in federal courthouses — from both the judge and the prosecutors on the case. The judge, William Pauley III of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, gave him 18 months’ probation even though the crime he pleaded guilty to carried a sentence of up to five years in prison. After the guilty plea, prosecutors for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office also agreed to lift a prohibition that had barred him from contacting South Korean officials for whom he was accused of spying. [N.Y. Sun, Joseph Goldstein]

WTF? Someone remind me again why the FBI investigated this guy in the first place. Wait — it gets better:

Most recently, a prosecutor from the office, Jennifer Rodgers, gave her permission to allow Park to travel to North Korea “on business” for two weeks beginning May 30, according to court papers filed by Park’s attorney. Judge Pauley gave final approval for the trip without asking for any additional details, noting that his approval was “on consent of the Government.” The trip is an unusual accommodation for a felon on probation.

It would seem, to say the least, that this case did not turn out they way the prosecutors wanted it to.  There are some interesting questions the article doesn’t answer, such as what kind of information, exactly, Park was funneling to the South Koreans, and what happened to the South Korean officials who presumably were acting contrary to their diplomatic status here. 

So why did this happen? I can think of  several possibilities here, all them rooted exclusively in my own speculation. The first is that the entire investigation was  an effort to get Park on some other suspected offense, an effort that simply fell apart as prosecutions sometimes do.  Or, the effort  succeeded in some other way:  sometimes, investigators and prosecutors will try to use a smaller charge as leverage to secure a suspect’s confession to something more serious, or to get him to turn and help prosecutors catch a bigger fish.  Another possibility is that our State Department didn’t want the prosecution to go forward.

It’s anyone’s guess how Park’s criminal conviction will affect his business and his visa status, but he appears to have skated.  One thing Park has going for him over Robert Kim is that at least he’s a Korean citizen; the question of loyalty is one the North and South Koreans can sort out themselves.  Park seems to have a prosaic outlook on legal technicalities and national loyalties.  It may not have occurred to Steve Park, but it occurs to me is  that the North Koreans  may not approve of their  sales agent feeding information to the South Koreans.  We’ll have a better idea if Park returns from  Pyongyang.  If the North Koreans  don’t find any of this to be suspicious, we ought to wonder  why.