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South Korea’s “liberal” government is trying to censor the North Korea policy debate in America

IT’S WEIRD HOW A TL/DR POST I PUBLISHED IN 2014 ON THINK TANKS, PROPAGANDA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Korea suddenly resurrected itself to relevance twice in two days, almost four years later. As you may recall from that post, in 2005, the Korea Foundation suddenly pulled its funding from the American Enterprise Institute after its in-house magazine, The American Enterprise, published a special edition about the current wave of sometimes-violent anti-Americanism in South Korea during and after the 2002 election that swept left-wing President Roh Moo-hyun (and his campaign manager, Moon Jae-in) into the Blue House.

Contemporary press reports alleged that Roh’s people directed the funding cut because they didn’t care for what TAE wrote, and because they really didn’t care for Nicholas Eberstadt (interviewed at this blog eons ago). One of the TAE authors called for an “amicable divorce” of the U.S.-Korea alliance, something that even most anti-American South Koreans fear. If this were to happen prematurely, it could cause capital flight, crash the KOSPI, and undermine the political support left-wing politicians build by profiting from the anti-American demagoguery of their simpaticos without openly propagating it themselves. Clearly, these issues are important matters of public policy for Americans. Why else would Congress have invited a bomb-throwing nobody fresh out of the Army to testify about them?

This episode was one of several I highlighted in my 2014 post about the ethical and legal questions surrounding South Korea’s influence machine in Washington. That topic is a third rail that few professional Korea scholars will touch. Privately, many of them have admitted to me that they’ve felt pressure from that machine. Publicly, they almost never discuss it, either because they don’t want to be seen as throwing stones at competitors or colleagues, or because the boards they answer to don’t want to anger donors that are funded by chaebol and controlled by the Blue House. As for journalists, it often seems that no one cares less about free speech than they do. I may be the only person in this town who is willing to write about this.

This week, a reader affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute saw my 2014 post and brought it to my attention that in the same year, AEI stopped taking foreign government funding. I’ve updated my post accordingly and thank AEI for bringing this to my attention. What I’m about to tell you next will give AEI reason to give thanks for that prescient decision.

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The Chosun Ilbo and the Joongang Ilbo now report that the South Korean government directed the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) to cut most of its funding to Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI), except for some Korean language and Korea studies training. KIEP calls itself a “government-funded think tank,” but it is a creation of South Korean law and has a “go.kr” web address. And as you’re about to see, it clearly takes its direction from the South Korean government.

Paradoxically, USKI is best known for publishing the reliably soft-line, anti-anti-North Korean, pro-“engagement” 38 North blog. It’s the last outlet you’d think Moon Jae-in’s people would mess with. USKI was founded in 2006, the year after the Korea Foundation pulled its funding from AEI. According to USKI’s website, it receives “generous support from the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP),” among others. The Joongang Ilbo also reports that USKI runs a Korea training program for students entering the U.S. State Department, which sounds like a great way to plant the seeds of long-term influence over our government’s policies.

Not surprisingly, USKI and the KIEP have different explanations for KIEP’s funding decision, and by the end of this post, you’ll see why. KIEP says the National Assembly demanded the cut over questions about the transparency of USKI’s budget. But Robert Gallucci, the Director of USKI, says the real reason is that the Blue House wanted him to fire Jae Ku, one of the few right-of-center thinkers at USKI. (Mr. Ku gave an interview to this blog way back in 2005. I hope I’m not doing him any more harm by calling him a friend.) Later, Gallucci says the Blue House also told him to fire Jenny Town, a co-founder of 38 North.

Of the various accounts of the controversy, the Chosun Ilbo‘s accounts are the most credible, because its reporters obtained and printed an email from KIEP Vice-President Kim Joon-dong to KIEP’s representative in Washington. The email cites two Blue House officials, Lee Tae-ho and Hong Il-pyo, as effectively ordering KIEP to tell USKI to fire Jae Ku or lose its KIEP funding. This, children, is the sort of email that lawyers really hate to see at their clients’ depositions. Emails like this tend to result in generous settlement offers.

Gallucci says he told KIEP that this would infringe on USKI’s academic freedom and refused. KIEP then asked Vali Nasr, the Dean of SAIS, to fire Ku. Nasr, who sounds like a man who listens to his lawyers, told them he could not fire an employee without cause. Gallucci then went on the record with the Chosun Ilbo to express his disappointment with the South Korean government. Other accounts say Ku even offered to go away on a sabbatical. Then, KIEP also asked Gallucci to fire Town. Gallucci told them to pound sand.

The reports vary as to why Ku was targeted. Gallucci denied knowing if it was politically motivated, but said that according to his sources, a powerful person in the Blue House was pushing a vendetta against Ku. Gallucci said he would appeal directly to Moon Jae-in. Other reports allege that the Korean government was purging its donees and targeted Ku because of his relatively conservative views and associations with people it linked to Lee Myung-bak. This is illiberal and vindictive, but it’s also logical if you believe that Moon’s cabinet is composed of illiberal and vindictive people who don’t respect their critics’ rights to speak freely.

What I can’t make sense of is why the Blue House targeted Jenny Town. Her North Korea policy views are as close to Moon’s as those of any scholar in Washington. Thus far, 38 North has had nothing to say about the controversy, although a Chosun Ilbo report quotes Ms. Town’s comments about the controversy on Facebook, expressing surprise that a “progressive” South Korean government would do this.

Separately, a column in the Joongang Ilbo reports that the Moon administration has been blacklisting Korean and American scholars for criticizing its North Korea policy. According to the column, the Sejong Institute’s new management forced out David Straub, a highly respected Korea scholar, author, and former diplomat as a Visiting Researcher. The Blue House’s blacklisting of Straub is also hard to explain. He’s politically moderate, tactful, generally supportive of the alliance, and the kind of person who can give them sound advice that can keep them out of trouble. Evidently, the Blue House objected to Straub’s warnings that policy differences between Moon and Trump could lead to a “decoupling” of the U.S.-Korea alliance.

Don’t forget, this is the same government that just sent six former officials, including two former Culture Ministers, to prison over allegations they blacklisted artists. The “blacklisting” in question did not involve jailing or punishing the artists; it selectively denied them government funding because of their political opinions. Which sounds a lot like what the Blue House is allegedly doing to Straub, Town, Ku, Gallucci, and God-knows-how-many scholars and journalists in Korea.

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If this is the kind of hardball a “liberal” South Korean government is willing to play against Americans, what do you suppose it’s willing to do to its Korean political opponents, the opposition press, or North Korean defectors? The same Joongang Ilbo column revives allegations that the Blue House has silenced Thae Yong-ho and other prominent North Korean defectors since Pyongyang agreed to come to the 2018 Olympics. Thae, who was North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador in London until his 2016 defection, testified before a packed hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year, where he confirmed that Pyongyang intends to use its nuclear arsenal to assert its hegemony over Seoul and either blackmail it into submission or subjugate it by provoking an economic crisis. Late last year, he predicted that Pyongyang would try to pressure Seoul into a freeze-for-freeze deal this year. I haven’t heard a public word from Thae this year.

Nor, as the column notes, have we heard from Oh Chong-song, the North Korean soldier who defected through the Joint Security Area last year. What we have heard are some unconfirmed and unexplained aspersions that Oh fled punishment after committing some terrible crime. Of course, surviving in North Korea often requires a person to lie, steal, or even kill to survive, and Pyongyang often makes up lies about defectors being escaping criminals or kidnap victims. For example, it accused Thae of embezzlement and rape, but offered no evidence to support those claims. We have no idea if the aspersions about Oh are accurate, and we know nothing about their context, until we hear Oh’s side of the story.

The Blue House denied the accusations of censorship. Then, it immediately threatened to censor its accusers:

The JoongAng Ilbo reported Wednesday the Moon administration has been pressuring researchers and policy experts as leaders of North and South plan to meet.

The newspaper stated experts including defector Ahn Chan-il, president of the World Institute for North Korea Studies, who fled the regime in 1979, was banned from making television appearances for a month, and high-profile defector Thae Yong-ho had been asked to cut back on his activities.

The presidential Blue House denied the claims in the report Wednesday and said it will seek legal measures to correct the “unacceptable” claims of a government “blacklist.” [UPI, Elizabeth Shim]

Presumably, this is a threat to prosecute the columnist for criminal libel or sue for defamation. In Korea, the line between criminal prosecutions and civil suits can be blurry. Criminal prosecutions there are often resolved by a civil settlement called a sonhae paesang. Under Korean law, truth is no defense in defamation actions. Meanwhile, Korean prosecutors are digging up years-old, politically charged accusations and bringing them before a “Truth” Commission with the power to recommend criminal investigations.

One wonders which Korean officials will go to prison for this blacklisting scandal after the next presidential election — assuming there is one, and that it’s genuinely competitive — when the revolving door of political vendettas turns again. If Korea’s pursuit of high crimes and misdemeanors is one part “Frost/Nixon,” it’s at least two parts “Death of Stalin.”

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Substantively, I disagree with about 65 percent of what Mr. Gallucci writes and at least 98 percent of what Ms. Town writes. Both are perfectly nice people, and in this case, Gallucci acted admirably. Anyone who suspects me of sympathy with 38 North’s policy views obviously hasn’t seen how much fun I’ve had trolling 38 North on Twitter. But the principle at stake here transcends ideology. The Korean government is as free to choose its fiscal priorities as any other government if it doesn’t think USKI is a good return on its investment. It is not free to use unregistered foreign agents to censor critics of its policies, threaten their careers, or turn our think tanks into its propaganda mouthpieces. That is a serious threat to the independence of our public policy debate, to say nothing of Korea’s. It’s also illegal.

If Mr. Gallucci’s letter to President Moon doesn’t have the desired effect, perhaps his next letter should be to the Attorney General. The Korea Institute for International Economic Policy does not appear in a search of the Justice Department’s database of entities that are registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I’m not saying that such a gross effort to influence an American think tank’s views necessarily broke any laws or eviscerated any claim that KIEP is not an “agent of a foreign principal.” I’ll let them ask their lawyers that.

While we’re at it, the Korea Foundation, which was a subject of my 2014 post, also remains unlisted as a foreign agent on DOJ’s FARA list.

I’ve long believed that the topic of Korean influence, which has already yielded one major influence-peddling scandal in Washington, would be an appropriate one for a congressional hearing. Censorship and foreign influence are grave national security issues for both the U.S. and South Korea. My hypothesis that Pyongyang intends to extort its way to control over South Korea argues that its first objective will be to control what South Koreans read and hear, in order to give a submissively inclined administration the political space to evolve toward a one-country, two-systems confederation under Pyongyang’s hegemony. The problem with measuring a hypothesis of this kind is that you can’t cite what the papers are afraid to report, but these revelations do lend support to that hypothesis. The implications for U.S. national security policy should be just as obvious, given the recent revelations of Russian influence here.

Full disclosure: One Free Korea has no budget or full-time staff, accepts no donations, does not hold conferences or serve hors d’oeuvres, and is mostly written in smelly Metro cars (or worse). Somehow, it still manages to make its own modest contributions to the discourse. Ponder that.

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[Update: A reader points out that, although KIEP itself is not registered as a foreign agent, the Korea Economic Institute (KEIA) is registered as a the foreign agent of KIEP, which is itself the foreign principal. I wish I hadn’t missed that when I searched the list of registered foreign agents only, without checking what principals they represented. But the thing is, I don’t see any evidence that KEIA was involved in any of the communications with Gallucci, USKI or SAIS, so I’m not sure that resolves the legal issue here. In this case, KIEP, which apparently maintains a representative in Washington, was acting as the agent of Blue House, not as the principal.]

[Update 2: I’m now reasonably certain that KEIA was not involved in the communications between KIEP and USKI, in which case, KIEP being registered as someone else’s foreign principal is a moot point. The question is whether KIEP acted as a foreign agent without having registered as one.]