Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon

Recently, I came across a voluminous Korean book titled "The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold" by Korean journalist Lee Dong-wook. The title sounded like a parody of the famous 1963 Cold War spy novel "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John le Carre. In fact, the book is a biography of Lieutenant General Kim Chang-ryong, who served as the head of the Korean Counterintelligence Corps under the Syngman Rhee government.

According to the biography, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Kim served in the Japanese military police. He was dispatched to Hailar, an extremely cold region near the border of Manchuria and the Soviet Union. In that freezing region, Kim operated as a spy, secretly gathering information on an underground network of Soviet spies. As a result, he helped the Japanese army arrest about 60 Soviet secret agents.

When Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945, Kim returned to his hometown in what is now North Korea, only to find that Soviet troops had occupied the northern half of the peninsula. Having barely escaped two death sentences imposed by the communist regime, Kim fled south to Seoul and entered the Korea Military Academy.

When the Republic of Korea was born in 1948, Kim became a counterintelligence officer in the ROK Army. At that time, communists and their sympathizers secretly infiltrated every nook and cranny of Korean society, including the military. They were secret agents sent by the Workers’ Party of South Korea, which was founded in 1946 to overthrow the Korean government and replace it with a communist regime. Under these intense circumstances, Kim did a dazzling job of hunting down and arresting communists within the Korean military by utilizing his previous espionage experience in northern Manchuria.

In "The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold," Lee maintains that had it not been for the arduous efforts of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, and his right hand, Lt. Gen. Kim, South Korea would have ultimately ended up as a communist country. He argues that both Rhee and Kim did their utmost to root out those attempting to subvert the nation.

Naturally, communists detested Rhee and Kim, condemning them as public enemies to be eliminated. Kim was especially feared and despised by radical left-wing ideologues because he was a staunch anti-communist who relentlessly hunted down their comrades in the ROK Army. Moreover, Kim became a figure of hate among corrupt military officers.

In the biography, Lee points out that when several Korean generals and high-ranking officers appropriated US financial aid for personal use, Kim launched an investigation into the scandal. As a result of exposing this corruption, Kim was assassinated by fellow army officers in 1956.

Lee laments that after his death, Kim was unjustly condemned as a pro-Japan collaborator by far-left political activists who wanted to erase his strenuous efforts to protect Korea from communist conspiracies. Through this biography, Lee shows readers how heavily indebted modern South Korea is to Kim’s lifelong dedication to eliminating communism from the country.

"The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold" vividly depicts the chaos created by the clash of two mutually antagonistic ideologies — communism and anti-communism — immediately following liberation. Describing the social atmosphere of the era, Lee writes: “Right after liberation, most Koreans were not free from an ideological schizophrenia of blind faith and blind hate. 'Hot-blooded, patriotic young men' became a synonym for 'terrorists.'”

It is disheartening that such a volatile phenomenon persists to this day. Even today, the nation remains deeply divided by mutually exclusive ideologies: progressivism versus conservatism, left versus right, and socialism versus capitalism. Schizophrenic attitudes of blind faith and blind hate, too, can easily be found in society today. Moreover, an all-or-nothing, either/or mentality remains ubiquitous.

In his book, Lee portrays Kim as a reasonable man who was thoughtful and caring toward others, despite his fearsome reputation as a communist hunter. For example, Kim was well known for treating his men equally and cordially regardless of their military rank. He also deeply respected Oh Wi-young, a cabinet minister and National Assembly member, for his rectitude, uprightness and refusal to pursue personal power.

Once, when a group of younger generals slandered older generals and senior politicians by falsely accusing them of taking bribes from communists, Lt. Gen. Kim — with the help of Admiral Sohn Won-yil, the first Chief of Naval Operations — dispelled the groundless suspicions and protected the falsely accused men's reputations. He also released a man arrested as an alleged communist collaborator when a dauntless young girl named Oh Duck-choo appealed for his innocence.

"The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold" is a thoroughly researched book based on historical facts. The author boldly uncovers the truth amidst the fabrication and distortion of history caused by ideological clashes that have left indelible scars on the minds of the Korean people.

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Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.

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