Seoul's School For Scandal

Espionage 301. Honors seminar for students of superior ability and interest in the theory and practice of buying the favor of U.S. Congressmen and other high officials. Lecture and laboratory.

This entry never appeared in any college catalogue. But for several years, Kim Sang Keun, 44, the South Korean CIA's second-ranking officer in Washington, has been directing such a seminar regularly in his embassy's third-floor library. For field work, he sent his students--all South Korean diplomats and intelligence agents--out to win support for the Park Chung Hee regime in Seoul by compromising American politicians and officials with money and sex.

The meticulous Kim kept careful records of the more than $500,000, usually in the form of $100 bills stuffed into a white envelope, that the Park regime slipped to Americans it hoped to influence. He recruited attractive Korean women, sometimes with the threat of deportation if they did not cooperate, to trap Representatives and Senators by sleeping with them. He also acted as his government's watchdog over more public South Korean lobbyists.

Kim last week poured out details of his undercover adventures to FBI agents at a secret location near Washington. To the astonishment of U.S. officials, Kim had defected rather than obey Seoul's order to return home and thus limit further exposure of the Koreagate scandal (TIME, Nov. 29). Fearing possible imprisonment and torture, perhaps even death, Kim sought asylum in exchange for supplying information and documents that the Justice Department had been seeking for more than a year. In addition, TIME learned, he may have turned over the codes used by Korean diplomats and KCIA agents.

Describing Kim as "a dynamite witness," a U.S. official told TIME: "He knows all about the movement of money to Congressmen. He handled some of the cash himself. There's a myriad of potential law violations in what he's talking about." Because of the sensitivity of Kim's information, Attorney General Edward Levi ordered the FBI to withhold information about his disclosures. Said a high Justice Department official: "It's a real sticky mess."

Until Kim's defection, the FBI probe of the scandal was virtually stalled. Businessman Tongsun Park, who entertained lavishly in Washington and doled out KCIA bribe money to a score of Congressmen, had fled the country to avoid being called before a federal grand jury. Comely Suzi Thomson, who regularly gave intimate parties at which Kim and other KCIA agents cemented relationships with influential Americans, had been a balky witness.

Safe House. Other possible witnesses are becoming hard to reach. Kim Sang Keun's erstwhile boss. Major General Kim Yung Hwan, the KCIA chief in the U.S., was reported being held under virtual house arrest in the Korean embassy in Washington. In Seoul, meanwhile, President Park fired KCIA Boss Shin Jik Soo in an apparent attempt to improve relations with Washington.

Kim's defection was arranged with the help of Julie Moon, 46, operator of the Washington-based U.S.-Asian News Service, which supplies news to publications in the U.S. and Japan. She gained asylum in the U.S. in 1973 after Seoul, irked by her criticism of the Park Chung Hee government, ordered her home. After learning last month that Kim faced punishment in South Korea, she asked Justice Department officials to grant him asylum. He phoned the FBI on Thanksgiving Day and was promptly whisked to a "safe house" outside the capital, while agents guarded his wife and three children at their home in suburban McLean, Va.

Short and taciturn, Kim was previously known for his unswerving loyalty to the Park regime. While an honor student at Seoul National University in 1960, he led a bloody student uprising that helped bring about the downfall of Dictator Syngman Rhee. A year later he was recruited by the KCIA. Assigned to Washington in 1970, he quickly became the South Korean embassy's expert-in-residence on how to hook a Congressman.

As word of Kim's defection leaked out, five leaders of the House called--for the first time--for a congressional probe of the scandal. Also, in a letter to President Ford, ranking members of the slow-moving House ethics committee asked that the Justice Department share its information with them.

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