Cold War Cover-Up of Murder

SEOUL —  Fifteen years ago, Hong Kong police burst into an apartment after neighbors complained of an unbearable stench and found the decomposing corpse of a woman with a pillowcase over her head and a belt wrapped around her neck.

The victim was identified as 34-year-old Suzy Kim, a South Korean bar hostess. Her husband, who had reported her missing two weeks earlier, told investigators an incredible story. His wife had been a spy for the Communist regime in North Korea. She had tried to kidnap him to the North and was killed, presumably by Communist agents, after the plot failed.

It was a sensational tale, but not altogether implausible given the turbulent times of 1987. North Koreans indeed had been implicated in kidnappings of South Koreans. Moreover, the spy drama came at an opportune time for the South’s military dictatorship, which needed to keep anti-Communist passions at a fever pitch to justify the repression of opponents at home.

A convenient tale, but a fabrication. The husband, businessman Yoon Tae Shik, is on trial in Seoul on charges that he murdered Kim during a quarrel over money. South Korea’s former top police officer and a onetime intelligence official also are on trial, accused of perpetuating the lie for 15 years.

As the truth oozes out from the unseemly depths of South Korea’s past, it is proving as incredible as the fiction--and embarrassing to both the right-wingers who ruled South Korea in the 1980s and the liberals now in power under President Kim Dae Jung. The case is the talk of South Korea and has scandalized the nation.

If the story ended with the cover-up of Suzy Kim’s murder, it might be just another tale of Cold War skulduggery. But the intrigue also has infested South Korea’s high-flying world of high technology.

After Kim’s death, Yoon became a successful venture capitalist in Seoul and chairman of Pass 21, a company that makes fingerprint detection software and has deals stretching from Saudi Arabia to Silicon Valley. In addition to the murder charges, 43-year-old Yoon is accused of plying dozens of government bureaucrats, legislators and journalists with $1.5 million in cash and stock to advance his company.

So much public anger has welled up over “Yoongate,” as South Koreans call it, and other brewing scandals that President Kim was forced to apologize last month in his annual New Year’s address, promising to “do my best to see that such corruption is uprooted from this country.”

“It is unbelievable. Only in Korea could this happen,” said Kim Oak Kyung, 44, the victim’s sister, who with other relatives told the family’s story in a tearful interview.

In many ways, the story of Suzy Kim illustrates how much South Korea has changed since her slaying and how much remains the same. Until a few months ago, her name was synonymous with Communist perfidy. Having neither money nor connections, members of Kim’s family had no means to defend themselves, and their lives were scarred by the scandal.

Suzy Kim was born in 1952 in Chungju, about 70 miles southeast of Seoul, the third of seven children. Her name was Kim Oak Bun, but her nickname was Suzy. Her father died when she was a teenager, and she moved to Hong Kong to earn money for her younger siblings. Although she had only finished eighth grade, she was ambitious.

In Hong Kong, Kim tried to start a Korean restaurant. It failed, and she ended up working as a bar hostess. She married and had a daughter, Sonia, but later discovered that her Chinese husband had another family, and she left him.

She was 34 and a struggling single mother when she met Yoon in 1986. Six years younger, he had just moved to Hong Kong to seek his fortune. They met when he looked at an apartment Kim was subletting and quickly became engaged.

“My sister was so full of hope and happiness that she had met this ambitious man who would start a business and give her a good life,” recalled Kim Oak Kyung.

Suzy Kim brought Yoon to South Korea in October 1986 to register the marriage and introduce him to the family.

She returned home less than a month later, seeking to borrow $4,000 from the family to invest in a video-rental shop the couple was starting. She confided that she was a little nervous about her new husband--a former girlfriend had telephoned to say Yoon had beaten her in the past. The family was worried.

“Our sister was not the same person. She was restless, chain-smoking,” recalled another sister, Kim Oak Nim, 40, an insurance saleswoman. “She was muttering to herself about whether she should leave Yoon or not.”

Still, family members scraped together some money with the hope that the business would bring them all financial security.

‘Your Sister Is a North Korean Agent!’

On Jan. 7, 1987, a shocking story broke on the evening news in South Korea. Kim Oak Nim was cooking dinner when her husband yelled from the other room.

“Come look at this! Your sister is a North Korean agent!” he shouted. Sure enough, there was Suzy Kim’s photograph flashed on the television. She had disappeared, the news broadcast said, and was presumed to have escaped to North Korea.

Then there was Yoon, unshaven and teary-eyed, giving a news conference. He said that a few days earlier, two mysterious Korean men had come to their Hong Kong apartment to see his wife. She asked Yoon to go out to buy cigarettes, but when he returned she was gone. Shortly afterward, he got a telephone call informing him that his wife would be sold into prostitution if he did not follow instructions. Yoon said that “like any good husband,” he obliged.

Following instructions, he flew to Singapore and took a taxi to an address he had been given, which turned out to be the North Korean Embassy. Yoon said he realized then that his wife had defected and was trying to lure him to the Communist country.

“I’m almost too terrified to talk about it,” Yoon said, sobbing, during one of a series of news conferences organized by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, or KCIA, which had picked him up in Singapore and returned him to Seoul. “I am so relieved to have escaped. It reminds us that we need to be strong anti-Communists to protect ourselves,” he said.

Family Targeted After Allegations

In early 1987, the Cold War between North and South Korea was raging. The estranged nations regularly accused each other of kidnappings and terrorism. Anti-Communist sentiments in the South were high.

The consequences for the Kim family were swift and devastating. The mother and six siblings were picked up for interrogation. The 60-year-old matriarch was beaten, kicked and sent home by police in the sub-freezing January temperatures without her winter coat, which had been confiscated because it was a gift from Suzy Kim.

The oldest sister was fired from her job in a tobacco factory. She had a nervous breakdown and died of a stroke later that year. The brother, a truck driver, lost his job and became an alcoholic. The siblings’ children, in turn, were so tormented in school that they were forced to drop out. All but one of the sisters were forced by their husbands’ families to divorce. Sonia, who had long lived with Suzy Kim’s family, was sent back to Hong Kong to stay with her birth father.

“What we went through individually was beyond description; it was seven individual stories, but our poor dear mother had to take all on herself,” said Kim Oak Nim. “She spent the last days of her life repenting what she said were sins in a past life that had brought it on the family.”

At the time of Yoon’s news conferences, it was assumed that Suzy Kim had escaped to North Korea. For a couple of weeks, her family believed that she was an agent. But then her body was discovered Jan. 24, 1987, stashed under her bed. The Hong Kong police figured that she had been killed Jan. 2 or Jan. 3, shortly before Yoon’s news conferences. The South Korean media speculated that she had been killed by the North Koreans after she failed to kidnap her husband. But her family was convinced that Yoon had killed her.

The family members were not alone with their suspicions. A doubting South Korean ambassador to Singapore warned the KCIA not to hold the news conferences. Hong Kong detectives handling the case were quoted as saying Yoon’s story was “a lot of rubbish.”

“We certainly felt that [Yoon] was the prime suspect and that it was unlikely anyone else could have murdered his wife,” Hong Kong police Supt. Stephen Tarrant said in a recent telephone interview. His department repeatedly told South Korean authorities during the 1990s that it wanted to interview Yoon but was told the businessman couldn’t be found, Tarrant said. (During part of that time, Yoon was serving 2 1/2 years in prison on an unrelated conviction for forging credit cards.)

In fact, the KCIA was not entirely clueless. According to court documents and prosecutors, the KCIA came to realize that Yoon’s tale of escaping a kidnapping plot was bogus, but the agency felt it would be inadvisable to admit it, given a volatile political situation at home. In early 1987, the streets of Seoul were choked with tear gas as riot police battled pro-democracy demonstrators and allegations were flying about the torture and killings of political opponents.

“His [Yoon’s story] was salable to the KCIA at the time. They needed to distract the public,” said Park Young Ryul, director of the International Crime Investigation Department in Seoul and the lead prosecutor on Yoon’s murder case. “After they reinvestigated, they realized the truth would hurt the regime, so they hushed it up.”

So what really happened?

According to the prosecution theory, outlined in a 48-page indictment, Yoon married Kim because she had permanent residency in Hong Kong and he believed that she could help his business. But she was less useful than he had hoped; the couple fought frequently, and he killed her during a quarrel. Frantic to avoid prosecution, he fled to Singapore, hoping the North Korean Embassy there would take him in. He was turned away and, thinking quickly, concocted the spy story.

Within days of the initial news conference, the KCIA questioned Yoon and extracted a confession--read into the court record late last month during his trial--that he had strangled his wife. “I was sitting on top of her stomach. Her complexion became dark. I thought, people can die so easily,” Yoon told the spy agency, according to the confession.

He tells a different story now. According to his attorney, Yoon accidentally killed his wife during a fight. If the court accepts this version, he would be guilty only of manslaughter and free from prosecution because the statute of limitations is only seven years.

“It is clear that this is a manslaughter case,” said Kim Hyon Ho, the attorney. “In a sense, Mr. Yoon is a victim of the cover-up as well. If he had been charged at the time, he would have served his sentence already and have been a free man by now.”

None of that explains how Yoon managed to escape prosecution on murder charges and prosper until his arrest in October. His apparent immunity continued well into the government of President Kim, who took office in 1998. As a high-tech entrepreneur, Yoon was so respectable that he was invited to a presidential reception and economic forum in 2000 and had his picture taken with the South Korean leader.

Despite the unresolved murder case and forgery conviction, Yoon was able to come up with enough money in 1998 to start Pass 21.

“He is very smooth, very talkative, very persuasive,” said S. David Kim, chief executive of Seoul-based Pass 21. “People were not suspicious of him.”

Had the investigation dragged on a few months longer, Yoon would have escaped entirely: The statute of limitations for murder in South Korea is 15 years. Although the National Intelligence Service, successor to the KCIA, in November admitted the cover-up and issued an apology, most of the people responsible in the agency cannot be charged because the statute of limitations for obstruction of justice is three years.

The exceptions are Lee Mu Young, once South Korea’s top police official, and Kim Seung Il, a former anti-Communist division chief of the intelligence agency. Both were indicted in December. They are charged with trying as late as February 2000 to quash the reopening of the murder case for fear it would harm relations with North Korea.

Investigation Continues to Dredge Up Names

The investigation is continuing, and each day dredges up new names of those tainted by their association with Yoon. Park Joon Young resigned Jan. 9 as chief government spokesman after it was alleged that he had recommended Pass 21 to government agencies and that his niece was on the company’s payroll.

Police officers, prosecutors, tax collectors, journalists and assemblymen are among those under investigation for allegedly having received stock in Yoon’s company in exchange for favors. A lawyer tapped by the president to be chairman of a blue-ribbon anti-corruption panel withdrew his nomination when it was revealed that he had done legal work for Pass 21.

Even in a country jaded by political scandals, the Yoon affair is rattling confidence. A survey in December of high school students found that 91% of respondents believed that their country was corrupt and one-third believed it was OK to pay a bribe to solve a problem.

But some South Koreans believe that the airing of the scandal is an encouraging sign. Park Byeong Seug, an assemblyman who in 1987 covered the case as a journalist, said: “The fact that Yoon has been arrested, and even the fact that it is now reported in the press, shows how much Korea is changed. Maybe it is not enough. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we have come very far.”

Suzy Kim’s family has begun to feel a sense of normalcy. In October, Kim Oak Nim went to Hong Kong for the first time since the slaying to visit the cemetery where her sister’s ashes are buried. She took a handful of dirt home to leave at the graveside of their mother to signal the end of the 15-year nightmare.

“My biggest regret is that my mother is not alive today,” she said. “I would like so much to tell her that it is a whole new world out there now.”

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Lim Kyung Hee and Chi Jung Nam in The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.