Word: kim
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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...
...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...