Anyway, he said, “Okay, Major. As you’re probably aware, we have a gigantic spy problem here in South Korea. In the U.S., you generally have two kinds of spies. You have foreign nationals. They enter with foreign passports and then set up business. Most often they operate out of embassies, or the UN headquarters in New York, or some other international institution that gives them a cover. They’re fairly easy for your FBI to target and watch. Then you have the occasional citizen who betrays your country – in the case of American traitors, most often for money. Those are the type who’re considerably more difficult to target.”
I couldn’t resist. “You mean like that Korean-American analyst who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency who was on your payroll?”
“Of course, he wasn’t working for us,” Kim said, maintaining his perfect smile. “But somebody like him would fit a spy’s profile. He had ethnic sympathy toward South Korea. He had money difficulties. He had sums of money entering his bank accounts that he couldn’t legally account for. I can certainly see where your counterintelligence services would suspect he was one of ours.”
Then his smile got a little wider. “Of course, he wasn’t. We’d never spy on our closest ally.”
He and Mercer chuckled merrily at this, like this was all part of the game. Their game.
“Anyway,” Kim turned back to me. “Our problems are much more severe. Northerners and southerners, we’re all Koreans. We speak the same language, look alike, dress alike, share the same culture. Millions of southerners were either refugees or descendants of refugees who fled North Korea when the Korean War broke out. Many southerners have families in North Korea. They’re vulnerable to all kinds of entrapments. Then there are the infiltrators. For fifty years they’ve been coming in, some by submarine, some simply sneaking across the DMZ. Lately, though, the North Koreans have gotten more sophisticated.”
“Like how?” I asked.
“Well, let’s take your friend Choi.”
“Okay, let’s take Choi.”
“According to our records, Choi Lee Min was born in the city of Chicago in the United States, the son of two South Koreans who immigrated in the year 1953. His parents were killed in a car accident in 1970, leaving him an orphan. He returned to Korea when he was seventeen, which is not uncommon. Many Korean expatriates have difficulties assimilating in their new countries, and eventually return. He dropped his American citizenship, attended his final two years of high school here in Seoul, got excellent scores on the national exams, and went to Seoul National University. This is our Harvard. At SNU he finished near the top of his class and could have fulfilled any dream when he graduated. Oddly enough, he chose to take the police exam. Believe me, that had to be a first for an SNU graduate. He could’ve waltzed into the executive ranks of Hyundai, or Daewoo, or any prestigious chaebol.”
“So he used to be an American citizen?” I asked.
Kim shrugged. “Maybe he was. As I mentioned, the North Koreans have gotten very cagey. They know we run rigorous background checks on any citizen being considered for a sensitive position, so they’ve become much more creative at fabricating foolproof legends. Maybe Choi’s parents were North Korean sleepers they planted in Chicago forty years ago. Or maybe Choi never set foot in Chicago.”
“He sure as hell seemed like he’d spent some time in America to me.”
Kim glanced at Mercer again, and Mercer nodded that it was okay to let me in on another little secret, too.
“We suspect the North Koreans have a secret camp for molding agents to appear to be Korean-Americans. The candidates enter this camp as babies and never set foot out of it afterward, until they take up duties as agents. They eat American food, are taught in replicated American classrooms, even watch American TV on satellite cable. An American author named DeMille wrote a novel called The Charm School, a fictional account of such a camp in the Soviet Union. We believe the North Koreans actually have such a place.”
“And you think Choi might be a graduate?”
Mercer said, “Look, Drummond, we’re not even sure the place exists. Over the years, we’ve heard rumors from a couple of high-level defectors. Supposedly it’s staffed by some of the American POWs who were never returned after the war ended. Of course, some of these damned defectors’ll tell you any goddamned thing. Who knows?”
I said, “Okay, so Choi looks like a guy who reverse-immigrated back to Korea when he was seventeen. What about his sister, Bales’s wife?”
Kim scratched his head. “What sister?”
I said, “Chief Warrant Officer Michael Bales is the CID officer who worked the Whitehall case with Choi. He’s supposed to be married to Choi’s sister.”
Kim lifted up a folder and glanced through it, searching for something. He said, “We have no record of a sister.”
“So who’s Bales’s wife?”
Mercer said, “We’ll do some checking.”
Then I said, “So what’s with this screening you mentioned?”
Kim said, “Our biggest problem is that before 1945 we were under Japanese rule and were administered by Japanese civil servants. In the last days of the Second World War, they destroyed their files, effectively eradicating our historical record of citizenry. Then between 1950 and 1953, thousands of our villages and cities were destroyed, and with them, even many of our municipal and regional records were lost. Millions of people lost their homes. There were massive internal migrations and millions of northerners fleeing south. The entire Korean race was on the move. It was like our country was stirred in a huge mixing bowl.”
Mercer said, “That’s why it’s so damned hard to figure out who’s workin’ for who down here.”
Kim nodded that this was so. “About three years ago, we developed a computer program to help us sift through large populations. We call it the Communist Screening Program, or COMESPRO. Admittedly not a very elegant name, but it works. The program employs special profiles to tell us who we might want to examine more closely, much like the one your immigration service employs to screen for likely drug mules at your customs points. For example, if we can’t trace a citizen’s family back three generations, it sends up a flag. If the citizen immigrated from a third country, that’s another flag.”
I said, “Then wouldn’t Choi have popped up on your program?”
“Yes, except we’ve only used it to screen our armed forces and intelligence services, some of our more sensitive ministries, and our foreign service. We frankly hadn’t considered using it on our police forces. They’re not involved in national security, so why should we?”
I pointed at the stacks of folders. “Is that what happened when you screened everybody who works at the Itaewon station?”
He pointed at the larger stack. “These were the ones COMESPRO screened out.” Then he pointed at the smaller stack. “These are the ones we would call suspect profiles. There are twenty-two in all.”
So I said, “Then you could have a big nest of spies in the precinct house?”
Kim smiled condescendingly. “I don’t want to sound dubious, Major, but a fifth of all populations we screen come up as suspects. There’s nothing unusual about these numbers. A lot of these aren’t going to pan out… probably none. Besides, we’ve never had anything like that before. Spies and agents operate in singles. They may be part of a larger cell, perhaps under a single controller, but they’re quarantined from one another. It’s good spycraft. If one gets caught, he can’t compromise the others, because he doesn’t know who they are. The controller usually has an alert system in place in the event one of his people is picked up, and a well-planned escape route he uses at the first sign of trouble.”
“So you think I’m barking up the wrong tree?”