 Won Sei-hoon, head of the National Intelligence Service, attends a plenary meeting of the intelligence committee at the National Assembly in Seoul, Tuesday. / Korea Times |
By Lee Tae-hoon
The chiefs of the country’s spy agency and defense ministry admitted Tuesday that they were completely unaware of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s demise until Pyongyang made an announcement two days later.
Due to their inability to get the information, President Lee Myung-bak was also in the dark until Monday at noon when the North’s state-run Central News Agency reported that the 69-year-old Kim had died of heart failure at 8:30 a.m. Saturday.
Lee left the country four hours after Kim’s death to have a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in Kyoto. On Monday morning, Lee celebrated his 70th birthday party at Cheong Wa Dae.
“I found out Kim Jong-il’s death after watching the news,” Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said during a National Assembly Defense Committee meeting.
Kim was at the Assembly to brief governing Grand National Party (GNP) floor leader Hwang Woo-yeo and party members on a defense reform bill when the communist North broke the news.
He said due to the reclusive nature of the Stalinist regime, it is difficult to collect such sensitive information as the North Korean leader’s sudden death with current intelligence assets.
“I realize how desperately we need to beef up our intelligence capacity,” Kim said.
In a parliamentary committee on intelligence, Won Sei-hoon, the head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), also acknowledged that he learned of Kim’s death after the North made the announcement.
“Other neighboring countries, including China, were in a similar situation,” Won was quoted as saying by GNP lawmaker Kwon Young-se who chaired the closed-door meeting.
NIS officials said the United States, Japan and Russia also found about the death of the North’s despotic leader after Pyongyang made the announcement.
Rep. Park Sun-young of the minor opposition Liberty Forward Party, however, urged Won to step down over his “agency’s intelligence failure.”
“The failure of the NIS, which receives an enormous amount of tax payer’s money each year to collect North Korean intelligence, cannot be forgiven,” she said.
The lawmaker argued that Won’s removal of North Korea experts in his agency to hire those close to him and the Lee administration led to a loophole in intelligence gathering.
Some North Korean experts say the government’s preference of signal intelligence through the latest technology over human intelligence is also responsible for the government’s failure to get word of Kim’s death.
“Satellites and surveillance equipment are great tools that help us to detect military movements near the demilitarized zones, but they have great limits in looking inside Pyongyang,” a senior government official said.
“In order to find out what is really going on inside the North Korean leadership, it is urgent to build a human network with access to top military sources.”
Some argue that the lack of inter-Korean exchanges over recent years since the Lee administration took office played a role in the shrinking of human intelligence in the secretive North.
“Cultural and industrial exchanges between the two Koreas provide a good opportunity to have reliable sources inside the North,” a government intelligence official said.
Meanwhile, military sources said that the North Korean military fired a missile on Monday morning hours before the North’s state media’s announcement as they were also unaware of their “Dear Leader’s” death.
Only later was it instructed to halt the test firing of short-range missiles into waters off the east coast.
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