Stephen Kim's battle: state vs. individual

By Sah Dong-seok

The news that Stephen Kim, a former U.S. State Department arms expert of Korean descent, pleaded guilty earlier this month after battling espionage charges in the U.S. for more than four years barely made headlines in South Korea. This may be natural, considering that the 46-year-old Korean-American was accused of leaking top-secret U.S. government information to a Fox News reporter, without considering implications for his fatherland.

Only a handful of newspapers covered the story briefly and few in the media discussed it.

Yet the incident raises questions of why the Korean-American provided the journalist, James Rosen, with sensitive national defense information on North Korea. It’s not clear yet, but there have been speculative reports that Kim might have been motivated to leak the information from a top-secret intelligence report on North Korea out of concern ― as an immigrant from South Korea ― that the U.S. administration wasn’t doing enough to address the nuclear threat posed by the secretive communist state.

Whether these reports are true or not, Koreans may need to show keener interest in the alleged espionage case as his compatriots, given the “horrific toll’’ ― financially, emotionally and professionally ― as described by the Washington Post, referring to his pain and suffering in the course of his courtroom battles.

The leak occurred on June 11, 2009, when Kim was working as a senior advisor for intelligence at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation. On that day, he provided Rosen with the contents of an intelligence report on North Korean intentions to carry out nuclear tests. Within hours, Rosen published a story on the Fox News website that Pyongyang planned to conduct nuclear tests in response to an expected U.N. resolution.

The resolution passed the next day, but there were no such tests. Kim, who emigrated to the “land of opportunity’’ at the age of nine as a member of a Korean immigrant family, was indicted on espionage charges in August 2010, and it signaled the beginning of his lengthy battles.

He used up his fortune to defend himself and his parents in Korea even had to sell their house to help their son. Eventually he made a realistic choice of entering a guilty plea, putting an end to controversy over whether Kim’s actions could constitute a crime. Although Kim admitted that his leaks could put America at risk under the plea bargain, his defense team had argued that his conversation with Rosen by phone and through emails caused little damage to national security.

“It was the state versus a single individual, an uphill struggle to begin with. He took it on and did the best he could. Now we have decided to stop,’’ Kim’s sister Yuri Lustenberger-Kim said in a statement after her brother pleaded guilty. Under the terms of the plea bargain with prosecutors, Kim, who earned an M.A. in politics at Harvard and a doctoral degree at Yale, agreed to a 13-month prison sentence along with a year on supervised release.

American prosecutors alleged that the Fox news story gave North Korea insight into U.S. intelligence sources because Rosen reported that the U.S. conclusion on North Korea’s impending nuclear tests was were based on information “through sources in North Korea.’’ But Kim’s defense attorney Abbe Lowell denied that Kim’s leaks had such a fallout, saying, “The information at issue was less sensitive or surprising than much of what we read in the newspaper every day.’’

Even the Washington Post raised the possibility of a double standard, quoting Lowell as saying: “Lower-level employees such as Kim are prosecuted because they are easier targets or often lack the resources or political connections to fight back. High-level employees leak classified information to forward their agenda or to make an administration look good with impunity.’’

The leak case involving Stephen Kim also sparked controversy over America’s overblown control on press freedom. Attorney Lowell told the Washington Post that the Espionage Act, applied to Kim, “was designed to punish spies, not to crack down on conversations between government employees and reporters.’’

In this vein, a recent report on the annual World Press Freedom Index, prepared by Reporters Without Borders, is quite suggestive. In the report, the Paris-based media rights watchdog, known by its French acronym RSF, warned of the “growing threat worldwide’’ from the “tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner.’’

RSF put the press freedom ranking of the United States at 46th in the 180-country index last year, a decline of 13 places from 2012, noting that the world’s leading democracy suffered “one of the most significant declines’’ in press freedom last year. The U.S. was singled out for its pursuit of intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, the conviction of WikiLeaks whistle blower Bradley Manning and the secret seizure of phone records from the Associated Press.

As Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has set the sentencing for Kim on April 2 after accepting his guilty plea, he will have to serve the agreed jail term.

The Korean government has little to do as far as Kim’s case is concerned, but there may have to be words of consolation at least from his countrymen. His American dream has been stopped for now because of the incident, but he will never give up.

Sah Dong-seok is the chief editorial writer of The Korea Times. Contact him at sahds@ktimes.co.kr.