By Jun Ji-hye
Military prosecutors indicted a Navy officer, Friday, for allegedly leaking classified information to a person believed to be a Chinese intelligence officer.
The lieutenant-commander, who is now working at the Defense Security Command (DSC), is suspected of having handed over third-class confidential information on naval destroyers to the suspected Chinese officer in February.
During a media briefing, Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said the two had a liaison, also believed to be Chinese, who allegedly received the data from the officer and delivered it to China.
The officer, whose identity was withheld, visited the hometown of the suspected agent, and the trip was paid for by the latter, Kim said.
A high-ranking ministry official explained, on condition of anonymity, that there was no evidence showing the lieutenant-commander received money or valuables from the Chinese.
The officer, however, has a bank account in China. “We could not look into his bank account in China,” he said.
The investigators believe that the person who received the confidential data from the Navy officer is Chinese because he has an address in China and a Chinese passport.
No evidence was found that he is tied to North Korea, the official said.
The DSC officer made friends with the suspected Chinese agent through his classmate while studying in China from August 2009 to July 2012.
In September 2011, the Chinese helped the DSC officer who was assaulted in a bar in China, the official said.
The official denied some reports that the DSC officer handed over information about the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
He noted, however, that the DSC officer testified that the Chinese agent asked him to hand over information about the Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) systems, which he did not.
THAAD is a core asset of the U.S. global multi-layered missile shield program, which Washington wants to deploy on the Korean Peninsula. KAMD is what Seoul wants to develop by 2020 as its own defense capability.
To extract the confidential information, the DSC officer was allegedly helped by a naval lieutenant who belonged to the same unit.
After receiving the data from the lieutenant, the lieutenant commander handwrote the contents on separate papers and took pictures of them to be stored on a memory card. He gave this to the Chinese.
“A memory card is very convenient in delivery as it can be simply inserted into smartphones,” the official said. “The liaison might have been able to easily go back to China after receiving the data from the DSC officer.”
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