InterviewTrained to infiltrate N. Korea, then forgotten: Ex-agent recounts 3 secret years

In 1984, Ha Tae-jun, then 24, spotted a notice recruiting for a special unit at the Military Manpower Administration office in central Seoul's Yongsan District. The notice was scrawled on the wall in marker, with little explanation.

Ha applied, and his life was changed forever — training as a South Korean operative for covert missions into North Korea.

“About a month after submitting background check documents, they said I'd passed and told me to meet at a cafe near my house,” Ha, now 66 and president of the Association of Bereaved Families of Special Mission Agents, said in an interview with The Korea Times.

At the time, he had no idea it would be three years before he saw home again.

Taken to a safe house on Mount Cheonggye in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, he passed a fitness test and got into a car, believing it would take him home.

Instead, the car took him to another safe house in Sokcho, Gangwon Province, operated by the Headquarters of Intelligence Detachment, a South Korean military unit that trained and dispatched agents on covert infiltration missions into North Korea.

The next morning, he woke up surrounded by North Korean military uniforms, with every weapon in sight made for use by hostile forces.

From that day, his life took an unexpected path.

According to Ha, four people were assigned to each agent. He lived in a villa with an officer, a noncommissioned officer and two enlisted men, one handling daily chores, the other monitoring him as a training assistant.

One of the most important principles they operated under was, ironically, keeping him in the dark. That way, if he were captured in North Korea, he would have nothing to tell them.

“I didn't even know the names of the people I lived with, only surnames like Kim, Lee or Park, or nicknames like 'big teacher' and 'little teacher.' I was only trained for the operation I'd carry out in the North, nothing else.”

Training began at 6 a.m. with a 4-kilometer run. Twice a week, he ran 12 kilometers of mountain terrain in an hour, carrying 25 kilograms of sand, 1-kilogram weights on each leg, and his rifle. Because operations took place at night, infiltration drills were concentrated after dark. He was also drilled in Morse code, used to stay in contact with headquarters after crossing into North Korea.

Agents trained in isolation, being kept apart so they never met. Trainees learned North Korean dialect and trained in skydiving and scuba diving, since a single agent had to operate on land, sea and air alike. Every piece of equipment at the safe house, down to the firearms, was not South Korean.

Unlike the way South Korean films often portray the training of agents who infiltrate North Korea, there was no beating or verbal abuse, Ha said. “The instructors spoke politely, because with weapons right there, pointing a gun the wrong way during training could turn deadly.”

But the hardest part mentally was the surveillance. “Once you go in, you can't come out. They tell you it's for two or three years, but that's just talk. The state controlled us with no rule of law, and everyone knew the contract meant nothing.”

The surveillance didn't end with his discharge. Every time he moved and had a home phone installed, he'd get a call asking if the move went well. To him, it meant he was still being watched, and knowing that made him instinctively withdraw.

That caution carried over to the operations themselves. Asked whether he had ever gone into North Korea, Ha said, “No comment.”

He added that no one who crossed over after the South-North Joint Statement on July 4, 1972, would ever tell. In that statement, the two Koreas agreed on principles for unification and pledged to stop sending armed agents into each other's territory.

The training reshaped more than what he could say. Learning to kill without hesitation, steal and blow things up turned Ha's personality cruel. Three years of isolation ended with his discharge. To his family, he had simply vanished and reappeared three years later.

“I went to my sister's house. She and her husband asked where I'd been all this time without a word," he said. "Just as I was trained to say, I told them I'd been out on a deep-sea fishing boat.”

Not long after, more trouble surfaced. One day, police showed up and tried to handcuff him. At the station, it turned out he had been considered a long-term missing person. During his years as an agent, he had also never once attended reserve forces training.

“If you skipped reserve forces training, you got hit with heavy fines. I later looked at my training record card, and for years there was a record of me being indicted.”

That indictment record made his return to society far harder. A month after he got a job at Samsung Electronics, the general affairs office showed him the record and asked for an explanation.

He couldn't give one and was fired.

“The state abandoned the promise of a stable job to people who had their whole future ahead of them,” Ha said, adding that most former agents, like him, ended up with criminal records and could not find proper work.

In 2004, a law providing compensation and recognition for former infiltration agents was passed, but Ha said it wasn't enough.

“There should have been a fact-finding committee to determine how much we contributed and suffered, but none existed. Bereaved families don't know whether their father, child or sibling went on an infiltration mission. The state didn't notify them for decades whether the person was dead or alive. It treated us as expendable.”

For Ha, what the state owes its agents is more respect and sincerity.

“In the United States, people are given the highest respect the moment they put on the uniform. Is that really true in Korea? The state needs to properly carry out the work of finding the bereaved families of North Korea infiltration agents.”