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Kim Soo-im was shot by the South Korean military on June 28. 1950, just three days after Korean War broke out. Why the hurry? Kim had been called Korea's Mata Hari, in reference to the legendary Dutch-born double agent who was close to military leaders of both the allied forces and Germany during World War I. Kim was 39 years old when she was executed on charges of carrying out espionage for the enemy under Article 32 of the National Defense Law.
Her three-cornered affair with Col. John Baird, the provost marshal of the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea, and Lee Gang-kook, a former chief of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of North Korea's Central People's Committee, caused a huge stir in South Korea during her court proceedings.
According to the indictment, Kim charmed secret information about the U.S. military out of Baird and passed it to Lee, a communist intellectual who had graduated from Keijo Imperial University, the predecessor of Seoul National University, and studied in Germany. She was also charged with taking Lee, who was to become a wanted fugitive, in Baird's jeep to help him cross the 38th parallel.
South Korean society was shocked by revelations about this noted socialite, a graduate of Ewha Women's Professional School (the predecessor of Ewha Womans University).
But declassified documents make it seem very likely that the Kim Soo-im case was cooked up. In a Seoul-datelined story on Sunday, AP reports record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files from the U.S. National Archives ˇ°tell a different Kim Soo-im story."
"Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on." Thus the colonel ˇ°had no access to the details of classified plans for the troop withdrawal," which Baird had allegedly told Kim about. "Besides, the outlines of the withdrawal had been reported in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper available to all."
Baird apparently played an unimpressive part. He and fellow army officers ˇ°could have defended her, but instead the colonel was rushed out of Korea to 'avoid further embarrassment... She was left to her fate -- almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done."
A confidential profile drafted by army intelligence in 1956 said Lee, who had been engaged in communist activities since before the national liberation, "was reported to have been employed by the CIA's covert 'JACK' -- Joint Activities Commission, Korea. And, in fact, the North Koreans executed Lee as an 'American spy' after the Korean War endedˇ± in 1953.
That was established by the National Institute of Korean History in 2001, based on data from the U.S. National Archives. On Aug. 2, 1950, about a month after Kim was executed, the U.S. Army began an investigation to find out if Baird had been caught in a Korean honey trap. The "Baird Report," a 200-page document that was produced after three months of investigation, said that there was "no sufficient evidence" to prove that Kim had charmed military information, including the U.S. troop pullout from South Korea, out of Baird, or that she helped Lee cross the 38th parallel via a U.S. military jeep. It was true Baird maintained an inappropriate relationship with Kim, but there was no evidence showing his direct or indirect involvement in espionage activities, the report concluded.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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