Rift seen in S. Korean and US intelligence sharing

The once-comfortable relationship between South Korean and American intelligence agencies has broken down as the South attempts to shake off its dependence on US support, according to intelligence analysts here.

Although US military intelligence officers remain on cordial working terms at the Ministry of National Defense, analysts say the Central Intelligence Agency is frustrated in its attempts to obtain information on North Korea - including access to defectors - from the South's National Intelligence Service.

Just this week, North Korea's top defector, Hwang Jang Yop, failed to appear at a press conference here to address recent death threats against him, after having said he would attend "at the risk of his life," said one of the conference organizers. Since he did not call to cancel, the organizer assumed he was forced to stay away. Defectors have had to keep a low-profile in South Korea, partly due to the protectiveness of South Korean officials concerned with offending the North and giving ammunition to US hawks.

Intelligence analysts trace the difficulty to the previous presidency of Kim Dae Jung, who sharply changed the government's outlook by pursuing his Sunshine Policy of reconciliation with North Korea.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, Koreans had some complaints about the US attitude after the launching of [a] US spy satellite," said Hajime Izumi, director of Korean Studies at the University of Shizuoka in Japan. "Now it is the Koreans who are reluctant to share. They don't provide everything. Such a new attitude took place during the Kim Dae Jung period."

While the US has high-tech abilities to monitor North Korea, South Korea has a strength in human intelligence gleaned from defectors. Fast, complete access to defectors is vital, say analysts, in light of how little the CIA knows about the extent of Pyongyang's nuclear programs at the heart of six-nation negotiations.

US officials don't comment on intelligence lapses, but the CIA has admitted for years that it can only estimate that North Korea probably has built one or two nuclear warheads. The estimate has grown more uncertain since early last year, when the North restarted its reactor at Yongbyon. The agency knows far less about the regime's uranium enrichment program.

"In the long history of the American and Korean CIAs," said Lee Ki Tak, a professor of international relations at Yonsei University, "the starting trouble" was the case of Mr. Hwang, who was a North Korean party secretary before defecting seven years ago.

Hwang and a top aide who defected with him arrived in Seoul from Beijing, where they had sought refuge in the South Korean Embassy, several months before Kim Dae Jung's election in December 1997. Although the government was conservative until Kim's inauguration in February 1998, CIA officials had to wait several months before getting to see Hwang, and they never had the steady access they would have liked.

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