A Life Amid Spies: The Two Koreas

In part four of her series, former State Department official and human rights advocate Roberta Cohen recalls efforts by South Korean intelligence to steer her activism and the North’s to thwart it.

THE ONLY SPY AGENCY THAT EVER TRIED TO RECRUIT ME was South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the NIS. It started sometime in 2009, when a young man from Seoul’s embassy in Washington asked to talk with me about articles and Op-eds I’d been writing in the New York Times, Washington Post and various journals advocating stronger responses by the U.S. and the United Nations to North Korea’s appalling human rights record.

“What motivates you to write these articles?” he asked. I explained my prior service as a human rights advocate at the State Department and private organizations and said that, although I was formally retired, I felt too little attention was being paid to the situation in North Korea.

That evidently interested those he reported back to at the embassy, because soon thereafter, a more senior officer, presumably from the NIS, became involved.