Los Angeles -- In a bizarre case of what appears to have been an elaborate
but failed attempt at international espionage, the U.S. attorney's office
announced Wednesday that it had arrested a man who had been running an
unsuccessful spy ring for North Korea for the past eight years.
News of the arrest came on a day in which the North Korean government also
made the sobering announcement that it had restarted a nuclear reactor that
can produce material for nuclear weapons. But as serious as that statement
was,
some officials involved in the spying case were puzzled and amused at what
seemed to be a complex but bumbling conspiracy.
The 76-page affidavit unsealed in Los Angeles by the U.S. attorney read
like a spoof of a John LeCarre novel. In it, the FBI said it had run an
aggressive counterintelligence operation since 1995 against John Joungwoong
Yai, a 59-year-old native of South Korea and now a naturalized American
citizen who lives in Santa Monica.
The affidavit described mysterious envelopes stuffed with $100 bills,
meetings with North Korean agents in Beijing and Vienna, faxes and e-mails
between Yai's home or office and agents in China and elsewhere. It also
said he had apparently succeeded in recruiting two other agents -- referred
to by the FBI as "Person L" and "Person C."
But the FBI said that, despite all the efforts, Yai trafficked in nothing
more sensitive than newspaper articles and other publicly available
information.
On several occasions Yai is quoted in the affidavit, which described
intercepted phone calls and break-ins of his house, as boasting of
obtaining classified government information. But officials with the FBI and
the U.S. attorney's office said there was no support for those claims.
"The information he got was from public sources," said Cheryl Mimura, a
spokesperson for the FBI. "Low-level spy is a pretty good characterization."
Yai was arrested Tuesday and made his first court appearance Wednesday. He
faces three charges, none of them actual espionage. He is charged with one
count of failing to register as a foreign agent and two counts related to
his bringing more than $10,000 in cash into the country after a trip to
Vienna and failing to declare the money on a customs form.
His wife, Susan Youngja Yai, who works at a Los Angeles bank, was also
charged with failing to declare the cash, but she was not arrested. Yai did
not enter a plea, and a public defender representing him just for the
hearing said he still had not retained an attorney. The next hearing in the
case is scheduled for Friday.
Several calls placed Wednesday to Yai's Santa Monica home went unanswered.
In court Wednesday, he did not fit in the least the LeCarre model of an
international spy. Yai, a bespectacled man, wore a gray sweat suit, a tan
plaid athletic-type jacket and open sandals. He looked dazed and shuffled
slowly as the manacles on his legs clanked.
The FBI said it had not arrested "Person L" or "Person C" but said the
investigation was ongoing.
The affidavit said the FBI first began to trail Yai in late 1995, and even
obtained a warrant from a secret intelligence court in Washington. These
warrants are notoriously difficult to obtain, which indicates the FBI put a
great deal of effort on the case.
The FBI appears to have spent considerable sums and devoted enormous
numbers of hours to tapping his phones, planting bugs, following him for as
long as eight hours a day and secretly breaking into his home and office to
rifle through documents.
Whatever spycraft he was trained in apparently did not include avoiding
telephones or faxes, or even hiding code sheets. The FBI said that in one
break-in they found a five-page code sheet, giving the secret codes he was
to use for words like invasion, nuclear facility, secret operation,
recruitment, human target and CIA.
In a series of e-mails, he is quoted describing how he recruited a person
in Washington, D.C., apparently a college student, called "Person C" by the
FBI in the affidavit.
"Disciple will do his job well," Yai is quoted as saying, and described a
trip the agent made to meet with a North Korean agent.
He is also said to have worked closely in Los Angeles with a woman the FBI
called "Person L." She appears to have claimed she worked in the office of
the district attorney, but a spokesperson for the office said they had no
knowledge of this person.
The FBI clearly took enormous pains in pursuing the case, although at one
point in the affidavit the agency scoffed at Yai's boasts about the
information he was supposedly obtaining.
The affidavit says Yai did, in fact, meet with North Korean agents in
Europe and Asia. And in one of the more intriguing if enigmatic claims in
the affidavit, it said that Yai's confederate, "Person L," at one point was
observed getting in a car owned by the South Korean embassy outside
Washington.
On another occasion, the document said, two women were seen exiting the
apartment of "Person L" and then getting into the same car. If the FBI
believes either that the person was a double agent -- or if there are North
Korean spies in the South Korean embassy -- it would not comment further on
the matter.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2003/02/06/MN185539.DTL
