Intel official behind military secrets leak recruited by Chinese in 2017: military prosecutors

A military intelligence official indicted this week for allegedly selling military secrets was recruited by a suspected Chinese operative in 2017, military prosecutors said Wednesday. Military prosecutors indicted the official at the Defense Intelligence Command on Tuesday on charges of aiding the enemy, receiving bribes and violating the Military Secrets Protection Act for leaking the secrets in return for money. Prosecutors said the 49-year-old claimed he was taken by suspected Chinese officials at an airport in the eastern Chinese city of Yanji in April 2017, where he had visited to meet with his contacts. He was offered to work for the suspected Chinese agent, which he claimed to have accepted as his family's safety was threatened. While the official confessed to first selling secrets in 2017, prosecutors confirmed he received money since 2019 and leaked secrets since June 2022. The official received about 160 million won (US$120,000) in total. He collected military secrets using various methods, su ch as taking photos and screenshots. They were taken out of base to his personal quarters and uploaded to a Chinese cloud server, prosecutors said. Counter-intelligence officials only discovered the leak in June this year. The agent took thorough steps to evade being caught, accessing the cloud server with a different account every time, setting passwords for every file, and deleting communication records. He communicated with the suspected Chinese agent through the voice message function in a game within a popular messaging app in China. Prosecutors, however, did not pursue espionage charges, apparently due to the lack of a clear connection to North Korea. South Korea's military law defines espionage crimes as spying for North Korea. The military prosecutor said an investigation was still under way, noting the possibility of the suspected Chinese agent being a North Korean operative. Source: Yonhap News Agency