SEOUL, South Korea — A colonel belonging to North Korea’s spy agency recently defected to South Korea, the South announced Monday. He is one of the highest-ranking North Korean military officers known to have defected to South Korea in recent
SEOUL, South Korea — A colonel belonging to North Korea’s spy agency recently defected to South Korea, the South announced Monday. He is one of the highest-ranking North Korean military officers known to have defected to South Korea in recent decades.
The Defense and Unification Ministries of South Korea would confirm only that a colonel from the North’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance had recently defected, declining to provide further details.
The South Korean news agency Yonhap, which earlier reported the officer’s defection, said he arrived in South Korea last year. A few South Korean news outlets also reported Monday that a North Korean diplomat stationed in an African country defected to the South last May. The government confirmed that defection as well.
The revelations Monday followed South Korea’s confirmation Friday that 13 North Koreans working for a North Korean government-run restaurant abroad had defected to the South a day earlier.
The colonel would be the highest-ranking official from the spy bureau known to have crossed over to the South. It remained unclear what his defection meant in a continuing spy war between the Koreas, which remain technically at war after a cease-fire ended open conflict in 1953.
Some South Korean news outlets quoted unidentified government sources as saying that the colonel had been involved in running spy operations against South Korea while working in the North, indicating that his defection could have handed a potential trove of intelligence to the South Korean authorities.
It has been rare for South Korean officials to publicly confirm the defections of North Koreans, especially those of high rank. Even when they have, they usually waited until after the government had thoroughly debriefed the defectors and was reasonably sure that announcing their defections would not jeopardize family members left in the North.
Opposition political parties accused the conservative government of President Park Geun-hye of advertising the high-profile defections in recent days to help attract votes in parliamentary elections set for Wednesday.
During news briefings Monday, local journalists bombarded the spokesmen of the Defense and Unification Ministries with questions about why the government announced or leaked the news of the high-profile defections just ahead of the elections.
The government denied that the announcements were politically motivated. Jeong Joon-hee, a spokesman for the Unification Ministry, said the defections of 13 North Koreans last week were significant enough to be announced because they occurred while the North was being punished with U.N. sanctions. He also said the colonel’s defection could be seen as a sign that some of the North Korean elites were not happy under the supreme leader, Kim Jong Un.
Park’s government has championed the vigorous enforcement of sanctions against North Korea, citing the recent defections as evidence that the sanctions were working.
But Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute, said the isolated defections did not prove that the sanctions were working or that Kim’s grip on power in the North was weakening.
North Korea created the General Bureau of Reconnaissance in 2009 by combining various party and military agencies in charge of collecting intelligence abroad and infiltrating the South with spies.
In recent years, the spy bureau expanded its saboteur and spy operations to cyberspace. The U.S. blacklisted the bureau last year after North Korean hacking attacks were blamed for wreaking havoc on the computer network of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014.
It was again blacklisted in March, when the U.N. Security Council adopted a new round of sanctions to help stop North Korea from raising funds and securing technology for its nuclear weapons and missile programs.
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