A South Korean civilian employee at the Korea Defence Intelligence Command (KDIC), indicted on charges of leaking military secrets including details about undercover agents, has confessed to being recruited by Chinese intelligence agents in 2017. The 49-year-old official admitted to disclosing confidential information since then by smuggling documents out of the base, either by physically removing them or photographing them using a silent camera app, and then transmitting them via a Chinese cloud service. This significant breach of security at the highly sensitive KDIC went undetected by the military for years, with an investigation only beginning in June of this year.
Military prosecutors on Aug. 28 said that the defendant, recruited in 2017, admitted to leaking military secrets and receiving cash during business trips to China. The investigation confirmed that, since June 2022, the civilian employee had leaked 30 pieces of military intelligence and received about 160 million won through a shell account starting in May 2019. The specifics of the information leaked from 2017 to early 2022 and the amount of cash received from 2017 to 2019 were not included in the charges due to insufficient data. The official was charged on Aug. 27 with benefiting the enemy in general under the Military Criminal Act, bribery under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes, and violations of the Military Secret Protection Act.
The agent worked as a non-commissioned officer in the Defense Intelligence Command during the 1990s and was later hired as a civilian employee in the 2000s, conducting operations in China and elsewhere. In April 2017, while attempting to contact local agents at Yanji airport, he was detained by Chinese authorities. He testified to prosecutors that he cooperated with the Chinese due to threats against his family in South Korea. After returning to South Korea, he failed to report his contact with the Chinese authorities. He also admitted that he began leaking military secrets around November 2017 and received cash during his visits to China.
He claimed he acted under duress, but later admitted to proactively offering to send additional information for more money, suggesting that financial gain was his main motive. Military prosecutors reported that the official demanded a total of 400 million won through approximately 40 transactions and received 162 million won into a bank account under a friend’s name starting in May 2019.
The official leaked 30 pieces of classified information to Chinese contacts since June 2022, including 12 documents and 18 verbal reports. He bypassed security by photographing materials outside the base or noting them at his desk. For documents from other departments within the Defense Intelligence Command, he borrowed them, photographed them using a silent camera app on his Galaxy phone, and then returned them. Despite the base’s security app designed to prevent unauthorized photography, he either avoided or circumvented it, rendering the app ineffective. The stolen documents were uploaded to a Chinese cloud service, divided into multiple compressed files, each secured with a password. He communicated these passwords via voice messages in a gaming app, and forensic analysis later recovered thousands of these messages.
