Popular Commentator on Korea Cuts Deal on Charges She Received Payoffs From South Korean Intelligence

Charming, knowledgeable, and ostensibly pro-American, Sue Mi Terry was an operative for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service with contacts in the CIA and the White House, for both of which she had worked. Those qualities explain her rise and fall as one of Washington’s most sought-after Korea experts before her arrest in July 2024.Now, less than two weeks before she was to go on trial in Manhattan, Ms. Terry is on the path to exoneration.Seen accepting nearly $10,000 worth of luxury gifts from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, plus dinners at fine restaurants, and another $37,000 from the Korean embassy in Washington for her public policy program, she’s charged with failing to register as a foreign agent and freed on $500,000 bail.The U.S. District Court in Manhattan, though, has given her a one-year reprieve before facing charges. The court agreed to dropping more serious charges that could have sent her to jail for years.“The case, which has reverberated through Washington, D.C.’s diplomatic and security community since her July 2024 indictment, is now likely to conclude without a guilty verdict,” according to South Korea’s biggest-selling newspaper, Chosun Ilbo.Under terms of the deal, Ms. Terry must avoid talking with any South Korean intelligence agent with whom she was consorting during her years holding forth on Korean affairs with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and also the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Wilson Center, both in Washington.Ms. Terry, 54, emigrated with her mother to America from South Korea after the death of her father when she was 12. She served as an Asia analyst at the CIA before directing Korea and Japan issues at the National Security Council under both President George W. Bush and President Obama.Suspected of being too close to her South Korean contacts, she resigned and joined the CFR as a senior fellow for Korean studies. It was after that move that she’s accused of providing channels through which Koreans could meet up with powerful Americans, of giving information to the NIS, and even showing them notes from a session with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.Ms. Terry did not comment, but her lawyer, Lee Wolosky, was delighted by the agreement that’s almost certain eventually to let her off the hook even though he was unable to get prosecutors and the court to expunge the admission of information-sharing. Her comings and goings to and from NIS dinners were supposedly secret but recorded by video cameras.“Dr. Terry, who has faithfully served her country for years, is satisfied with this outcome,” Chosun Ilbo quoted Mr. Wolosky as saying. “We have consistently argued that her interactions with South Korean authorities were aimed at advancing U.S. interests and fulfilling her role as a representative North Korea and East Asia expert.”A frequent moderator, Mark Lippert, former American ambassador to South Korea, praised her in gushing terms whenever introducing and thanking her.Her advocates do not think the charges should have been brought against her in the first place.It was “completely wrong-headed to try to criminalize the conduct at issue,” in the view of a former White House counsel, Gregory Craig. On the website Just Security, he called the case “an overly aggressive enforcement action” that was “not worth the chilling effect it can have.”For full rehabilitation, however, she faces a difficult challenge. After her arrest, both the CFR and CSIS posted on their websites that they could no longer display her material, including articles she wrote for Foreign Affairs.The Washington Post went a slightly different route in dealing with pieces that Ms. Terry wrote with her husband, Max Boot, a Post columnist.If the charges against her are “true,” the paper posted over those articles, “this is information that would have been pertinent for The Post’s publication decision.” The paper noted she had denied the charges but did not comment on her relationship with her co-author.

Popular Commentator on Korea Cuts Deal on Charges She Received Payoffs From South Korean Intelligence

Popular Commentator on Korea Cuts Deal on Charges She Received Payoffs From South Korean Intelligence

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