Truth Surfaces Decades Too Late in Case of Korean Socialite

SEOUL, South Korea — She was "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America," a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a "very malicious international spy." Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told viewers Kim's "womanly wiles" had been the communists' "deadliest weapon." Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia's Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the "seductress" headline, reviled her as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet "Operation Sex."

Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a turbulent past. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped "SECRET," hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.

Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.

The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up.

Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of Korea to "avoid further embarrassment," the record shows. She was left to her fate — almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done.

Any truth to this?

“Wonil Kim — son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird — is on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, “with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned.”

It’s sad.

The year-old orphaned boy, the son of the Colonel and Kim Soo-im, was adopted by a church administrator and his wife, a head nurse at the hospital where Kim gave birth. In 1970, the Korean family moved to the United States, where Wonil Kim eventually earned a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies.

...

Not long before Baird died in 1980, at age 90, Wonil tracked the old colonel down at a Rhode Island nursing home. Baird rejected his illegitimate son, speaking instead of a “Mr. Smith” as the father, Wonil Kim said. But after his death, Baird’s family was “very warm and accepting.”

...

This June his quest for the truth led Wonil Kim to a surprising figure, a feeble, 88-year-old Seoul lawyer who as a young army officer was one of five judges who sent Kim Soo-im to her death.

After meeting the son, elderly ex-soldier Kim Tae-chung spoke briefly with the AP, defending the long-ago verdict, but saying he’d told Wonil that Kim Soo-im “to me didn’t look like a bad person.”

Was she tortured? the AP asked. “All I know is what happened in the courtroom,” Kim Tae-chung protested.

Wonil Kim said he found the old judge “a very gentle kind of soul” who “believes he did the right thing.” Their hour together proved “cathartic” for both men, he said.

And for a son on a sad, dutiful mission, it proved essential.

“I just needed to be with someone who was in the courtroom with her,” he said — to talk about his mother, to summon up the memory of Kim Soo-im, before that memory slips finally, forever into the grave.

...

I suppose we’ll never know for sure.

Don't know the details of this particular case, but as time goes on you must be VERY careful of Korean revisionism; young South Koreans are considerably more leftist in their vision of Korean history; DPRKs are often written of as good guys, Americans and their realistic SK allies are cast as dastardly trouble-makers.

It's sometimes so ludicrous that this report here actually STRENGTHENS my instinct that the original reports were in fact correct.

Five or so years ago they started coming up with "new history" of US troops mercilessly mowing down cowering Korean civilians, etc.

Be super, super suspicious --they're trying to completely re-write history.

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