UDU - A Secret South Korean Navy Spy Unit

[2RHPZ]

UDU - A Super Secret South Korean Navy Spy Unit Unveiled
Compiled by DW Whang*

The Navy ranking has a special category, "UDU", which shows up on the citizenship papers of those involved.* In today's atmosphere of North-South reconciliation, the plight of the agents dispatched to North Korea has seen much spotlights but there are some spots still under wrap. Until now, only agents of* HID (Higher Intelligence Dept) or its successor AIU (Army Intelligence Unit) have stepped forward to air their grievances.* The truth of the matter is HID or AIU refers to the Army spy operations, which is only a part of the total picture. There were spy operations run by other services and organizations as well.
This article tells the story of the Korean Navy's spy operation, whose veterans are totally forgotten and ignored.* UDU, Underwater Demolition Unit, was officially established in 1954.* Its parent organization was formed in September of 1948, when the US Army CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) formed a secret spy unit in Korea. It was April of 1955 when this unit was renamed UDU.**
Select members of UDU were flown to the USA for training.* They boarded a US transport at the Pusan airbase and reached a secret training camp in America after a brief stopover at Okinawa. They were blind-folded for the entire duration* of their long journey and so, they did know where they were in America.
UDU's primary missions were: kidnapping or assassination of key officials, destruction of key structures, re-supply and recovery of agents, demolition of transportation infra-structures, interception of signals and so on.* UDU was in operation until 1971 when a North-South agreement to curtail hostile actions was signed. However, UDU exists even today and it is not known if it had actually ceased its operations after the 1971 agreement.*
Initially, UDU operated as a semi-covert and semi-overt unit and drew its members from active-duty naval personnel. But later it became a totally covert unit and drew its members from the civilian populace. A batch of 40-50 candidates was selected from military age youth, who were subjected to six months of harsh training at a secret training camp. The candidates signed a service contract with UDU.* All but 10 or so recruits would survive the grueling training regime and become the elite members of UDU.* They were trained to kill people using special martial arts.* UDU ran like a business firm: for example, instead of the military ranks, chairman, department head, section head and so forth were used to designate one's rank.**
Today, many of the former members of UDU are bitter because they feel that they have been exploited by the government and that their considerable sacrifice and services for the nation have not been properly acknowledged by the government let alone any monetary awards, while people with lesser services strut around with chest full of medals and receive pensions. They are particularly incensed for being excluded from the proposed compensation of former agents now on the table at the National Assembly and the recent repatriation of former spies from North Korea.* It is believed that there are many UDU agents still alive in North Korea and the Seoul government could have done more for their return home.*
A UDU veteran speaks out.
My first UDU mission was in 1961 and I completed about 40 missions since then until 1971.* The most memorable mission was in 1963 when I was ordered to recover an agent and escort him home. The enemy discovered us and we fought a 40-min gun battle starting on the mainland until* we reached Paikryong-do. The enemy used a speed* boat to chase us and we ran out ammo.*It was a touch and go, life or death situation. We barely made it.
My missions were mainly to:
Recon North Korean coasts and interior positions
Locate North Korean communication centers
Infiltrate or extract our agents
Demolish key installations

I* quit spy business in 1071 and I was assigned to normal duties. In 1980, I was transferred to a regular Navy unit and worked as a regular navy officer.* I was honorably discharged in 1987.*
As far as monetary compensations go, I expected nothing when I joined UDU.* I did so because I loved my country and wanted to serve my fatherland.* Medals or no* medals - I don't care. They don't mean much to me.* Most of my UDU comrades think the same.* I might add that most of my comrades are dead now.
When I was in the service, I was proud of my elite status* Once out in the civilian world, my elitism got in my way. Most of the few survivors are doing poorly - financially speaking.* We receive next to nothing from the government. Some of us eke out a living as fishermen.* We could use some help financially.

[2RHPZ]

PYONGYANG WATCH

Spies R Us: Inter-Korean infiltration
By Aidan Foster-Carter

In Korea, as in any conflict situation - and never forget, the Korean War is technically not over yet - it's easy to assume that one side has a monopoly of virtue and the other of vice.
Present global trends tend to reinforce this, with the bullying and deeply counter-productive black and white worldview - if you're not for us, you're against us - that has become the West's menacing mantra since September 11. So this is a good time to recall the shades of gray that make up the real world, and some darker hues on "our" side.
Before the loyalty police cart me off, this doesn't of course mean either indifference or alleging moral equivalence between two sides: be they the United States and Al-Qaeda, or South and North Korea. As regular readers know, I regard the DPRK as a profoundly perverse regime: a menace as much to its own starved citizens as its weapons of mass destruction and maverick behavior make it to the wider world. The ROK, by contrast, has evolved, painfully at times, to join the ranks of the developed industrial democracies.
Yet one of the ways democracy is superior is precisely a willingness to shine a probing light into our own murky corners. With terrorism the shibboleth of the moment, and the presumption that this is something exclusively perpetrated by nasty Them against nice Us, we urgently need a more grown-up world view.
It is pertinent, therefore, to look at infiltration on the Korean peninsula, starting - but not ending - with the better-known and indubitably larger-scale efforts of the North against the South.
Terrorism can take many forms. One of North Korea's hostile habits over the years has been to infiltrate its agents into South Korea. In 1968 a 31-man KPA commando unit, sent to assassinate the then South Korean president Park Chung-hee, got within a mile of the Blue House before even being challenged and gunned down. That didn't stop the North sending in a further 120 agents later that year, to the same fate.
Nor is this old history. Remember those submarines? One night in 1996, an alert taxi driver - where were the coastguard? - saw something suspicious bobbing off a southern beach, like a giant dolphin. It turned out to be a 30 meter long Shark class KPA mini-submarine. A huge manhunt soon found 11 bodies, all shot in the head - presumably by their consent, to avoid capture: their colonel's pistol was still in its holster. Another 11 infiltrators were killed over the next fortnight, and two more seven weeks later, having nearly made it back to the DMZ overland. One agent was caught, and revealed all. Another may have got away.
Kim Young-sam, the ROK's then president, went ballistic. His US allies feared some southern military retaliation, or jeopardy to the still new nuclear Agreed Framework and incipient engagement process. It took three months of pressure from Washington before Pyongyang, which had initially claimed engine trouble caused the sub to drift south - pull the other one, comrades - eventually stated its "deep regret" (the word apology never passes Northern lips), and pledged that "such an incident will not recur".
Oh yeah? Fast forward two years to 1998. Another president, another submarine. This time caught in a southern fishing boat's nets. All nine on board were dead, in another group suicide. Weeks later, the body of a heavily armed KPA frogman washed up on another east coast beach. Later that year the ROK navy chased and sank a DPRK submersible assumed to be landing agents. But unlike Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung took a calm view of all these incidents - and persevered with his patient "Sunshine" policy.
The presumption has to be that North Korean infiltration of the South was and perhaps still is routine. A less publicized case in 1995 from the west coast suggests as much. A captured spy revealed that he had been back and forth several times by mini-submarine, as if by bus, living for months on end in the ROK. But this can shade over into paranoia, as when the top-level northern defector, Hwang Jang-yop, allegedly claimed that up to 50,000 South Koreans are spying for the North - most of these being actual sSoutherners rather than infiltrators. He has notably failed to name names.
Some on the extreme right in Seoul, a nasty and bone-headed bunch, even see Kim Dae-jung and the "Sunshine" policy as agents of a Pyongyang plot. The manifest Northern incompetence revealed in losing a pair of submarines - to adapt Oscar Wilde, once might be accounted a misfortune, but twice looks like carelessness - seems scant consolation to those in the South who overplay the threat from the North.
Thus the premise of the 1999 hit South Korean thriller film Swiri is that a crack KPA special forces unit resides semi-permanently in the South, where it strikes with virtual impunity: gunning down targets, hijacking a top secret new ROK weapon in broad daylight, and about to blow up a stadium where the presidents of North and South are together watching a unified Korean football team for the 2002 World Cup. (This political twist, that the KPA might sabotage their own leaders for making peace, is the best part of an otherwise over-excited plot. And as for the sexy lady KPA sharpshooter whose lurv for a southern agent proves greater than for Kim Jong-il, purleez!)
So that's what North Korea does, in fact and fantasy. What about the free world? Are ROK hands clean? Or does the South, too, send infiltrators North? I couldn't possibly comment. At least, not until next time.

A recent column looked at North Korea's persistent efforts down the years to infiltrate South Korea. They were doing it as recently as 1998, and may be at it still. But what about the other way round?
These days, I'd be very surprised if South Korea still sends agents into the North. Access to data from US spy satellites means they hardly need to. The fact that North Korea has no equivalent information source is one reason for all that tatty B-movie sub-James Bond derring-do - like sending agents by unreliable submarine.
But back in the old days, South Korea did this kind of thing too. How do we know? Because the ROK's former spooks are starting to spill the beans - as, in a now free society, they can. The Korea Times recently carried a couple of articles which shed a fascinating light on this little-known story.
It begins, needless to say, in the thick of the 1950-53 Korean War. Or probably before. In those early days, the 38th parallel between 1945 and 1950 was more porous than the DMZ became after 1953. Neither side really accepted the division and there was a fair amount of both overt and covert toing and froing.
But by November 1950, the peninsula was at war. Na Chol-ho, then 29, had just started work on a US base in Pohang as a "houseboy" (sic). As he tells it now, an angry old man of 80, an American soldier asked him to go on a mission behind enemy lines to collect data on Northern troops. There was talk of a house and big bucks. At a time of dire poverty, it must have seemed worth a try - and patriotic to boot.
So just a few days later, Na was on board a plane with "hundreds" of others - big plane, or do they maybe mean dozens? - heading North. He was parachuted into Kaechon, 75 kilometers north of Pyongyang. Apparently the hundreds were each on their own. Most are presumed to have died in North Korea. Na was one of the lucky ones. Walking for 10 days, sometimes through thigh-deep snow, he made it to Pyongyang. There he met a woman and together they crossed the lines back to the South some six weeks after he'd set out.
No house, no big bucks. Instead, both Na Chol-ho and his companion - about whom no more is said, not even her name - were questioned by the Headquarters Intelligence Detachment (HID), a top-secret ROK special operations and counterintelligence agency, which then promptly enrolled them. In seven years with HID - UNTIL 1958, five years after the war ended - Na crossed back into the North more than 20 times.
House, megabucks? Nope. Not one lousy won. Na Chol-ho says that he never even received a salary, much less danger money. But at least he volunteered - unlike Park Chong-ho, now 66, who aged just 16 was drafted into HID, again with promises of compensation that were never honored. Park is even angrier than Na.
For decades, anti-communist military regimes meant men like these daren't say a word of their grievance, let alone seek redress. That changed with the restoration of democracy in 1987. In the same year another HID veteran, Park Boo-seo, founded the Association of Former Undercover Operatives in North Korea, to campaign for recognition and recompense for these forgotten secret servicemen of the ROK.
They were not few. As many as 10,000 Southern agents are reckoned to have worked undercover in the DPRK between 1951 and 1972, when the first of many inter-Korean agreements led the South (or so they say) to end such missions. And 7,726 of these are dead or missing. Their names are enshrined at two temples and a military camp in Seoul, but for Park that's not good enough. He wants their memorial tablets moved to national cemeteries, alongside their fellow servicemen who likewise died for their country.
It's been an uphill struggle. As if not being paid weren't bad enough, there's a Catch 22. Officially, HID never existed - thus nor did its operatives. To this day, the defense ministry (MND) is reluctant to admit that any of this ever happened. One reason is said to be political parity, as North Korea's party line is that it never sent agents South. Seoul should simply reject such a brazenly ludicrous stance. What about those submarines? Or the 61 old communists, many of them former agents, sent home by the ROK last year?
This is one of several instances where Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine" policy, misapplied as tip-toeing around Northern sensitivities, ends up doing a rank injustice to its own loyal servants. Former HID agents have to contend with other slings and arrows too, such as being dismissed as Northern anti-communist youth out for revenge, mere civilians (technically true), recruited from orphans (as if they counted for less) or even criminals.
True, this kind of work is no tea party, and HID doubtless had its share of thugs and low-lifes. Even so, they were hired to do one of the toughest jobs going, by and for their country. To be first not paid, and then to now have to face the sheer denial of their sacrifice is a gross injustice that adds insult to injury.
Fortunately, the old spooks have allies. Legislators such as Kim Seong-ho, of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party, have pressed their case for recognition and compensation. Two bills are currently before the ROK National Assembly. So these forgotten people of the shadows may yet get justice. Meanwhile, they can stir the pot - and hopefully earn the odd won - by telling their fascinating stories.

An earlier column focused on South Korean agents who infiltrated North Korea: a story much less well known than the other way round. Here we return to what I for one find a fascinating twilight zone, on which the Seoul daily Korea Times has recently shed rare light.
So, if you remember HID (Headquarters Intelligence Detachment), South Korea's top secret special ops agency, then here's another acronym - all too revealing, surprisingly, of its job. UDU stands for Underwater Demolition Unit: a special ROK undercover body said to have mounted as many as 200 missions into North Korea during the 1950s and 1960s - both on its own, and in tandem with partners who allegedly included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and Taiwan.
Obviously, veracity is an issue in areas like this. Unlike the aggrieved old operatives of HID, fighting for recognition and compensation, former UDU agents are unwilling to be named. But they have described what they got up to in intriguing detail - and the Korea Times says that it has seen documents which log UDU activities in detail, and which name names. So I see no reason to doubt that these claims are broadly true.
Unlike the HID, which dates back to the founding of the ROK in 1948, the UDU was founded in July 1954, one year after the Korean War officially ended. Initially controlled by an unnamed US intelligence agency, it was created to fill a vacuum caused by the disintegration of wartime guerrilla units set up behind enemy lines. As such, UDU operations included infiltrating North Korea, reconnaissance, wiretapping communications of the Korean People's Army - and even actual attacks on the North's military targets, although examples are not given.
The most detailed account is of helping a US agent into North Korea on June 15, 1963. Setting off from Paengnyong island, which abuts the North, a UDU boat reached Kumbok-ri on the lower Taedong river less than three hours later. Six UDU agents took pictures of KPA radar stations and checkpoints from the beach - were the coastguard asleep, one wonders? - while the US agent slipped into North Korea. What his mission was exactly, the Korea Times' informant, now in his 60s, claimed not to know. All equipment - stereoscopes, infrared cameras, 30 caliber machine guns - was provided by the US. Two "white" US agents - was the infiltrator an ethnic Korean, perhaps? - were on the UDU mother ship off Paengnyong.
By then, in fact since 1958, the UDU had passed formally into the control of the ROK navy. But evidently he who paid the piper still called the shots - or could at least hitch a ride. Another more unexpected user of UDU ferry services was Taiwan, then a close ally of South Korea. On September 5, 1964, three UDU operatives took a Taiwanese agent into North Korea - mission again unspecified. Both Koreas contain small and largely invisible Chinese communities. Another agent has claimed that South Korea used to employ ethnic Chinese as spies in North Korea because they were less suspect.
At least some of what the UDU did might be called terrorism, to coin a phrase. On another of the agency's 30-odd joint operations with the US during the 1950s and 1960s, to help a CIA agent infiltrate the northeastern port of Rajin (now part of the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone), on their way back the team encountered a DPRK fishing boat. They sank it and took the four-man crew to the South. Small beer, compared to the 407 South Korean fishermen kidnapped and still detained in North Korea over the years. But it does no harm to remind ourselves that neither side in Korea has a monopoly of virtue, or vice.
Using the present tense begs an obvious question. As with the HID, the party line in Seoul - insofar as they admit these embarrassing outfits ever existed at all - is that UDU missions into North Korea ceased when the two Koreas first started talking, in 1971-72. But apparently both bodies continued to exist right into the 1990s, when they were integrated into the ROK's Defense Intelligence Command. One can hardly help but wonder what they got up to in the 1960s and 1980s. Did they really and truly never ever pop back for a peek at their old haunts north of the DMZ? Or perhaps by then the arrival of satellites meant that this kind of old fashioned cloak-and-dagger work increasingly became obsolete.
It was certainly hazardous to health, particularly if the UDU's rate of no return was anything like the HID's 75 percent. You can imagine what the DPRK did to any Southern agents it caught. In fact you don't have to imagine. The crew of the captured US spy ship Pueblo - now a tourist attraction in Pyongyang - who themselves got more than a little roughed up during their year of captivity, recalled the constant screams of what they were told were South Korean spies getting what was coming to them.
Lately, some encounters have been friendlier since it became easier for both Koreas to meet on neutral ground - especially China, after the ROK unceremoniously ditched Taiwan for Beijing in 1992. Things got so cosy that in 1996 an MP used rogue elements in intelligence to pay North Korea to stage a border incident just before an election - to scare people into voting conservative. Bizarre as that sounds even for the looking-glass world of espionage, ROK courts had accepted this - but on November 9 another court claimed a key document was forged. The means may have changed, and the facts will always be murky. But one way or another the twilight world of spies and agents lives on, as it always has and always will.

[duck]

Nowadays you can get that information over some Kimchi stew and quality drinks. ;)

" NK Soldiers Revisit Mt. Sorak 50 Years On

By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter

MT. SORAK - A little bit nervous, but bold and soldierly. The North Korean delegates to the inter-Korean military talks on Thursday turned up early in the morning at Hotel Kensington in this South Korean resort mountain.

Four Mercedes-Benz sedans and two minivans, escorted by a couple of South Korean vehicles, arrived here at around 8:44 a.m. The five delegates, led by a one-star general and accompanied by about 25 assistants and journalists, traveled across the four-kilometer wide demilitarized zone, separating the two Koreas.

About 10 kilometers from the border and 200 kilometers northeast of Seoul, Mt. Sorak is a major resort that attracts millions of people a year. The craggy mountain, however, was the site of one of the fiercest battlefields of the 1950-53 Korean War, and it is first time that North Korean soldiers have appeared here since then.

``Nice to meet you again. Let¡¯s make our meeting bear fruit this time,¡¯¡¯ said An Ik-san, chief North Korean delegate, who last week received the Southern delegation at Mt. Kumgang in the North.

South Korean delegates, led by Navy Commodore Park Chung-hwa, greeted their guests with warm smiles, shaking hands with them one by one at the hotel¡¯s main gate.

Hotel managers, staff and cooks also lined up at the lobby to welcome the North Koreans, with some female employees offering them bunches of flowers.

On their arrival, the North Korean officers seemed a little bit uneasy and anxious. But, at the negotiation table, they regained their soldierly spirit with all of them in their unique golden yellow uniforms.

An, in particular, created a tense situation with a brief silence, by saying right after the warm greetings: ``There is one thing that has disappointed me.¡¯¡¯

He explained his team wanted to visit the site where South Koreans are working to reconnect the inter-Korean railway and road nearby, but they couldn¡¯t due to the inspection procedures. ``Please let us visit and see the construction site on our way back home,¡¯¡¯ he asked.

South Korean military authorities, now as the host, took special care with hospitality for the guests, who could be vexed in the enemy¡¯s territory or by the horde of pressmen.

``We served high-quality Munbae-ju for the North Korean delegates over lunch as we heard they have a great regard for the traditional liquor,¡¯¡¯ an official said.

Before their arrival, officials asked photo journalists not to provoke the North Koreans by thrusting cameras too close to their faces, while one major blocked the approach of some reporters¡¯ toward one of the North Korean journalists.



jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr "