KCIA: Be like the Mossad!

I have been meaning to work this article into this blog somehow.

This article Chosun Monthly's article profiling the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The article portrays Mossad as group of patriots unencumbered by political control and thus able to quickly gain results and protect Israel from its sea of enemies. The implication of the article was the the Korean Central Intelligence Agency should take Mossad as its role model. No other article could make feel the myriad emotions I felt today, incredulity, amusement, rage, and many others, few of them positive and none particularly agreeable.

Leaving aside the effectiveness of Mossad on the various current dilemma that Israel is in, or questions about its effectiveness. If I were to talk about this just as a Korean, it is not the right time and not the right way to say that intelligence agencies should be augmented.

KCIA, the main intelligence agency in South Korea in used be called K(GB)CIA. During the 1960s onward, it was famous the repression and torture of the political dissidents. Kim Dae Jung, the President of Korea from 1998-2003 was almost murdered in 1973 when he was kidnapped in Tokyo (he was exiled at the time). The KCIA's "black history" is famous and there are still thousands who have felt the hands of repression one way or another. That any respectable Korean paper could write about letting KCIA be free of political interference is not merely disturbing, but revealing about their view of the past in a way I cannot describe in words.