Hailed as a Hero, Executed as a Spy, and Exonerated Decades Later

SEOUL, South Korea — Amid the more than 30,000 defections to South Korea from North Korea, Lee Soo-keun’s stands out as one of the most sensational and tragic.

He was welcomed as a hero in South Korea in 1967 after he escaped over the border under a hail of bullets and with the help of U.S. soldiers. Two years later, he was caught trying to leave the South on a fake passport and charged with spying for the North. Enraged South Koreans burnedhim ineffigy, and he was swiftly convicted and hanged.

This month, nearly a half-century after his execution, Lee’s story took another dramatic turn: A court in Seoul, the South Korean capital, absolved him of espionage, ruling that he had been wrongfully executed based on fabricated charges and a confession obtained through torture.

“He was never given a chance to exercise his right to defend himself, vilified as a fake defector,” the presiding judge at the Seoul Central District Court, Kim Tae-up, said in a ruling Thursday. “It’s time to seek forgiveness from the accused and his bereaved family for the mistake perpetrated during the authoritarian era.”

Lee’s posthumous acquittal is part of South Korean efforts to set the record straight after a military dictatorship from the 1960s to the ‘80s that often used torture and fabricated spy charges to silence dissidents at home and to stoke fear of North Korea.

The efforts to expose the truth were stymied in 2008, when conservatives halted the previous liberal government’s investigations of mass killings and other rights violations perpetrated by the South in the name of fighting communism. But families of the victims regained hope last year with the election of President Moon Jae-in, which returned a liberal government to Seoul.

Lee’s defection on March 22, 1967, took place at Panmunjom, a so-called truce village straddling the border between the two Koreas. At the time, Panmunjom was a neutral zone where people from both sides mingled under the watchful gaze of military guards.

Lee, then 44 and a vice president of the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, was at Panmunjom to cover talks between North Korea and the U.S.-led United Nations Command when he secretly asked U.S. officials to help him defect.

They agreed, and Lee dashed into a sedan belonging to the U.N. Command. Two North Korean guards ran over and tried to drag him out.

“When this happened, I just threw a football block on them and knocked them both right out of the car,” Capt. Thomas F. Bair of the U.S. Army said right after the defection.

The sedan, driven by Sgt. Terry L. McAnelly and with Lt. Col. Donald E. Thomson riding next to him, crashed through a wooden barrier at a North Korean checkpoint in Panmunjom. The guards there fired more than 40 shots but the three men escaped unscathed. Lee’s dramatic defection was a propaganda bonanza for the anti-communist government in the South.

Fifty thousand people welcomed him at a rally in Seoul. He was given a house, a car, cash and other gifts. The government helped Lee, who left a wife and three children in the North, marry a U.S.-educated college lecturer in the South. He went on an anti-communist lecture tour around the country.

Lee said he had defected because he was about to be purged for failing to give enough attention in his articles to the speeches by the North’s leader, Kim Il Sung. He described life under Kim’s regime as “hellish,” with people subjected to long working hours, propaganda sessions that went far into the night and ideological witch hunts.

But Lee was never happy in the South, either.

He was under constant surveillance for signs of betrayal. South Korean agents beat him whenever he veered from their script during lectures, according to government investigators in recent years.

In January 1969, Lee, disguised in a wig and a fake mustache, boarded a flight with a fake passport obtained with the help of Pae Kyung-ok, a South Korean nephew of his North Korean wife. South Korean agents caught up with the plane when it stopped in Saigon, South Vietnam, en route to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

He was brought back to South Korea on a military plane, and the South’s spy agency, known at the time as the Korean CIA, announced that Lee’s defection was a “fake” that had been intended to allow him to spy on the South.

Banner headlines in South Korean newspapers declared “shock” and “disdain.” Children sang a song vilifying Lee as a communist spy.

Lee was hanged in July 1969, less than two months after he was convicted of spying.

But some journalists and historians have long raised questions about the case.

In 2007, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a now-defunct agency investigating human rights abuses of past South Korean governments, said Lee and Pae had been repeatedly tortured by agents. It recommended retrials.

Pae, who was freed in 1989 after 21 years in prison, was acquitted of spy charges in a 2008 retrial. But there were no immediate family members of Lee to file for a retrial. Prosecutors stepped in last year to file the necessary paperwork.

In its ruling last week, the court said there was no evidence that Lee had been a spy or that his defection had been a ruse. Instead, it found that Lee, deeply fed up with both the North and South Korean governments, wanted to resettle in a third country. “I think he was someone who could live neither in the North nor in the South,” James M. Lee, a Korean-American who helped Lee defect through Panmunjom when he worked at the U.N. Command, said in his memoir, which was serialized in a South Korean magazine in the late 1990s.

In 1969, faced with the hangman’s rope, Lee apologized to his wife and children in the North, as well as to his wife in the South, according to South Korean news reports at the time.