Unraveling the mystery of a Korean ‘seductress spy’

Back in the days of Red scares, blacklists, suspicion and smear, Kim Soo-im was singled out as a one-woman axis of evil, a villainess without peer.

“The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America,” as the U.S. magazine Coronet labeled her, was 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 June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim was labeled a “very malicious international spy” by the South Korean military and hastily executed. .” Her deeds, thereafter, grew in infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anti-communist fever, one TV drama told viewers that Kim’s “womanly wiles” had been the communists’ “deadliest weapon.” Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia’s Mata Hari. Reviled as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet “Operation Sex,” she was even blamed by Washington columnist Drew Pearson for igniting the entire Korean War.

Kim Soo-im is gone. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped “SECRET,” the truth survived. Now it has been made public, half a century too late to save her.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files, obtained at the U.S. National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

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

In retrospect, the espionage case against Kim looks like little more than a frame-up.

Baird and fellow Army officers could have defended her, but instead the colonel 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.

Kim’s son by Baird, Wonil Kim, is on a quest to learn all he can about his mother and her ordeal, to restore the truth and destroy the lies. Thus far, he says, he has found her “an intelligent woman with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned.”

A theology professor at La Sierra University in Riverside, Kim was the first to discover the declassified U.S. documents, a 1,000-page trove. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film to tell the “human story” of Kim Soo-im.

“He betrayed her,” Cho said of Baird. “He had a high position and the power to save her. He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family.”

The precise, soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, say that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand the Korea of the 1930s and 1940s, when people united in opposing Japan’s colonial rule, and younger, educated Koreans leaned to the left in envisioning land reforms and other changes to modernize their feudal society.

Cho said that in 1946, a year after the U.S. Army took control of southern Korea at World War II’s end, a U.S. Embassy poll found that 77% of southerners wanted a socialist or communist future.

Instead, the U.S. military government kept many of Japan’s right-wing Korean collaborators in power, and the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, vowed to “stamp out” the communists.

Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul’s prestigious Ewha women’s college, a U.S. Methodist-founded institution.

In 1936, as a female office administrator, something rare in Korea, she was featured in a Seoul magazine article on the new generation of young women.

Smart and fashionable -- a fox-trot dancer, it was noted -- she had a circle of sophisticated, politicized friends, including Moh Yoon-sook, later Korea’s best-known poetess.

In 1941, Kim met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated intellectual active in Seoul’s clandestine leftist movement. She became his lover, and he rose in political prominence, gaining a seat on the Central People’s Committee, a broad nationalist coalition that sought to take over Korea from a defeated Japan in September 1945.

Hodge’s crackdown stifled that effort, and within a year Lee, facing arrest as an alleged security risk, fled to communist-run northern Korea.

Kim Soo-im’s fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the U.S. occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Baird, 56, the Americans’ provost marshal, or military police chief, and was soon overseeing his network of Korean informants monitoring the black market, thievery of U.S. materiel and other crimes.

Baird secured a house for her and took to spending nights there, or slipping her into his officer’s quarters, according to Korean and American witnesses in the declassified record.

“She had a baby by Col. Baird,” Kim’s friend Nancy Kim would later tell U.S. interrogators. “We all knew. He was the only man friend of Kim Soo-im. He slept in the house many times. The baby looks like the father.”

When the U.S. occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory corps, Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American wife came to Korea to join him. In North Korea, meanwhile, Kim’s ex-lover Lee had risen to important posts and made broadcasts denouncing the southern regime.

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer employed by the U.S., was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee’s roundups of leftists -- workers and writers, teachers, peasants and others with suspect politics.

On June 14, 1950, nine days after Baird sailed from Korea, Kim Soo-im faced a five-judge South Korean military court and a long list of alleged crimes, including obtaining vehicles from the colonel to lend or sell to “communist” friends, keeping guns at her house, and transporting Lee Gang-kook to the northern border in 1946 in a U.S. Army jeep.

The most serious charge at the trial, a headline event in Seoul newspapers, accused her of eliciting the classified 1949 U.S. withdrawal plans from Baird, and relaying them to the northern communists.

As her court-appointed lawyer noted, the government presented neither material evidence nor witnesses to back up the charges. The court even rejected guns the prosecutors offered as exhibits. “The Korean police at the time were notorious for fabricating evidence,” said Wonil Kim.

But on the trial’s third day, according to a summary in the declassified U.S. file, Kim Soo-im confessed. She said she had asked Baird about withdrawal plans, and shared the information with friends, only because they were worried about their future U.S. employment.

The court sentenced her to death.

Just weeks after her execution, however, and across the Pacific, U.S. military investigators reviewing Baird’s role were hearing confidential testimony from Army officers and enlisted men indicating Kim’s conviction was a contrivance of the Seoul authorities.

On point after point -- alleged illicit use of jeeps, an Army truck, sedans, a radio and other items for “communistic activities” -- Baird staunchly denied such dealings with Kim, and the inspector general’s office repeatedly found that “the evidence does not substantiate the allegation,” according to the long- secret record of the 1950 Pentagon inquiry.

On the key count of espionage, officers up to Hodge himself testified that Baird had no access to the details of classified plans for the troop withdrawal. Besides, the outlines of the withdrawal had been in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper available to all.

The investigators concluded that there was only a “remote possibility” Kim Soo-im used Baird as alleged. Since she was dead, they said, that couldn’t be fully disproved.

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, had testified that her confession was probably forced through “out-and-out torture,” probably simulated drowning, or waterboarding, as it’s now known.

In the turmoil of war, year-old orphaned Wonil Kim was adopted by a Korean church administrator and his wife, a head nurse at the hospital where Kim gave birth. In 1970, the family moved to the United States, where Wonil Kim eventually earned a PhD in Old Testament studies.

Not long before Baird died in 1980, at age 90, Wonil tracked the colonel to a Rhode Island nursing home. Baird rejected his son, saying instead that a “Mr. Smith” was the father, Wonil Kim said. But after Baird’s death, his family came to know and accept their half-Korean relative.

Baird would never have “really stuck his neck out to save her,” Wonil Kim said. But he also knew that the writer Moh Yoon-sook, in her memoirs, recounted that the American officer “came to her begging her to save her, my mother.”

It wasn’t until he discovered the long-classified Baird investigative files that Wonil Kim began to learn of the flimsy case that condemned Kim Soo-im. But crucial questions remain -- about the mysterious Lee Gang-kook, for example.

A confidential profile drafted by Army intelligence in 1956 said Lee was reported to have been employed by the CIA’s covert Joint Activities Commission, Korea. And, in fact, the North Koreans executed Lee as an “American spy” after the Korean War ended in 1953.

Historian Jung, who found that declassified profile at the National Archives in College Park, Md., believes, with other historians, that North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had Lee and other southerners executed to eliminate potential rivals.

Completing its 1950 investigation, the Army inspector general’s office recommended that Baird be court-martialed for bringing discredit on the Army through his scandalous liaison with a Korean mistress. But within a month the file was stamped “Case closed.”

Wonil Kim in June found 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 a reporter, defending the long-ago verdict, but saying he’d told Wonil that Kim Soo-im “to me didn’t look like a bad person.”