Two weeks ago, Song Du-yul triumphantly returned from 37 years of exile in Germany. Song, a 59-year-old professor of philosophy, was greeted with bouquets at the airport and an invitation to a reception at the Blue House, South Korea's presidential office.
The Korea Broadcasting System, the state television network, created a documentary, Return of the Exiles, featuring Song and 33 other returning South Koreans.
The cause of the adulation was his long struggle for democracy against the military dictatorships that ruled in the 1970s and 1980s. A respected academic, he spoke out in Europe and the US in opposition to military rule, which ended in South Korea in 1987.
But the warm reception turned to chilly reassessment last week, after a private TV station broadcast photographs of Song posing with the former North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung in 1991. Then the station showed a film clip of Song weeping at Kim's 1994 funeral, and grasping the hands of Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong-il.
South Korean government investigators said Song had visited Pyongyang 18 times and written a dozen letters of loyalty to Kim Jong-il.
Song admitted under questioning by prosecutors last week that he had joined the North Korean Workers' Party in 1973, became a Politburo member under a pseudonym and took up to US$100,000 from the North Koreans, apparently to recruit South Korean college students in Europe to the North's brand of Stalinism.
But to reporters, he argued that joining the party and writing the letters were just "procedural" steps taken by an academic wishing to research in North Korea. He said the money was to pay travel expenses for his research trips.
Conservatives in South Korea rapidly seized on the news to embarrass the government. One legislator called it "the biggest espionage case in decades."
Some conservatives noted that a week before Song left Berlin, Park Jong-sam, a deputy director of the South Korean National Intelligence Service and a political appointee -- and a college classmate and friend of Song -- visited the city.
A spokesman for the Intelligence Service said it was a "coincidence," but the conservatives say the visit is proof that the government is soft on North Korea.
South Koreans in general tend to doubt that a longtime exile would have had any access to the kind of state secrets Pyongyang would desire. But many are uneasy that so many government agencies would promote the return of a man whose lhistory of pro-North work had spawned a large intelligence file.
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