She was “The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America,” a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, a US colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.
In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a “very malicious international spy.” Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in infamy.
In 1950s US, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told viewers Kim’s “womanly wiles” had been the communists’ “deadliest weapon.”
Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia’s Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the “seductress” headline, reviled her as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet “Operation Sex.”
Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a turbulent past. But in yellowing US military files stamped “SECRET,” hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.
The record of a confidential 1950 US inquiry and other declassified files, obtained at the US National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story: Colonel John Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been a US agent.
The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up.
Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of Korea to “avoid further embarrassment,” the record shows.
She was left to her fate — almost certainly, the US concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn’t done.
Historians now believe the Seoul regime secretly executed at least 100,000 leftists and people they believed were sympathizers in 1950. This one death, for one US citizen, remains a living, deeply personal story.
Wonil Kim — son of Kim Soo-im and Baird — is on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, “with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned.”
The son, a theology professor at California’s LaSierra University, was the first to discover the declassified US documents. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on Kim Soo-im.
“He betrayed her,” Cho said of Baird. “He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family.”
The soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, both say that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand that young, educated Koreans of the 1930s and 1940s largely favored recasting their feudal country in a leftist mold once rid of their Japanese colonial rulers.
On the espionage count, officers ranking as high as the US Army’s Lieutenant-General John Hodge himself testified Baird had no access to classified details of the troop withdrawal. Besides, the withdrawal’s outlines had been reported in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper available to all.
The investigators concluded there was only a “remote possibility” Kim Soo-im used Baird as alleged — one that couldn’t be fully disproved, since she was dead.
Colonel William Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, testified that her confession was probably forced through “out and out torture,” probably near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it’s now known.
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