Travel and conversations link Yai to North Korea, FBI says
In building the case against an accused North Korean spy, the FBI will use nearly eight years worth of evidence it has collected against the Santa Monica man.
John Joungwoong Yai, 59, is accused of being paid by the North Korean government to recruit other agents from 1997 to 2000. Yai was arrested Tuesday at his home located at 909 Grant St. in Santa Monica. His first federal court appearance is scheduled for today in downtown Los Angeles.
On Wednesday, Yai spent hours with an interpreter who translated from English to Korean the 76-page affidavit written by FBI special agent James G. Chang.
But FBI officials say Yai understands English well, according to a statement he made when he applied to become a U.S. citizen in 1980, which says that he can read, write and speak English.
The FBI has been operating counterintelligence on Yai and performing covert searches of his property since 1995. Yai was the subject of surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from December 1996 until June 2000, Chang wrote.
During that time, investigators bugged Yai’s downtown Los Angeles office and allegedly intercepted faxes, e-mail and telephone calls between Yai and North Korean officials. The communications were often loaded with code words, the FBI said.
“During the period of the FISA surveillance, the FBI found no evidence that Yai was employed by any entity other than the North Korean government,” Chang wrote in the affidavit. “...The FBI determined that Yai was involved in sending reports to North Korea (via the People’s Republic of China) of information he obtained from publicly available sources in the United States.”
“The FBI found no evidence that Yai was employed by any entity other than the North Korean government.” — – JAMES G. CHANG F.B.I. special agent
The affidavit highlights years of e-mail messages, faxes and telephone conversations between Yai, an agent he recruited and high ranking officials in the People’s Republic of China and North Korea.
“I believe, based on my experience with this case, the reason Yai’s e-mail correspondence was with an e-mail address in Beijing, PRC, rather than an e-mail address in North Korea, was due to the extremely limited availability of e-mail access in North Korea,” Chang wrote.
Chang went on to explain that only some high ranking officials in Pyongyang, North Korea, were believed to have limited Internet access through a communication network connected to China, according to the affidavit.
“A story in the Washington Times dated February 12, 2001, attributes to a senior U.S. military official the statement that the North Korean leader has access to the Internet, ‘but he’s the only one,’” according to the affidavit.
Special agents during their investigation made contact with Yai and one day last August, an agent struck up a conversation with Yai at his snack shop, Bon Apetit, on Wilshire Boulevard.
Yai told the agent in Korean that his real profession is a writer and that he was a reporter for two major newspaper companies in South Korea before moving to the United States, according to the affidavit.
Some of the agents recruited by Yai planned to get jobs in the U.S. government. Chang wrote that one fax sent from Yai on March 16, 1998, detailed information about a new recruit and how he was eager to work toward the “revolutionary cause.”
“I believe Person C can be a good candidate since our future workers should be able to speak English well, use computers efficiently, be young and their ideology is beneficial and reliable to our causes,” according to the affidavit.
Yai allegedly provided the North Korean government mostly with information that already was made public in the United States via newspaper articles and the Internet. However, North Korean government officials allegedly instructed Yai in 1998 to obtain classified information and under no circumstances continue to feed them information already made public.
Yai explained to the agent working with him that the Korean government expected 100 to 150 reports a year and about 40 of them get submitted to top-ranking officials.
And further evidence showing Yai’s ties to the North Korean government tracks his travels to the country, which is nearly impossible for U.S. citizens to enter.
“Tourism in North Korea is permitted only in officially organized groups authorized by the government of North Korea. Independent tourism is not permitted,” the affidavit said. “The Internet site www.lonelyplanet.com states in connection with visas to North Korea: ‘If you’re from the U.S. or South Korea you can pretty much forget about it.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 7, 2003. Read the original PDF.