In last year's blog on UNPFK, the United Nations Partisan Forces in Korea, I also talked about the KLO agent program, the so-called Korean Liaison Office program which involved recruiting, training, and deploying agents for intelligence collection in North Korea. This program in general was not as successful as the "partisan" or guerrilla forces program. For one thing, agents had to be clever enough to pass for locals. Just because an agent was from North Korea did not necessarily mean that he or she could easily melt into the crowd. Dialect differences were quite distinct from one region to another. To a foreign ear the Korean spoken by a person from Wonsan may sound the same as the one from Pyongyang, but to a Korean, the difference was not just obvious, but striking.
During the war, employment opportunities were next to zero, except as a participant as one of the combatants! For women, it was even more difficult to survive. Many sought employment working for the war effort in one form or another. KLO agents received a hefty bonus when they signed on and their salary was quite good. If they were fortunate enough to survive a mission, they received additional bonuses. In other words, being a KLO agent was financially beneficial. But, you had to be from North Korea! The Americans who ran the program were from all branches of the service but predominantly from the fledging CIA (CIA had been formed in 1947). Except for those personnel who were charged with parachute or other technical training, all other Americans, military and civilian, were essentially all Case Officers, involved in recruiting, training, and deploying agents into North Korea.
Initially, many mistakes were made. Many who were not from the north claimed that they were North Koreans so that they could get the job. The Case Officers hired these people who were lost on their first mission! The North Koreans captured them almost as soon as they arrived! So, it became a much more difficult process of finding and hiring for KLO work. It was especially difficult to find women for the program.
The program paid a hefty bonus to Case Officers for recruiting agents, around $5,000 per agent. That was an awful lot of money back in the early 1950s....it isn't exactly chump change today either! So, as you can guess, whenever money is involved, there are going be attempts by some to take advantage of the situation. Unscrupulous Case Officers would make arrangements with desperate people who wanted to earn the good money that was paid by the program. The prospective agents received a $5,000 bonus for signing up, and the unscrupulous Case Officers would hire new agents with an arrangement for a kick-back on the bonus. Most of them split 50/50, so a Case Officer could conceivably make as much as $7500 on each new hire!
There were also numerous cases of trying to pass off new agents as North Koreans by some Case Officers. Some South Koreans were coached to speak with a northern accent, etc. But generally, these bogus cases were uncovered before these poor men and women were sent off to their deaths, and the Case Officer responsible was transferred out of the program.
There was one rather disturbing incident that involved a mistress of one of the Case Officers. This man had made a small fortune collecting bonuses and he was known to be a top recruiter. He was very charismatic and a ladies man. His Korean mistress happened to be North Korean from Pyongyang, originally. She was a beautiful girl, one that easily would have made an impression on any Hollywood casting director, and she was very much in love with him. At the time the supply of North Korean women for KLO agents had dried up and Case Officers in the program were busily scouring the country looking for prospective agents.
Apparently this particular Case Officer was not about to go without a bonus, he convinced his mistress to join the program. She was so much in love with him that she would have done anything for him, so she joined the program. Most of this man's colleagues were shocked! But he insisted that she volunteered on her own, but everyone knew that he had convinced her to join. He collected not only his bonus, but kept her bonus for "safe keeping!"
She went through all of the prescribed training, culminating in parachute training. A mission was selected for her just on the outskirts of Pyongyang and she was sent off. She never returned. Word had reached the KLO headquarters via an agent that returned that she was captured almost immediately, tortured, then killed. Her lover/Case Officer had collected both bonuses and didn't seem to be bothered by what happened to her. Ironically, this man went on to live a long and fairly prosperous life. He married three times, each time to a successively more wealthy woman! He died in Hawaii from alcoholism when he was in his late 60s. His last wife and family in Honolulu discovered after his death that he had another family on the big island of Hawaii!
He was a not a nice man, but of all the despicable things that he did in his life, collecting a bonus for sending off his mistress to her death was the worst.
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