A web of connections between four former Western Illinois University students, an emigre political science professor there and a Korean newspaper publisher in New York City are part of the intrigue and controversy surrounding death sentences meted out by a South Korean court last month.
Two of the former students, Dong Hua Yang and Seong Man Kim, were sentenced to death Jan. 20 in Seoul on espionage charges that grew out of student protest activities there last summer. A third student, Tae Kwon Hwang, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
All three, along with a fourth former WIU student living in this country, Chang Sin Lee, were accused of being recruited by a North Korean agent living in New York City, according to Korean newspaper accounts and a spokesman for the South Korean Embassy in Washington.
Although other student protesters in South Korea have been accused of being North Korean operatives, this is believed to be the first time those who studied in the United States have been named. State Department officials say it also is the first time they have heard charges of North Korean agents recruiting South Korean students in this country, a practice they say North Koreans use more often in Japan.
News of the sentences has launched a flurry of protest by human rights groups across the nation. And while the international response continues, a chill has set in among the 130 Korean students studying at Western Illinois University in Macomb.
It was at Macomb, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago, where in 1982 and 1983, the three sentenced students studied, grappled with English and complained about their government before moving on to New York City and eventually back to South Korea. All were in the U.S. on student visas to complete a one-year program at WIU.
”These students did not stand out,” said Robert Gabler, director of international programs at the university. ”If there had been anything going on, we would have known it.”
Recalled one Korean student, who like others contacted would speak only if their name were not published: ”They were common people. Good students. They are against government, that`s it. Not good, not bad.”
Amnesty International and the North American Coalition for Human Rights in Korea charge that the sentences are a government attempt to discredit the South Korean student protest movement and to discourage rising numbers of Koreans abroad from political activities critical of their government. The Korean consulate in Chicago dismisses both accusations as groundless and insists the case is purely a criminal one.
Details of the trial, including their pleas and the evidence against them, have not been available. But in a pretrial account in the Korea Herald, the official South Korean government newspaper, prosecutors charged that Yang and Kim directed a South Korean student group in carrying out ”antistate activities” on behalf of North Korea.
According to the Korea Herald account, it was in South Korea last June that Yang, 27, allegedly led a student break-in of a reserve officers training corps office in the city of Kwang Ju; that Kim, 28, was charged with distributing ”seditious printed materials to colleges and universities” and financing students who seized the U.S. Information Service office in Seoul;
and that Hwang, 30, allegedly taught other students how to produce antigovernment leaflets.
A South Korean government spokesman in Washington charged that Yang, Kim, Hwang and Lee received indoctrination and training from the New York-based North Korean agent, whom he identified as Chung Kyun Suh, 48. Yang and Kim also allegedly received training and money from other North Korean agents in East Germany, Hungary and North Korea, according to the government newspaper account.
Also named by the government publication as a North Korean agent was Lee, 30, the fourth WIU student, who is accused of helping indoctrinate the others and persuading them to become operatives. He is said to have done so by organizing study sessions of North Korean President Kim Il Sung`s doctrine of self-reliance and by showing documentary news films of the 1980 Kwang Ju riot- massacre, in which many students were killed.
Lee, an applicant for U.S. citizenship whose family emigrated to Chicago 11 years ago, vigorously denies the charges and said he plans to sue the Korea Herald for libel. He now lives in New York City, where he drives a taxicab and is a television production student at the Center for Media Arts.
All four students were known to Western Illinois University political science professor Jai Huyon Lee. In 1973, when then-President Park Chung Hee replaced the South Korean constitution with his own charter, professor Lee, then a member of the Korean diplomatic corps, resigned in protest as chief press and cultural attache with the South Korean Embassy in Washington.
The professor, a longtime critic of human rights violations in South Korea, said he believes Yang, Hwang and Kim may have been singled out because of his presence at WIU.
But others say Yang, Kim and Hwang were vulnerable because they had been out of the country and were part of an isolated protest group with no connection to larger student groups or opposition parties in Seoul.
Yang, a pre-engineering student, and Kim and Hwang, both graduate students in political science, left WIU in February, 1983, according to university records. A friend said they were exhausted from studying and frustrated from trying to learn English. Later, after his graduation, Lee shared a New York apartment with the three.
The four were said to have made contact in New York with Chung Kyun Suh, the man South Korean Embassy officials in Washington contend persuaded the four to become North Korean agents.
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Suh is former publisher of the Korea Overseas Journal and operator of a book and gift store on Manhattan`s 36th Street. His wife is a nursing administrator; his daughter is a university student. The Korea Herald said he is the leading North Korean agent in the United States.
An FBI spokesman in New York would neither confirm nor deny that Suh is a subject of investigation or surveillance. North Korea`s official presence in the U.S. is confined to a small, closely monitored observer mission at the United Nations in New York City.
Suh denied the accusations against him. In a telephone interview, he said he has no connection with the North Korean UN mission, has not visited North Korea and knows only one of the three students sentenced, Hwang, who he said sought him out to express admiration for his newspaper. Suh also said he knew Chang Sin Lee, who was a customer at Suh`s store.
The South Korean government named him, Suh said, because his now-defunct newspaper was popular with Korean students in the U.S. The newspaper had a biweekly circulation of between 2,000 and 4,000 and an editorial policy that was antigovernment and supported withdrawal of U.S. troops and reunification of the two Koreas. Reunification is favored by many South Koreans. Student protesters in South Korea are calling for an end to the military government and full restoration of civil liberties.
In a report issued this month on South Korea by Asia Watch, a Washington- based human rights group, Suh`s newspaper was described as ”an important source of (information about) human rights violations in South Korea.”
The South Korean government ”is genuinely concerned about the possibility of North Korean influence among the Korean community in America,” said Ben Limb, a New York lawyer of Korean descent.
Korean students in the U.S. have greater access to information about North Korea than do those in South Korea, where listening to a North Korean radio station is against the law. And after the administration of President Jimmy Carter relaxed travel restrictions, it has been permissible to travel to North Korea from the U.S., something many of the growing number of Koreans living in this country have taken advantage of to visit relatives.
There are 16,430 Korean students studying at U.S. universities and colleges, according to the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs.