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Last week, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim was sentenced to 13 months under the Espionage Act following a plea bargain reached in February; The Washington Post's Ann Marimow provides a good overview of the case. Of interest to this blog is the fact that Kim’s crime consisted of leaking classified information on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2009.
The short, two-page 2010 indictment accuses Kim on two counts: leaking the contents of a top secret/sensitive compartmented-information report; and then lying about his contact with Rosen. The information in question centered on how North Korea would respond to the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1874 of June 12, 2009 imposing additional sanctions after its second nuclear test. According to Rosen's article, the intel community had secured information “through sources inside North Korea” that Pyongyang planned to respond with a third nuclear test, the reprocessing of all spent fuel rods into plutonium, an expansion of its uranium enrichment program, and another Taepodong-2 launch. Ironically, the information leaked by Kim was subsequently proven wrong in the short-run and could well have even been purposeful disinformation; North Korea may have believed they could gain by leaking plans of a robust response to UNSC 1874.
Rosen’s article then goes on to draw even more attention to the human intel source—and the leak--by saying that it was “withholding some details about the sources and methods by which American intelligence agencies learned of the North's plans so as to avoid compromising sensitive overseas operations in…North Korea.”
The case garnered particular attention—detailed well by Scott Shane at the New York Times in 2011 and the Washington Post’s Marimow in 2013—because of the aggressiveness with which the Obama administration went after Rosen’s cloak-and-dagger communications with Kim. The Federation of American Scientists took a particular interest in these and other leaks; the organization has a project on government secrecy and created a webpage with extensive documentation of the case. The material on offer seems overwhelming, but many of the documents contain principled and passionate arguments against an expansive definition of treason and on behalf of First Amendment rights; see the early spate of defendant’s motions filed in January 2011 for example. Kim’s side of the story can also be found on the website of his legal defense fund.
Kim did step over a line in leaking classified information rather than simply rendering his own opinions. In particular, he erred in attributing the information to human intelligence sources. But as Kim's council points out in a short statement made after the plea bargain in February, it is not accurate that Kim revealed intelligence “methods” or “sources.” The aggressive prosecution not only of Kim but of Rosen raises important issues of what should be in the public domain and the role of the press in assuring government transparency. The press should be talking with officials and analysts about policy and the intelligence on which that policy is based. If Kim had simply said that the government believed North Korea might respond aggressively to sanctions, there would have been no case. It is difficult if not impossible to have intelligent public debate if information deemed relevant to making crucial policy decisions is routinely treated as a state secret.
