Former CIA Agent Dr. Michael Lee: "South Korea Has Been a Fabricated History from Its Founding. Young People, Correct It Even at the Cost of Your Lives"
- Alfred 정현 Kim
- Oct 29
- 11 min read
Dr. Michael P. Yi, Former CIA Agent: "South Korea's History Is a Fabrication from the Start—Youth Must Step Up to Set It Right!"October 28, 2025 – On October 20, 2025, 92-year-old Dr. Michael P. Yi greeted his visitor with a warm smile. "Come in, you've traveled far," he said, his voice still resolute and commanding. His Maryland home is a fortress of bookshelves crammed floor to ceiling, a testament to a life spent scrutinizing the Korean Peninsula. Maps of the divided land and stacks of yellowed documents dominate his study, relics from 24 years at the CIA and 16 at the DIA, where he kept a hawk-eyed watch on North Korea.
The two-hour interview that unfolded there on that crisp autumn day was no mere reminiscence. Dr. Yi unleashed a torrent of revelations, viewing South Korea's modern history through "Washington's lens." From Kim Il-sung's "fabricated myths" to the May 18 Gwangju Uprising as a North Korean military operation, and Kim Dae-jung's actions as outright "treason," his statements landed like bombshells. "South Korea's National Intelligence Service fell into enemy hands under Kim Dae-jung. The young generation must rise up!" His impassioned plea resonates deeply amid the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula, stirring the hearts of the nation's youth.
Dr. Yi's journey began with service in the South Korean Army, after which, at just 25, he was handpicked as chief interrogator for the DIA's 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion. Over the years, he grilled more than 400 North Korean defectors and spies. Upon joining the CIA, he served as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and as a coordinator for U.S.-South Korean cooperation, cementing his reputation as an expert in East Asian security. After retiring, he taught as a professor in Alaska before returning to South Korea as editor-in-chief of the Sejong Institute's English publications. Now, he has made his Maryland home his "final stronghold."Clenching his fists during the interview, Dr. Yi declared, "I've watched North Korea for 40 years. Those bastards are masters of deception. Even our history has been twisted by their hands." His claims go beyond personal testimony—they're backed by a lifetime of classified insights. In South Korea, where textbooks and mainstream media often lean left, Dr. Yi's perspectives are rarely aired. In particular, the May 18 Special Act, as seen in the May 18 Gwangju incident, criminalizes dissenting views, rendering open debate a legal minefield. As a former U.S. intelligence official shielded by American protections, Dr. Yi stands almost alone in unveiling these truths domestically. He substantiates his arguments with historical documents, declassified files, court rulings, and other concrete evidence. Dr. Yi promised to delve deeper into the historical context of each major event, saying, "I'll explain the background of these key incidents in greater detail," before launching into his account.
"North Korea's Kim Il-sung Is a Fraud! The Real Hero Kim Il-sung Starved to Death in Siberia"
In the opening moments of a recent interview, Dr. Michael P. Yi, the 92-year-old former CIA analyst who spent four decades dissecting North Korean intelligence, murmured the name "General Kim Kyung-cheon" like a long-lost incantation. "This man was the real Kim Il-sung," he declared, his eyes flashing with conviction. Born Kim Kwang-seo in 1888, the independence fighter graduated from Japan's 23rd class of the Imperial Military Academy as a lieutenant.
Following Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, the nation fell under colonial rule. By 1919, the March 1st Independence Movement had ignited a nationwide wave of resistance. During this time, General Kim Kyung-chun (also known as Kim Kwang-seo)—a graduate of the Japanese Military Academy—made a fateful decision: to dedicate his military training to the cause of Korea’s liberation.
In the spring of 1919, while visiting family in Korea, Kim witnessed the March 1st demonstrations firsthand. Deeply shaken, he fled to Manchuria and joined forces with Ji Cheong-cheon (his junior from the 26th class of the same academy) to teach at the Shinheung Military Academy, founded by independence leader Lee Si-young. The academy was an institution for training Korean independence fighters—young men who had to stand against the 700,000-strong Japanese army without even a single rifle to their name.
Kim later traveled to the Russian Far East, where he mobilized a community of 180,000 Koreans and negotiated with the Bolsheviks (the Soviet Red Army) to acquire weapons for the resistance. In the early 1920s, he led joint operations with the Red Army against the White Army (anti-Bolshevik forces), emerging as one of the central figures in Korea’s armed struggle for independence in the Primorsky region. His exceptional skill in cavalry warfare earned him the nickname “Korea’s Napoleon.”
His diary, “Gyeongcheonaillok” (擎天兒日錄), discovered in 2005, vividly documents his life as a partisan commander in the Russian Far East during the 1920s. For Kim, this was not mere guerrilla warfare—it was a desperate fight to block Japan’s expansion into Manchuria and secure international solidarity for Korea’s survival.
However, by 1925, as the resistance collapsed, Kim fled deeper into Soviet territory. Records from Russia and Kazakhstan confirm that he was later caught in Stalin’s mass deportation of Koreans—a brutal policy driven by Soviet paranoia about Japanese espionage, which forcibly relocated 180,000 Koreans from the Far East to Central Asia.
Kim Kyung-chun was accused of being a Japanese spy after refusing to join the Communist Party. He was imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp—believed to be one of those later described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago—and died of malnutrition on January 2, 1942.
According to Dr. Michael Lee, a former CIA officer, the Chinese Communist Party later appropriated Kim’s name to construct a false revolutionary legend. “The first Kim Il-sung (born 1903) died in battle; the second, from the Second Division, perished in the field; the third was Kim Song-ju,” he explained. The controversy over the “fake Kim Il-sung” surfaced again during the 1945 Moranbong welcome rally, a revelation later supported by the testimony of North Korean novelist Han Sŏl-ya (한설야).
Dr. Lee recalled: “The Korean people had been waiting for the real General Kim Kyung-chun, who would have been 57 at that time. When a 33-year-old young man appeared before them, everyone thought, ‘He’s an impostor.’ Han Sŏl-ya exposed it—and was purged for it.” Han Sŏl-ya, once celebrated as a towering figure of North Korean literature in the 1950s, was both the architect and the victim of the Kim Il-sung myth. After crossing into the North following Korea’s liberation, he became the head of the Korean Writers’ Alliance and Federation of Literature and Arts, playing a leading role in glorifying Kim Il-sung through so-called “revolutionary literature.” Yet, paradoxically, Han was also the one who most clearly understood that the Kim Il-sung myth was an artificial creation.
According to Dr. Michael Lee, during his time analyzing North Korean cultural propaganda for the CIA’s Northeast Asia division, internal documents revealed that Han Sŏl-ya had begun questioning the Kim Il-sung cult's exaggerations and fabrications in the late 1960s. Although officially honored as a “revolutionary writer,” his name disappeared from all public records after 1969. Witnesses from Pyongyang’s literary circles later confirmed that Han was quietly isolated during the regime’s “literary history restructuring project” and died under undisclosed circumstances in 1976.
In one of history’s great ironies, Han Sŏl-ya built the very foundation of North Korean revolutionary literature—but when he tried to expose the lie behind it, he himself was erased. Today, his name remains in North Korea’s official histories as a “pioneer of revolutionary literature,” but those who know the truth remember him instead as “the ghostwriter of the Kim Il-sung myth—and its final witness.”
Kim Gu Was a Traitor, Syngman Rhee Humanity's Hero... Tear Down the Hyochang-dong Statue!" Ex CIA Veteran Ignites Firestorm
Amid the chaotic political maelstrom following Korea's 1945 liberation, declassified secrets from 1948 paint a stark picture of betrayal and brinkmanship. In a heated exchange during his recent interview, 92-year-old Dr. Michael P. Yi, the ex-CIA stalwart who spent decades unraveling North Korean intrigues, closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. "Kim Gu? A traitor to the nation, hiding behind a facade of patriotism," he said, his voice laced with weary disdain. "In 1948, when Ahn Doo-hee came begging for his cooperation in building the republic, Kim hurled an ashtray at him and screamed, 'I'll wait for Kim Il-sung to lead communist unification!' It's all laid bare in recently declassified documents. Kim praised the North as 'splendid' and outright opposed President Rhee's founding of the Republic of Korea."Dr. Yi drew a grim parallel to history's infamous turncoats, likening Kim to Kim Ja-jeom—the 17th-century schemer whose collusion with the Qing invaders during the Manchu wars sealed Korea's humiliation. "The blood of betrayal runs in his veins," Yi charged.
"That memorial hall and statue in Hyochang Park? They need to go. President Rhee, after 40 years of unyielding independence struggle, quietly orchestrated the Cairo Declaration in 1943, paving the way for liberation. When 75% of the populace leaned toward socialism, he forged a liberal democracy—a triumph etched into the annals of human civilization!"Dr. Yi's explosive testimony draws on eyewitness accounts from real-life figures who navigated the fog of postwar Korea: a U.S. intelligence officer and a diplomat from Chiang Kai-shek's regime. First among them is Erle Cocke Jr., a battle-hardened veteran of World War II and the Korean War, who served as a G-2 Army intelligence officer. Dispatched to Seoul in 1947–1948 as an advisor to the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), Cocke also advised the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK).
His role was pivotal—bridging USAMGIK's staunch anti-communist stance with the UN's oversight of Korean independence, providing military and administrative muscle to ensure the commission could operate on the ground. Cocke's insights, cited in Dr. Yi's CIA archives, underscore how Kim Gu's push for North-South negotiations tilted the scales toward communist interests. Cocke went on to hold high posts at the Pentagon, CIA, UN military delegations, and as president of the American Legion, burnishing his credentials as a Korean Peninsula security expert.
Equally damning is Yu Yu-man (Liu Yu-wan), a Chiang Kai-shek diplomat who features prominently in the 1948 edition of Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Volume VI: The Far East, under the "The Korean Question" section. In UNTCOK field reports from Seoul, Yu documented "Kim Gu's anti-nation-building maneuvers," including direct encounters. The records quote Kim decrying Rhee's solo government push, citing the "superiority of North Korea's Workers' Party and military" as his rationale, a stance that aligns seamlessly with Dr. Yi's narrative. Yu's dispatches, internal USAMGIK memos, reveal how Kim's left-right unity rhetoric dovetailed with Soviet ambitions to communize the peninsula during the May 1948 UNTCOK-supervised elections.
Cocke and Yu were threads in the USAMGIK's early "security network," firsthand observers of Kim's maneuvers in liberation's shadow. Their accounts form crucial evidence in the case branding Kim a betrayer—fueling the 1948–1949 Northwest Youth Group assassination plot led by Ahn Doo-hee. Fresh off Independence Day on August 15, 1948, Ahn, a group executive, approached Kim to enlist his support for Rhee's republic. Kim's retort? "Even if I came back from the dead, I wouldn't. I'm waiting for General Kim Il-sung's communist unified state!"—punctuated, legend has it, by a flying ashtray. In his 1996 memoir, Ahn detailed Kim's anti-republic activities and shadowy backers, even citing Reconstruction Committee records that dubbed him "Kim Il-sung's puppet."
The backdrop was a peninsula cleaved by U.S.-Soviet joint trusteeship—USAMGIK in the south, Soviet occupation in the north—where left-right fissures erupted into open warfare by 1948's solo government gambit. Dr. Yi pressed on: "Even the Cairo Declaration's hidden hero was President Rhee." That landmark pact, hammered out November 22–26, 1943, at Egypt's Cairo Conference among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, reshaped Asia's postwar order amid World War II's fury. Rhee, exiled in America since 1919, had woven a web of influence: linking Korean expatriate networks with the Shanghai provisional government, lobbying relentlessly in Washington.Harry Hopkins, FDR's trusted aide and Rhee's longtime acquaintance, reportedly urged the president that "Korea's independence bolsters U.S. Pacific strategy."
The payoff came in the declaration's December 1, 1943, text: "Mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, [the three powers] are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent." Rhee fired off a thank-you note to Roosevelt the next day. Scholars credit the Korean clause to Chiang's advocacy or Roosevelt's decolonization vision, but Dr. Yi insists Rhee's diplomatic arm-twisting was the linchpin.As Dr. Yi's revelations cut through the haze of official histories—textbooks that lionize Kim as a selfless martyr while vilifying Rhee as a relic of authoritarian excess—they ignite a fresh debate on Korea's soul. In an era of North Korean saber-rattling, his call to dismantle icons and reclaim "true" heroes isn't just archival dust-up; it's a gauntlet thrown to a generation grappling with division's scars. "History isn't polite," Yi warned. "It demands we face the traitors in our pantheon—or risk repeating their sins."
Kim Dae-jung's Proletarian Communist Revolution Disguised as Democratization.
Dr. Michael P. Yi, the former CIA analyst who monitored North Korea for four decades, revealed how the agency's safeguards against communist infiltration were systematically gutted after 1998. "Once Kim Dae-jung's government took power, 581 anti-communist agents from the Agency for National Security Planning were fired," Yi recounted coolly during his Maryland interview. "Add in 2,500 from police intelligence and 600 from military counterintelligence, and you're looking at over 3,600 purged." Officially framed as organizational reform, Yi called it nothing less than the "dismantling of the intelligence system.
"Casting a detached gaze back at that era, he added, "After Kim Dae-jung, the National Intelligence Service is no longer South Korea's intelligence agency. It's morphed into something like North Korea's 'South Operations Liaison Office.'" What was once dedicated to intelligence gathering and national security, he argued, had devolved into a conduit for the enemy state. In essence, the republic's top spy outfit had been reduced to a mere liaison desk for dealings with Pyongyang. "South Korea's democratization was built on a foundation of lies," Yi stated matter-of-factly. As an ex-CIA officer who specialized in analyzing communist regimes across Asia, he has long contended that the peninsula's Cold War history was riddled with fabrications.
To illustrate Kim Dae-jung's alleged role in North Korean influence operations, Yi pointed to the infamous 1985 "1 Billion Won Incident." "That spring, as head of the New Democratic Party, Kim Dae-jung reached out to Lee Cheol, the mastermind behind Seoul National University student protests," he explained. "The message was crystal clear: 'The international situation favors us. We'll give you 1 billion won—join the proletarian liberation struggle.'" At the time, that sum was an astronomical political slush fund.Yi views the episode as emblematic of Kim's "South-denigration operations" masquerading as democratization efforts. "It wasn't just campaign cash," he emphasized.
"In Cold War terms, it was ideological funding." His assertions find corroboration in Lee Cheol's handwritten confession, published in the Monthly Chosun magazine—a rare glimpse into the ideological undercurrents propping up the democratization movement centered on Kim. Dr. Michael P. Yi, who spent 40 years at the CIA shadowing North Korea's machinations, has rocked Korean discourse by recasting major episodes of modern history as Pyongyang-orchestrated plots. He warns that South Korea has devolved into a nation incapable of self-preservation, one that now requires divine intervention to endure. "The young generation must know this truth," he implored. "They can't go through life ignorant of it."
In the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement (known as the May 18 Uprising) as a prime example, labeling it a state-overthrow attempt fusing 600 North Korean special forces with Kim Dae-jung supporters. "On May 12, 2020, declassified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables were released," he noted. "They conclude that May 18 was a joint rebellion by North Korea's South operations team and Kim Dae-jung's followers to conquer the Republic of Korea." In Yi's view, these documents provide irrefutable proof clarifying the event's true nature. He extends North Korean meddling to the April Revolution of 1960 under President Syngman Rhee, claiming a Pyongyang operative codenamed "Lee Seok" orchestrated it. Yi also debunked myths around the March 15 election fraud allegations: "That rigged vote had nothing to do with President Rhee. Candidate Jo Byung-wook's death left him as the sole contender, with victory preordained. Rhee stepped down out of conscience, a mark of a great leader's resolve.
"The 1970s self-immolation of labor activist Jeon Tae-il fares no better in Yi's retelling, dismissed as a North Korean "staged suicide-murder" designed to ignite anti-Park Chung-hee unrest. "It was a terrorist ploy to spark anti-government fervor," he testified. Yi insists no chapter of Korean history escapes Pyongyang's shadow: "From grand upheavals to minor incidents, North Korean operations have infiltrated them all."Even the tragic June 13, 2002, incident in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province—where U.S. military armored vehicles crushed two schoolgirls, Shin Hyo-sun and Shim Mi-seon—falls under his suspicion.
"This was a North Korean operation to stoke anti-American rage," Yi asserted. Citing the girls' inexplicable entry into a restricted U.S. training ground and their collision not with the lead tank but a trailing one, he argued, "This wasn't driver negligence. Someone shoved them between the vehicles during the exercise." The ensuing anti-U.S. protests and societal turmoil, he added, were precisely the fallout Pyongyang craved. A North Korea specialist during his CIA tenure, Yi diagnoses the nation's present plight starkly: "The Republic of Korea can no longer solve its own problems. It's become a country that survives only by God's grace." His plea to the youth rings urgent: "Don't live in denial of these facts. You must face them." As his revelations ripple through Korean society, they promise to ignite fierce debates, forcing a reckoning with the ghosts of a divided past.
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