Opinion: Sue Mi Terry and the many dangers of DC influencers

The photographs in the 31-page indictment show a woman in dark clothing, holding gifts that Korean agents had bought for her in flossy shops around Washington. She looks in a hurry — not to avoid surveillance cameras, but to get to her next meeting, appearance, interview.

Who would have suspected Sue Mi Terry? The italicized disclaimers at the think tanks where she worked compound the shock. Her last job, as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, ended abruptly .

“On July 16, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed the indictment of Sue Mi Terry on charges of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” the organization noted. “CFR has a rigorous FARA compliance policy, and Dr. Terry is no longer a CFR employee as of July 18, 2024.”

In one program, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, she would chat with moderator Mark Lippert, a former ambassador to South Korea, and Victor Cha, the CSIS star on Korea. CSIS gives an italicized explanation for removing all trace of her: “In light of these serious allegations, CSIS cannot verify the independence of the scholarship of this material containing the views of Ms. Terry and has therefore archived this content pending the resolution of the charges.”

The indictment, signed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, reads like a litany of favor-giving in the D.C. swamp where influencers cozily interact.

Complete with shots showing Sue Mi with South Korean intel agents, clinging to expensive gifts, the indictment demands she fork over “any and all property, real and personal,” including money deemed “traceable” to “said offenses.”

Sharing a luxury pad on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with hubby Max Boot , a columnist at the Washington Post, she is currently free on $500,000 bail , awaiting trial on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent and getting others to do the same.

Sue Mi has one of New York and Washington’s top attorneys, Lee Wolosky, declaring the charges “unfounded.” They “distort the work of a scholar and news analyst known for her independence and years of service to the United States,” he insists, claiming the feds “made a significant mistake.”

How did Sue Mi wind up in this fix?

Now 54, Sue Mi was 12 when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother after the death of her father in Korea. On a trajectory through New York University and earning a doctorate at Tufts, she joined the CIA as a North Korea analyst, then migrated to the White House as the National Security Council’s director on Korea and Japan. Next, she was deputy national intelligence officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council.

Now she’s accused of giving her notes on a background briefing two years ago with Secretary of State Tony Blinken to her “handler” from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, who then photographed them. Were those notes from the briefing or, as Wolosky claims, questions she’d drafted to ask the secretary?

With many pals inside the think-tank establishment, Sue Mi is primed to fight the case with all the tenacity she’s shown in a career in the Washington maelstrom of high-stakes bureaucracy and power-playing. Her glide through the DC maze, however, raises the question: how many other think-tankers are covertly freelancing, doing favors for more than a lunch?

“Terry is typical of foreign policy influencers in and around Washington,” writes retired Air Force lieutenant general, Dan Leaf, in Responsible Statecraft . “Many of these influencers migrate from think tanks to government and back again.”

The indictment states that a Korean intelligence “handler,” after purchasing a Louis Vuitton handbag, chatted with Sue Mi in a D.C. sushi restaurant in April 2021 about her “close relationship with a senior State Department official” responsible for Korea, “who had previously served in senior roles at the CIA and at the National Intelligence Council.”

One of Sue Mi’s friends, Leaf writes , “is Jung Pak, former deputy assistant secretary of state who oversaw North Korea matters but suddenly resigned in early July.” Her departure, says Leaf, “is rumored to be connected to Terry’s legal troubles.” Pak had worked for the CIA before going to Brookings and the State Department.

Parallel careers fit a pattern. The world of DC think-tankers has no boundaries, no rules for a game in which the pay ranges from nothing to six-figures. What’s to stop a tanker from serving hidden masters, pitching studies or solutions to the highest bidder?

The indictment has Sue Mi admitting she left the CIA due to “problems” — specifically her Korean intelligence contacts. They even had her collaborating with hubby Max, a senior fellow at CFR, as she once was, on a piece that ran in the Washington Post last year on Korea reconciling with Japan. Could he have been unaware his wife was parroting her “handler”?

The intrusion of the Washington Post into the plot offers a new dimension to a tale of intrigue: in DC power politics, intermingling journalism and soothsaying, any scenario is possible. Let the reader beware, warns the italicized prelude now posted above articles that Sue Mi and Boot concocted: “The indictment alleged that Terry co-authored this column at the request of a South Korean official. If true, this is information that would have been pertinent for The Post’s publication decision. Ms. Terry has denied these charges and has asserted through counsel that the allegations in the indictment are unfounded.”

OK, but what about the piece she wrote in 2014 for Foreign Affairs: “A Korea Whole and Free: Why Unifying the Peninsula Won’t Be So Bad After All.”

According to the indictment, she told a colleague the Koreans were paying her to write that one. What “colleague?” Then there was her article for the same publication in 2023 on the North’s use of “solid” rather than “liquid” fuel for powering a missile as explained by her South Korean handler.

Foreign Affairs accompanies her publication now with the note, “Foreign Affairs requires all contributors to disclose any affiliation or activity that could present a genuine or perceived conflict of interest or call into question the integrity of their work. We take these allegations very seriously.”

In 2022, the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol replaced the leftist Moon Jae-in as president of South Korea. Did Sue Mi follow the Moon crowd and then fall in behind Yoon? On the Post and Foreign Affairs websites, such questions go unanswered.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.

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