Ex-Analyst Admits Spying for S. Korea in Plea Bargain

WASHINGTON —  A former Navy intelligence analyst who claimed that he only wanted to help his native South Korea pleaded guilty Wednesday to reduced charges stemming from his indictment last year on espionage charges.

Robert C. Kim, 57, a civilian computer expert with the Office of Naval Intelligence, was allowed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage under terms of an agreement that capped months of negotiation.

Justice Department officials accepted the plea bargain because there was no evidence that Kim had received any payment for giving, or attempting to give, seven national defense documents to a naval attache at the South Korean Embassy in Washington. Kim said that he only wanted to assist South Korea, a U.S. ally, and never intended to harm the United States.

Kim, appearing before U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in suburban Alexandria, Va., said simply, “I’m guilty,” as he entered his plea.

Brinkema set sentencing for July 11. The charge carries a maximum possible punishment of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Kim, who became a naturalized American citizen in 1974, was dismissed from the Navy after his arrest. He had been under FBI surveillance for four months at the time agents arrested him.

The plea bargain brought to a close the third and least serious U.S. espionage case to result in charges in the last eight months. Two other spies, Harold J. Nicholson and Earl Edwin Pitts, pleaded guilty in separate cases earlier this year.

Nicholson, 46, a former CIA station chief and the agency’s highest-ranking officer ever to be arrested for espionage, pleaded guilty in March to charges that he spied for Russia from 1994 until his arrest last November. He acknowledged receiving more than $300,000 for his crimes.

Pitts, 43, an FBI counterintelligence agent arrested last December, pleaded guilty in February to having sold secrets to the Soviet Union and later to Russia beginning in 1987. Pitts received at least $129,000 from Moscow and the Russians told him that they had set aside another $100,000 for him in a “reserve account.”

Both are awaiting sentences that could range as high as life imprisonment.

In Kim’s case, court records suggested that the materials he provided to South Korea were not gravely harmful to U.S. interests, although the initial espionage charges against him carried a maximum sentence of life in prison. An FBI affidavit released after his arrest at a diplomatic reception last September said that Kim, in part, had passed classified data about “a computer software system used for tracking maritime vessels” that the United States was negotiating to sell South Korea.

The affidavit also charged that Kim gave military information about North Korea and China to South Korea over a nine-month period.

A Navy employee since 1978, he had a top-secret security clearance with access to classified maritime information in the joint Navy-Coast Guard computer system, officials said.