The US Justice Department has agreed to forgo prosecution of a former CIA analyst and White House National Security Council official who was accused of working as an unregistered agent for South Korea in exchange for luxury goods and other gifts.
Under a deferred prosecution deal reached with foreign policy specialist Sue Mi Terry, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said it would suspend criminal charges in the grand jury indictment returned against her in July 2024.
Provided that Terry abides by several conditions stipulated in the deal, including restrictions on her travel and contacts with the government of South Korea, the case against her would be dropped altogether after 12 months of compliance.
Terms of the agreement were laid out in a four-page deferred prosecution notice filed in US District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday.
It gave Terry no explanation for why the Justice Department was essentially giving up its high-profile intelligence case except to say it had determined "that the interests of the United States and your own interest will be best served by deferring prosecution."
The indictment accused Terry of accepting gifts from South Korea's government in return for advocating Seoul's policy positions, disclosing non-public information to its intelligence officers and facilitating access for South Korean government officials to their US counterparts.
Her alleged work on behalf of South Korea as an unregistered foreign agent began in 2013, two years after she left US government employment, and ran for 10 years, including her time as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
At the council, which placed her on unpaid leave following the indictment, she had worked as an expert on East Asia and Korean Peninsula.
The indictment charged Terry with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and conspiring to violate that law.
Terry has maintained her innocence. Her lawyer, Lee Wolosky, said at the time that his client had been a harsh critic of the Seoul government and that she was being prosecuted for performing the work of an independent scholar and news analyst.
The unexpected outcome spares Terry the immediate threat of a criminal conviction or any jail time. It comes weeks before the case was set to go to trial, according to the New York Times.
"We have consistently maintained that her interactions with South Korean officials were conducted in furtherance of US interests and her work as a leading American specialist on North Korea and East Asia," the Times quoted Wolosky as saying in a statement about the agreement.
As part of the deal, Terry admitted to no wrongdoing. But she acknowledged assisting South Korean intelligence officers in a number of ways, including sharing with them notes she had prepared for a meeting in 2022 between top State Department officials and Korea policy experts.
She also admitted accepting designer handbags valued at more than US$9,200, 19 meals at fine restaurants and US$37,000 in payments to a public policy program on Korean affairs that she ran, as gifts from South Korean intelligence officers.
Born in Seoul and raised in Virginia, Terry was a senior CIA analyst from 2001 to 2008, and director of Korean, Japan and Oceanic Affairs at the NSC from 2008 to 2009 under Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Barack Obama.