Photo: Yonhap News Agency

On September 12, 2024, about a hundred people gathered at a rooftop party in Tribeca where lines of servers held platters of palomas and tables were strewn with gleaming copies of a new book about Ronald Reagan. At the center was the author, Max Boot, a sharp-suited Russian American who was also celebrating his 55th birthday, in honor of which the hostess wheeled out a surprise: a cake shaped like the Gipper. In one corner, a guest whispered to another that they had wondered whether the party would be canceled. The other person nodded, adding that public opinion about “the incident” seemed to be shifting. They were referring to the recent arrest of the author’s wife, Sue Mi Terry, for allegedly being a spy. Now she was out on bail, standing next to Boot in a sleek white pantsuit.

Terry, a former CIA analyst and Korea expert, was indicted on July 16, 2024, by the Southern District of New York on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for South Korea’s government for more than a decade. The news was met with shock in the rarefied foreign-policy circles in which Terry moved. Since leaving the CIA in 2011 she has been a private citizen without a security clearance, working for prestigious think tanks, writing for the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, testifying before Congress, and appearing as a commentator on cable television. I’ve known Terry professionally for years, both of us members of a small group of North Korea watchers who sit on the same policy panels. As one of the few Korean-born women in the field, she stood out for her fluency in both the language and geopolitics of the peninsula. I found her disarmingly charming in a down-to-earth way that made it easy to forget she was former CIA.

With Boot by her side, she cut a glamorous figure in foreign-policy spheres stretching from New York to Washington, impeccably dressed and surrounded by cultural and political elites. Both Boot and Terry were immigrants who had risen against the odds to the highest echelons of the American meritocracy — both intellectuals, both experts on countries central to U.S. foreign policy. Boot is a best-selling author and columnist for the Washington Post, a conservative who opposes Vladimir Putin’s regime and has suggested Donald Trump could be a Russian asset. He even co-wrote op-eds with his wife — one of which the indictment now claims was part of a campaign directed by the South Korean government.

In June 2023, three FBI agents arrived unannounced at their Manhattan apartment while Boot was at the gym. According to Terry, they forbade her from changing out of her pajamas, and questioned her without informing her of her right to counsel, and one female agent watched her as she eventually changed clothes with their permission. They surveilled her husband’s movements and arranged with the New York Police Department to block him from entering the apartment. When he returned, she says, she was instructed to lie to him about the nature of the interrogation. The agents then brought her to a nearby hotel where the questioning continued for several hours. There, she says, they pushed her to admit she had been operating under the direction of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. They told her to “come clean,” said she “was close to saying” what they needed, and that she “was not sorry enough” and “needed to retire,” she wrote in a sworn affidavit. “They kept insisting that I needed to state that ‘I was under the “direction” or “control” of the NIS’ … I consistently said that was false.”

Apparently, the government has been surveilling Terry since 2013, two years after she left the CIA. Prosecutors claim she accepted luxury gifts — two handbags and a coat — from South Korean diplomats who were later identified as NIS agents. They say she published op-eds and articles using talking points provided by her South Korean contact and that, at that contact’s request, she allegedly organized a happy hour for U.S. congressional staffers, which he funded. She allegedly shared notes from an off-the-record State Department meeting with him and allegedly failed to disclose that he was the source of more than $37,000 in donations to the Wilson Center, the think tank where she served as the director.

Though a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act is not technically an espionage charge, the indictment’s language — especially its references to Terry’s “handlers” and the “direction” she received from them — suggests otherwise. Other people who have been charged with violating FARA include former senator Robert Menendez, who was convicted of accepting gold bars and other bribes to further the interests of the Egyptian government; Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government at the behest of the Ukrainians; and Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul who has been accused of being a Chinese secret agent. Terry has now joined this illustrious company to the bewilderment of many of her friends, colleagues, and associates.

Her former husband, the venture capitalist Guy Vidra, said the charges were ludicrous, describing her as “rah-rah American. Loyal patriot. Hawkish.” Moon Chung-in, an adviser to former South Korean president Moon Jae-in, said he long saw Terry as an adversary rather than a secret ally — one of those “Washington hard-liners” opposed to warmer relations between South and North. Her defenders also note that it strains credulity that Terry, who lives a life of relative luxury, would sell out her adopted country and jeopardize her career and reputation for a couple of handbags and a donation to her think tank. They say the case essentially criminalizes the routine networking that occurs between think-tank officials and representatives of foreign governments.

Of course, if you were to construct a credible spy, you might make them a patriotic neocon who charms people with her approachable demeanor and is married to Max Boot. And Terry’s critics say that, if the indictment is to be believed, she crossed clear ethical and legal lines, even while her motives remain hazy. The case is so confounding, so resistant to neat explanation, that it has spawned several equally plausible narratives. Is Terry the victim of a government panic about the infiltration of foreign agents that stretches back to the Mueller investigation in 2017? Did she grow blithe about maintaining ethical standards the longer she remained ensconced in the high-flying world of international diplomacy? Is her case a warning for any immigrant serving as an expert of their country of origin? Or is she a model for a 21st-century secret agent?

Born in 1969 as Sue Mi Kim in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Seoul, she moved to the U.S. at age 12 after her mother married a U.S. Army officer. She took her stepfather’s surname and became a U.S. citizen in 1985. “I taught her ABC on the plane over,” said her mother, now a volunteer principal at a Korean-language school in McLean, Virginia. Owing to her lack of English, she was placed in the fifth grade instead of sixth. Yet not only did Terry master English and graduate from New York University with a degree in political science in 1993, she also eventually earned a Ph.D. in 2001 from the Fletcher School at Tufts University — the oldest graduate school of international affairs in the U.S. and a training ground for foreign diplomats.

At Fletcher, she met Vidra, who described her as strong-willed, independent, and very patriotic even then. He got a job in New York as an operator for a software company, but when Terry moved to Washington, he followed, working remotely from their home in Falls Church, Virginia; they married in 2003. Terry joined the CIA shortly before 9/11, which Vidra says intensified her sense of mission to protect the country from foreign threats. For an immigrant, entering that organization was a profound source of pride — for both her and her mother, who says that Terry is someone “who could die for America.”

This was the era of hypervigilant counterterrorism and controversial CIA tactics such as the torture programs. Terry quickly rose to become a senior analyst, earning the nickname “Tsunami” for her unstoppable drive. Jung Pak, a former colleague at the CIA, said, “When you’re writing the President’s Daily Brief, you’re working until 11 p.m. or midnight, and back in the office by 5 a.m. for pre-briefs. It didn’t happen every day but often enough that I still feel the muscle memory.” Another former colleague described the situation similarly: too many hours for not enough money. But Terry was obsessed with the integrity of the work, with getting it right, and she was excellent at it.

When I asked what it was like being married to someone in the CIA, Vidra first clarified, “She was an analyst, not a spy,” assessing America’s adversaries’ intentions, capabilities, and motivations. But he added that she shared little about her work: “At the end of the day, you ask how was your day, and all you get is, ‘It was good.’ Not much more. That was challenging.”

Between 2005 and 2007, Terry gave birth to their two sons. Her career was thriving, according to her colleagues and Vidra; she was getting coveted rotations (temporary assignments to other departments as part of a career-development plan) to serve the National Security Council and the White House under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Yet the work took a toll on her marriage, and by 2010 the couple had separated and Vidra wanted to move back to New York. They agreed that the family should stay in the same city for the sake of their children, so Terry worked out a rotation to be a visiting intelligence fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (which publishes Foreign Affairs). It was there that Terry met Boot, who was also a fellow. The two were assigned to take a group of CFR members overseas on a trip to South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, and by the end of the trip, they had fallen in love. In 2011 she left the CIA, and later she and Boot moved in together in New York.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act was introduced in 1938 to counter Nazi and Communist propaganda, the intention being to control foreign-sponsored information disseminated in the U.S. The statute remained largely dormant in subsequent decades — unearthed for a mere seven prosecutions between 1966 and 2017 — until the Mueller investigation, which used FARA to target Manafort and his associate Richard Gates for lobbying on behalf of the pro-Russian former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Since then, there have been at least 21 criminal FARA cases, including several members of Trump’s circle, while FARA-based investigations have targeted everything from environmental groups and pro-Palestinian activists to human-rights organizations and churches.

The expansion of FARA’s dragnet has drawn critics from across the ideological spectrum. In 2022, a group of nonprofits led by the ACLU warned that “FARA’s overbreadth and vagueness can undermine and chill First Amendment rights to speech and association and the statute has a history of being used to target undesirable expressive conduct.” In January, the national security publication Lawfare, part of the centrist Brookings Institute, said FARA “functions increasingly like a sword of Damocles hanging over broad sections of U.S. civil society, the business community, and the country’s political class, with no one being quite sure if — or when — it might drop on them.” And in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Department of Justice would begin limiting the criminal enforcement of FARA to prevent “further weaponization and abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

One FARA lawyer told me the government has a history of pursuing high-profile but weak cases, often driven by prosecutorial ambition. One such example is the case of former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, who had been indicted on lobbying for Ukraine; he was eventually found not guilty. Brandon Van Grack, former chief of DoJ’s FARA unit, told me: “What you’re seeing is a pattern of elected officials who are being investigated. It’s not just about what did the person do — it’s about what access did this person have.” Such was the case, says Van Grack, with the casino mogul and Trump supporter Steve Wynn, who was accused by the DoJ in a FARA case of acting as an agent for China; the case was eventually dismissed. Would they have gone after Wynn without his high-level access? And Terry, as a former CIA analyst who also worked at the White House and is married to Max Boot, had access to numerous people in the U.S. government.

Many of Terry’s alleged actions — courting sources, sharing talking points, engaging with embassy officials — are routine in the think tank world. “The foreign-lobbying-registration system is a joke. Half of the foreign lobbyists in Washington don’t register because they can get away without doing it. Of the half that do many don’t provide the information they’re supposed to, or they provide deliberately misleading information so it’s still often hard to figure out who’s actually paying them or what they’re doing in exchange for the money, so it defeats the whole purpose of disclosure anyway,” said Ken Silverstein, a journalist who has covered FARA for decades. Several organizations — the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — have filed amicus briefs in her defense. “The allegations appear to criminalize the kind of meetings and outreach that are typical and routine with embassy officials of allied nations,” said Peter Bergen, an executive at New America.

Some critics have pointed to the sensational way in which Terry has been portrayed. Headlines emphasized the designer handbags she allegedly received and the “Michelin-starred” dinners her alleged handler treated her to. One outlet ran red-carpet images of Terry in a skimpy dress, portraying her as a luxury-loving spy. “It feels racialized,” said Mimi Alemayehou, a Fletcher classmate. “Would she face the same scrutiny if she were Sue Smith from Ohio?”

The indictment against Terry claims she “resigned in lieu of termination” from the CIA owing to “problems” in her interactions with South Korean officials. Her legal team and former colleagues dispute this. They say she left voluntarily after her separation from Vidra to raise her children in New York and that her career ended in good standing. No public evidence appears to support the government’s version. Still, one former counterintelligence officer told me the length and intensity of the surveillance, which may have begun as early as 2011, suggest this is more than just a FARA case. “It reads like a full-blown counterespionage investigation,” he said. But he acknowledged this remains conjecture — no classified leaks from her time at the CIA have been alleged.

Despite the fact that the scope of the law has grown in recent years, at its heart it remains about disclosure — it is not an espionage or bribery statute, even if espionage and bribery are often featured. In May 2020, the DoJ published “The Scope of Agency Under FARA,” which provides insight into how they determine that an individual is an agent who acts “at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal.” So the core question for Sue Mi Terry is agency: Did she act under the direction of a foreign government?

Critics of the case note that Terry often acted in opposition to the government in Seoul, which regularly switches between liberal and conservative regimes that have opposing goals. “Her position hasn’t changed across liberal and conservative administrations in Seoul,” Moon said. “Logically, that makes no sense.” Terry was known as a North Korea hawk, the type of figure who would frustrate liberal governments seeking greater engagement with the Hermit Kingdom. “After all, Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ came from the CIA,” he said. “Sue Mi Terry is very well versed in the sociology of CIA intelligence analysis. Her views have been consistent.” Though he disagreed with her approach to North Korea, he found it implausible that she was ever an agent for South Korea.

Her lawyers furthermore argue that South Korea is one of the U.S.’s closest allies. Most recent FARA prosecutions have involved the governments of China, Iran, Russia, or Venezuela. The last major South Korea–related case was “Koreagate” in the 1970s, when a George Town Club founder named Tongsun Park was charged with bribing U.S. congressmen to sway American foreign policy. Intelligence professionals use the acronym MICE — money, ideology, coercion, ego — to describe why someone might become a spy. Park might have fit that profile. But with Terry, it’s harder to identify a potential motive.

Unless, that is, she did it all for the gifts. According to the indictment, one of Terry’s alleged handlers in 2019 gave her a $2,845 Dolce & Gabbana coat he had purchased from a store in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which she then returned for a $4,100 Christian Dior coat, paying the difference out of her own pocket. That same month, according to the indictment, the alleged handler bought her a $2,950 Bottega Veneta handbag from a store in Washington; video footage appears to show the pair at the register with Terry walking away with the bag in hand. Two years later, according to the indictment, another alleged handler bought Terry a $3,450 Louis Vuitton handbag from a store in Washington, again confirmed by surveillance footage showing both of them at the register. In addition, Terry was seemingly regularly going to dinner with her handlers at “upscale restaurants” in the capital.

Photo: Department of Justice

What the South Koreans received in exchange for these gifts is unclear. Ostensibly the most serious charge — sharing notes with her alleged handler after a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken — looks less serious upon inspection: the meeting was for the State Department to converse off the record with policy experts on North Korea, including Terry and four others, in a “discreet setting.” It is not uncommon for government officials to provide such information to reporters and other interested parties, and prosecutors have not claimed that any  classified secrets were shared. (According to Terry’s attorneys, “The notes that Dr. Terry shared were written by her prior to the unclassified meeting between Secretary Blinken and several non-governmental Korean policy experts.”)

There are two instances in which the indictment claims that Terry was encouraged by her handlers to write columns in Foreign Affairs and other places, in which the line between Terry doing basic reporting and sourcing is blurred with smuggling Korean talking points into the niche world of foreign-policy journals. At one point a South Korean official allegedly asked Terry to write an article for a Korean newspaper for a fee of $500 — just about what the average beleaguered freelancer might make for a short column. Unlike the average freelancer, though, Terry once shared a draft of a Foreign Affairs column with a purported South Korean intelligence agent.

In exchange for organizing an event at the Wilson Center celebrating the U.S.’s long-standing partnership with South Korea — called “70 Years of the U.S.-ROK Alliance: The Past and the Future” — the South Koreans allegedly donated $25,418.70 to a gift account at the think tank that was controlled by Terry. In exchange for organizing a happy hour with congressional staffers, the same account received a check for $11,000. (“In fact it is a common practice among think tanks to receive funding from the ROK and other governments,” Terry’s attorneys say.) Prosecutors say such events were an occasion for Korean spies to “spot and assess” congressional staffers as potential sources and recruits. At the happy hour, the staffers received gift bags “containing Yeti-brand tumblers and pamphlets with the logo” of the South Korean Embassy.

Moon, the former South Korean official, acknowledged it was imprudent for Terry to accept the gifts. But he also argued that after years of acting as a liaison, the boundary between diplomacy and friendship can become murky. And unlike many Korean American experts, Terry was the most Korean of them all in manner and tone, which may have put her South Korean counterparts at ease. The fact that she went shopping with her contact to pick out a designer bag — those moments could be read as excursions with a friend rather than acts of bribery.

But another former South Korean government official says it was clearly a bribe. She added that, in Seoul, there has been no mention of Terry since the indictment. It is as if Terry has been completely forgotten or erased, which is the equivalent of calling her guilty.

If prosecutors are to be believed, there is certainly a case to be made that Terry was, in a sense, working for a client as a consultant and fixer, much in the same way she worked for the Wilson Center, drawing income from both streams. Whether that suggests she was working on behalf of the South Korean government to further its geopolitical ends is another matter. And it all suggests that the work of a foreign agent these days, at least among allies, is pretty mundane, a game played for the smallest stakes.

In February, Terry’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the case, disputing both the charges and the legality of the investigation itself, and the case is pending. Meanwhile, the personal and professional toll on Terry has already been immense. “There’s a crushing weight of suspicion,” one former FARA-investigation subject told me. “You wake up every day wondering what the DoJ will do next.” Whether she is found guilty or not, Terry’s life and career remain in limbo. At the top of every article she wrote for Foreign Affairs is a disclaimer that cites the FARA case against her and asserts that the publication “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.” When I saw Terry at that Tribeca party, she said only one thing to me: “I don’t need any favors. I just want to tell the truth.”

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