The True Story of the Pentagon Spies Who Posed as Christian Missionaries to Surveil North Korea
▻http://m.democracynow.org/stories/16067
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you—-we just have a few minutes—on your fascinating story late last year on missionaries in North Korea.
MATTHEW COLE: Yeah, so last year we published a story about a Pentagon program that ended in—at the end of 2012, about a espionage effort that the Pentagon started in 2004, 2005, using and funding an NGO, an NGO out of Colorado run by evangelical Christians, who were doing humanitarian work around the world. And what it was, was the Pentagon funded this group in an effort to get the head of the group legitimacy in the NGO world, so that they could then get him into North Korea, so that they can move materiel, so that they could collect intelligence.
And so, for about a eight-year period, the Pentagon funded this organization that—by the way, the organization did—90, 95 percent of their work was legitimate. You know, nearly everyone in the company—or, the organization, had no idea that they were acting as a front for the Pentagon. And it’s important to remember that, because they were missionaries who were doing really important work all over the world. And they did very good work. And it was really sad, actually, to interview people who had worked there who were completely distraught about the—upon discovering that they were, in fact, being paid by the Pentagon secretly. And it goes to show the danger of U.S. intelligence agencies or the Pentagon trying to get in under the cover of humanitarian auspices.