Korea recently experienced yet another spy scandal, as Seoul authorities arrested four political activists who allegedly acted as North Korean agents. Ideology more than money appears to have driven these former firebrands of the students’ movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Their arrest recalls the case of Professor Song Du-yul, a prominent guru of the nationalist Left who also happened to be a North Korean agent with a high formal position in the Pyongyang bureaucracy.

Song was hardly the first 20th century intellectual to hate right-wing dictatorships while favoring left-leaning despots. 

Partially open Soviet archives have confirmed that