The national-security analyst’s wife and sometime co-author is charged with being a South Korean agent. Boot’s career as a columnist may be on the line.
The national-security analyst’s wife and sometime co-author is charged with being a South Korean agent. Boot’s career as a columnist may be on the line.
T he Washington Post has found itself in a remarkably uncomfortable position.
Its national-security columnist may have been compromised by a national-security risk.
How’s that for irony?
Max Boot, whose rise to online prominence was made possible by his willingness to peddle conspiracies alleging a foreign takeover of the Trump-era GOP, co-authored at least a half dozen columns with his wife, Sue Mi Terry, who is charged with being an unregistered foreign agent.
Terry, born in Seoul, is accused of accepting cash and luxury gifts from South Korean officials, including an estimated $10,000 in goods from Dolce & Gabbana, Bottega Veneta, and Louis Vuitton. Prosecutors also allege she received a covert payout of at least $40,000 to an “unrestricted account” she controlled at a think tank that employed her at the time. In return, Terry allegedly provided South Korean intelligence officers with access to members of Congress and “nonpublic U.S. government information,” and planted South Korean propaganda in U.S. news media.
The Justice Department charged Terry last week with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and one count of failure to register under the same act. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, meaning Terry, who serves as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and who worked previously as a CIA analyst, faces up to a decade behind bars.
The 31-page indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, is bursting with allegations and supporting materials, including undercover photos and stills of surveillance footage purporting to show Terry accepting luxury gifts from her handlers, of which she had three.
In one particularly jarring passage, the charging documents allege Terry participated in an off-the-record briefing in 2022 with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The meeting was organized to discuss U.S. policy on North Korea. Terry took handwritten notes of the private meeting, which she then passed along to her foreign handlers, according to the indictment. Prosecutors also allege that Terry used her position at D.C.-based think tanks to place South Korean intelligence agents in the same room as U.S. federal officials. More specifically, she hosted meetings that included South Korean intelligence officers and U.S. officials, where the latter were oblivious to the fact that the events were organized at the behest and benefit of South Korea.
Then, there are Terry’s alleged efforts to plant pro–South Korea propaganda in U.S. news media. In opinion articles published in the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, and in her many cable-news appearances, Terry’s analysis uniformly supported South Korean policies and interests.
This brings us to the conundrum for the Washington Post.
Terry’s alleged propaganda blitz included co-opting her husband’s Washington Post column. Boot and Terry co-authored at least six opinion articles, each one promoting South Korea’s interests. Of those articles, at least one reportedly was written with direct input from Terry’s handlers. The article, published on March 7, 2023, is filled with glowing praise for South Korean president Yoon SukYeol, referring to him as a “profile in courage” for attempting to resolve a long-standing dispute with Japan.
Terry’s handlers approached her with the idea of writing on the dispute, prosecutors claim, citing cellphone data. She responded by asking for specific details regarding South Korean–Japanese relations. Her handlers responded, point by point. Boot’s column, which Terry co-wrote, was published later that day, its language appearing “broadly consistent” with the language used by Terry’s handlers, according to the indictment.
“Hope you liked the article,” Terry texted one of her handlers.
The handler responded, “Thank you so much for your zeal and endeavors! Of course we do. Actually, Ambassador and National Security Advisor were so happy for your column.”
The question now for the Washington Post is whether it keeps Boot on staff. If it’s true Terry served for more than a decade as a covert intelligence asset of the Republic of Korea — and the indictment is rather damning — then Boot is left with no good defense. Either he knew of Terry’s side hustle, in which case he has no business writing a national-security column, or he didn’t know, in which case he has no business writing a national-security column. In other words, he’s either too corrupt or too dim to be taken seriously again as a supposed national-security and intelligence “analyst.”
But even if the charges aren’t true, either in part or in whole, there is still the problem of Boot’s and the Washington Post’s ethical lapses. For starters, it beggars the imagination that neither Boot nor his editors saw any potential conflicts of interest in Terry’s long-standing ties to South Korea. Even if her relationships are purely on the up and up, simple prudence dictates that her name should be kept off an article offering effusive praise for South Korean policies and leaders. At the very least, they should have included a “full disclosure” notice.
Speaking of which, it’s astounding that not one of the articles co-authored by Boot and Terry includes a note addressing the fact that they are married to each other. Why? Their marriage absolutely reaches the bar for full disclosure. That Boot, who is in the business and knows better, didn’t think to include such a note is astonishing. That his editors likewise thought it unworthy of mention is inexcusable.
One uncharitable theory for why they declined the marital disclosure is professional pride. They wanted to present Terry as an independent think-tank expert and former CIA analyst, not as Boot’s literal bedfellow.
Speaking of the CIA, now is a good time to point to the passage in the indictment where the prosecution writes that Terry “admitted, in substance and in part, that she had resigned in lieu of termination from the CIA because the CIA had ‘problems’ with her contacts with Republic of Korea National Intelligence Service officers.”
Neither Boot nor the Washington Post responded to my request for comment.
The Post has affixed an editor’s note to stories bearing Terry’s byline. The note reads, “On July 16, a federal indictment was made public alleging that Sue Mi Terry had acted as an unregistered agent of the South Korean government beginning in 2013. If true, this is information that would have been pertinent for The Post’s publication decision.”
Terry’s attorneys, for their part, maintain her innocence.
Should the indictment hold, and Terry is found guilty, the obvious question is: Does the Washington Post give Boot the boot? How could it not? A supposed national-security expert infamous for accusing others of working on behalf of foreign powers is himself married to a woman who allegedly worked on behalf of foreign powers — that’s not a professional disgrace from which one can return. Boot may be innocent of involvement, but his judgment and analysis will forever be stained. Who wants to hear about global affairs from an “intelligence” expert who doesn’t even know what’s happening in his own home? And if Boot did know, then he really can’t be trusted.
In 2020, as part of his extended McCarthyite crusade to ferret out supposed Russian influences in the Trump GOP, Boot wrote, “Washington should ramp up enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and expand U.S. counterintelligence efforts against foreign influence, not just espionage.”
“Congress should appropriate funds to enhance FARA enforcement and change its focus from encouraging compliance to punishing noncompliant parties,” he added.
Be careful what you wish for.