The US Department of Justice has effectively walked away from prosecuting Sue Mi Terry, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and National Security Council staffer who had been accused of a decade-long secret relationship with South Korean intelligence.<\/p>\n
Under a four-page notice filed with the federal court in Manhattan on October 13, 2026, the charges are to be dropped after 12 months. The US Attorney\u2019s Office for the Southern District of New York, for its part, declined to explain its reasoning, offering only that the deferral \u201cbest serves the interests of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Terry, who served as director for Korean and Japanese affairs at the National Security Council under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, admitted to receiving designer handbags and coats worth more than $9,000 from South Korean intelligence, along with 19 meals at high-end restaurants and $37,000 in payments funneled into a program she ran. She also acknowledged handing over talking points prepared for a closed-door meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022.<\/p>\n
The deferred-prosecution deal came together just weeks before trial was set to begin, effectively taking the threat of a criminal conviction off the table for the former intelligence officer. The outcome lays bare how selectively the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) gets applied to retired members of the American intelligence community \u2013 and in doing so, undercuts the Justice Department\u2019s stated commitment to transparency and equal accountability under the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US Department of Justice has effectively walked away from prosecuting Sue Mi Terry, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and National Security Council staffer who had been accused of a decade-long secret relationship with South Korean intelligence. Under a four-page notice filed with the federal court in Manhattan on October 13, 2026, the charges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4122,1816,4154,2119,5661,3415,3414,5662,107,18,5659,3407,1953,4116,60,5660,663,3339],"class_list":["post-4067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-facts","tag-court","tag-espionage","tag-foreign-agent","tag-intelligence-agencies","tag-ministry-of-justice","tag-seoul","tag-south-korea","tag-sue-mi-terry","tag-usa","tag-inostrannyj-agent","tag-ministerstvo-justicij","tag-seul","tag-specsluzhby","tag-sud","tag-ssha","tag-sju-mi-terri","tag-shpionazh","tag-juzhnaja-koreja"],"yoast_head":"\n