Free Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim, Chi-Young Kim

castle. The way Basho's haiku popped up on his screen this morning.
    Ki-yong sweeps the items on his desk into his black Samsonite briefcase. Song-gon isn't back yet. He stands up and strides out of the office. With an electronic whir, the door locks automatically behind him. He looks back. A small green light blinks above the keypad. Next to it is a well-known security company's logo of a fine mesh web, connected in sharp angles. He heads to the subway station. Dark clouds billow between buildings, wending along the wrinkles of the city. His car, crouched and still, observes him walking away. Ki-yong encounters more people the closer he gets to the subway station but nobody looks at him. He isn't a man who stands out. Lee Sang-hyok at Liaison Office 130 instructed, "Erase yourself until your alias becomes your second nature. Become someone who is seen, but doesn't leave an impression. You need to be boring, not charming. Always be polite and don't ever argue with anyone, especially about religion and politics. That kind of conversation always creates enemies. You'll slowly fade. From time to time, you'll feel your personality straining to get out from within you. You'll ask yourself, Why should I let myself disappear? Practice and practice again so this question will never present itself in your mind." According to Lee Sang-hyok, repetitive and conscious training, similar to that followed by a Zen monk in eliminating egocentric images, would allow one to reach a point where one could fully erase oneself. It was similar to working on one's golf swing. By relaxing the shoulders and eliminating unnecessary movement, one can swing more gently and efficiently. A spy's mindset and actions can be modified, too. In that sense, Ki-yong was the descendant of Pavlov and Skinner.
    "Why do people remember you? Because you annoy them. If you're partial to a loud tie or unusual accessories or have exaggerated gestures, people notice you. Seasoned spies aren't easily caught. Even neighbors who lived next to them for years don't remember them when the police come knocking on their doors. A police sketch becomes a faint outline of an average face. Good spies are like ghosts. People don't notice even if they tap-dance in the street or do the butterfly stroke in the pool."
    Ki-yong knows that people have warped ideas about what a spy is—Mata Hari, sex appeal, infiltration and escape tactics, extremely tiny cameras, bribery and appeasement, threats. In truth, all the information gathered by spies is already out in the open. Spying is similar to clipping newspaper articles. The quality of the information culled by spies isn't any better or worse than that. Information covers the sky in a black mass, like migratory birds in early winter. No, Ki-yong thinks, that is too menacing an image. It is more like a flood during rainy seasons, sweeping away objects in its path—a cow trying to swim, a chest door inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a pregnant Berkshire sow, red dirt-filled water bubbling up, timber from a pine tree, the corpse of an impatient hiker, Styrofoam buoys. Ki-yong and his colleagues' assignment was to pull out meaningful information from this flow of facts, then analyze it. Because they read endlessly and organize what they learn, they are as academic as any scholar. It was no accident that the spy Chung Su-il, also known as Khansu, became one of the most renowned scholars on the history of exchanges among civilizations.
    The most important asset for a spy isn't the ability to infiltrate or disguise oneself, but to possess an acute sensitivity, an ability to discern the crux of the information from the common barrage of words. Near the end of World War II, a
famous spy received an order from the KGB to report on the German army's deployment. He went to a blanket factory near the Austrian border and asked them all kinds of questions, posing as a blanket seller. By figuring out where the blankets were going, he could piece together the