You can tell a Moon Jae-in by the company he keeps

This article was originally published May 14, 2017 under the headline “Moon’s right-hand man former friend to the North.” It was republished on June 18, 2020, after then-Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok was mentioned as then-President’s Moon Jae-in’s possible nominee for the post of unification minister. Someone else ended up getting that job but now we are publishing the piece for the third time, with new headlines, in response to the news that ex-President Moon has said in a newly published memoir that he credits Kim Jong Un’s promise to abandon the North’s nuclear weapons.

As US investigators hunkered down last week to investigate whether US President Donald Trump’s election campaign colluded with a hostile government, South Korea’s new president was appointing a right-hand man about whom there could be no doubt.

Im Jong-seok served a prison term for behavior that a court considered aiding his country’s main enemy, North Korea. Im was convicted and sentenced in 1989 after arranging an illegal visit to Pyongyang by a fellow leftist activist, a visit that North Korea’s regime milked for propaganda advantage. And now he’s chief of staff to President Moon Jae-in.

There seems to be little surprise in Seoul about the appointment of Im, who’s now 51. After all, Moon is a former militant anti-government activist. Later, he was a close supporter of two earlier presidents’ decade-long pursuit of the “Sunshine” policy of making nice to the North in the hope the two could negotiate their differences.

Moon has since his election sought to downplay his differences with US policy toward North Korea. So the suggestion that Im’s appointment sounds like an appalling development is left to just a few observers.

Those include the conservative