The Case of Sending Drones to North Korea and Inter-Korean Dialogue

Amid another anti-North Korean moves by Seoul, the administration of Lee Jae Myung decided to make use of the ‘drone case’ to smooth things over – and ran into a tough North Korean response.

New Charges and Links with Intelligence Services in the Drone Case

The principal suspect, a PhD student named O, who personally launched the drones, was listed in military intelligence as a ‘civilian auxiliary’ (essentially an irregular agent). An NIS officer, as it turned out, gave him 5.05 million won. Intelligence, however, insists that it was a private loan because they knew each other from university matters. Despite an internal review, the NIS ‘could not identify a link between the money and the drone flights’.

Moreover, it has been established that O and his accomplices launched drones into North Korea not twice but four times since Lee Jae Myung came to power. The launch dates were: 27 September, 16 November, 22 November, and 4 January, with two of the drones having crashed (in September and January) and another two having come back successfully.

On 6 March, the cases of the three civilian suspects were handed over to the prosecution. It was found that ‘since 2024, they conspired to develop a drone that would be able to bypass the detection by the air defence systems of South and North Korea at low altitudes.’ After that, they conducted eight test flights of drones in the Yeoju area (about 60 kilometers southeast of Seoul) between June and November 2025.

On 31 March, the prosecution received the cases of a National Intelligence Service officer and two servicemen on active duty. The civilian intelligence officer had maintained close relations with the PhD student O for more than ten years and gave him 2.9 million won (about 1,900 US dollars) to cover the costs of making drones. The commander of an army special forces, who had previously attended the same school as the PhD student O, joined him to observe the flights and carry out an analysis of the video footage of North Korea that was shot by the drones in order to assess its value. A second captain from the Defence Ministry’s intelligence department, as it was........

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