Yeom Dong-jin (; February 14, 1909 – after June 24, 1950), also known as Yeom Eung-taek, was a Korean far-right militant and independence activist. He was the main founder and leader of the White Shirts Society, a secret fascist terrorist organization that assassinated several Korean politicians.
Most scholars believe he was also a double-agent for the Japanese Kempeitai. He and the White Shirts Society have been linked to a number of crimes and assassination attempts. This includes an attempt on Kim Il Sung in 1946, the assassination of Lyuh Woon-hyung in 1947, and the assassination of Kim Ku in 1949. However, there are varying degrees of debate on whether he was truly responsible for these actions.
Historiography
Much of Yeom's life remains unknown or uncertain. Even Yeom's name and birth year have been the subject of uncertainty. Most details about his life come from a number of interviews of people who were either directly or indirectly associated with Yeom. Some information comes from declassified government records. Some accounts directly contradict others, which contributes to ongoing scholarly debate about the reliability of each source.
Some of the earliest and most extensive studies of Yeom and the White Shirts Society are by Lee Yeong-shin. Most notably, between 1993 and 1995, Lee published a two-volume series entitled Secret Organization White Shirts Society, in which he made a number of proposals about Yeom that have persisted as consensus, although some have since been supplanted. Ahn Gi-seok also constructed his own biography of Yeom in 2005. has found a number of critical contemporary records on Yeom and published notable works on him over a period of several decades.
Cilley report
In 2001, a document written by the US Counterintelligence Corps agent George E. Cilley was declassified and released by the US National Archives and Records Administration. Among Korean scholars, Jung Byung Joon was the first to discover and write about the document. The document was written on June 29, 1949, just after Kim Ku's assassination on the same day, and submitted several days later on July 1. It consisted of four pages with a confidential classification level that discussed Yeom, the White Shirts Society, Kim's assassin, and Kim's relationship to the preceding topics.
The document is one of the few contemporary records on Yeom and his activities, and contained several allegations that shocked scholars and the general public upon its publication. It led to a renewed interest in Yeom and the White Shirts Society. In fact, despite numerous studies on the CIC's activities in Korea published in the preceding decades, Cilley had been virtually unknown to scholars until that point.
The report is considered to be mostly reliable by South Korean scholars, although there is disagreement on how to interpret its information. It remains an important source of study on Yeom.
Early life
Yeom was born Yeom Eung-taek on February 14, 1909, at 82 Ch'ohyŏn-ri, Chunghwa County, Pyongyang, South Pyongan Province, Korean Empire. He was the third son of father Yeom Do-yeol. Yeom also had an older sister. His bon-gwan is the Paju Yeom clan.
Yeom graduated from the Chunghwa-gongnip Primary School. He then enrolled in a regular course at the Sunrin Commercial School in Seoul on April 1, 1926, and graduated at age 22 in March 1931. Afterwards, he spent some time at the Munsan area of Paju City.
Exile in China
Yeom then left Korea to join the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in exile in Shanghai. There, the KPG had been conducting various resistance activities against Japanese imperialism, especially via their militant arm the Korean Patriotic Organization (KPO). While in Shanghai, Yeom became aligned with Ji Cheong-cheon, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy who defected to the KPG in 1919.
After the KPO prominently assassinated Japanese military and colonial personnel in April 1932, the Japanese launched a vigorous effort to capture them. The KPG mostly fled from Shanghai and their activities were significantly disrupted for several years. However, this incident also caused the KPG to gain the respect of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), who began sheltering them and providing resources and training in guerrilla warfare.
Student at Sun Yat-sen University
Beginning in October 1933, Yeom briefly attended Sun Yat-sen University as a first-year student in the Department of Economics of the School of Law. His academic record at the university was discovered by Jung in 2021.