Journalist Choe Sang-hun has an article published in the New York Times that further details the extent security forces went to during the military dictatorship era of the Korean government to extract confessions from supposed spies:

When the twice-a-day ferry pulls into this island of 900 people, village dogs trot out to the pier to watch the passengers come ashore. Seagulls wheel overhead as weathered fishermen mend nets on the beach. Women in sunbonnets spread anchovies out to dry.

Gaeyado today presents an idyllic scene.

But decades ago, the arrival of ferries was anticipated with dread. Often they brought the counterintelligence detectives, agents in successive South Korean military governments’ drives to root out Communists and their sympathizers.

The extent of the terror they spread in places like Gaeyado is only now coming to light with the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This panel was set up in 2005 to investigate dark episodes in modern Korean history, including abuses the South Korean government perpetrated against fishermen, mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the name of fighting the Communist threat from the North.

In the fearful atmosphere of that time, neighbors informed on each other. People were detained and tortured. Families broke apart, and onetime friends — like Park Chun-hwan, now 62, and Im Bong-taek, 61 — turned on each other.  [New York Times]

Read the rest, but from what I have read about this period in Korean history this story is actually quite probable.  However, the fact that the Korean Truth & Reconcilliation is involved in this is troubling.  As I have outlined before this group conducts sloppy historical research and driven more by politics than actually documenting historical truths.  This story just further emphasizes the problems with the committee because the group has been so discredited you don’t even know to believe stories from them that probably are true.