He was the main founder and leader of the White Shirts Society, a secret fascist terrorist organization that assassinated several Korean politicians.

Most notably, between 1993 and 1995, Lee published a two-volume series entitled Secret Organization White Shirts Society,[b] in which he made a number of proposals about Yeom that have persisted as consensus, although some have since been supplanted.

[3] Jung Byung Joon [ko] has found a number of critical contemporary records on Yeom and published notable works on him over a period of several decades.

[4][c] 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.

[11][8] 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.

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.

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.

[4][1] 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.

Yeom received a letter of recommendation from Sin Ik-hui and was approved for membership by Ji, making him the first student to enroll in the course.

[1][7][4] According to the testimony of Jeon Bong-nam (전봉남; 全奉南), after graduation, the personnel of the Party moved to Nanjing and began renting a house together.

[4] In June 1935, they created a militant arm of the organization, of which Yeom served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs (외교부 부장).

[4][15] The leaders of the militant arm rented a room together in Gao Gang County (Chinese: 高崗里), in which they both lived and worked.

[4] From August, Yeom and the other militants began receiving training at a secret course for Korean independence activists at the Republic of China Military Academy.

[1][3] All sources agree that around this time, Yeom became associated with the Blue Shirts Society (BSS), a secret militant fascist group within the KMT.

[5] According to the later testimonies of former White Shirts Society agents,[n] after the 1937 outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Yeom and many other members of the BSS joined the statistical survey department of the National Revolutionary Army (Chinese: 國民政府軍事委員會調查統計局, aka.

The leading theory and general consensus is that Yeom was arrested in March 1936 in Shancheng [zh], Jilin by the Kempeitai of the Japanese Kwantung Army.

Yeom told Cilley that, due to Kim Ku's betrayal, he had been captured, tortured, and blinded by the Chinese Communist Party.

[4][3] Jung described it as "slander" and a lie to conceal his past as a double-agent for the Japanese, who were the recent enemy of both the United States and Korea.

[13] Until 1940, he worked in Tonghua County for a cultural organization that Jung speculated was a cover company for the espionage operations of the Kempeitai.

[13] Lee claimed that Yeom's spying even continued past the liberation of Korea in 1945, as he reportedly met with Japanese Sergeant Arakawa Takezo (荒川武藏) in mid-1946.

[3] Yeom founded and led the anti-communist group Daedongdan in August 1944,[r] which was the direct predecessor to the 1945 White Shirts Society.

[9][3] Yeom is widely suspected to have ordered the September 3, 1945, murder of Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk, the leader of a branch of the Communist Party of Korea.

After arriving, Yeom stayed with his in-laws, including Lee Bong-ryeol (이봉렬), who was an employee of the Namseon Electric Company.

According to a 1977 report in the Kyunghyang Shinmun which contained an interview of the police inspector in charge of the case Na Byeong-deok (나병덕; 羅炳德), it was a revenge-killing by Yeom.

Jung theorized that this effectively associated the popular independence movement with the far-right actions of the WSS in the minds of new recruits.

[y] According to Ahn, after Yeom's defection to the South, he ordered that Kim, then the leader of a militant left-wing youth group associated with the Communist Party of Korea,[z] be kidnapped and taken to the house of Oh Dong-jin (오동진) in Seoul.

Ahn noted the existence of theories that Yeom, via his connections to the American government, was later able to have Kim released from jail after his arrest on terrorism charges.

[3] Sin was a long-time member of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) and reportedly a consistent ally to Yeom, even during their exile in China.

[3] According to Cilley, Yeom had been acting as a medium between the CIC and the 4th regiment of Republic of Korea Armed Forces before Kim's assassination.

Some time after she secured Yeom's release from jail in the aftermath of Hyeon's assassination, she was beaten at a west Pyongyang police station, which led to her miscarriage.