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Former President Lee Myung-bak speaks with former NIS Director Won Sei-hoon. An investigation of NIS political activities during Won’s tenure shows a shocking level of crimes against constitutional government.

The results of an investigation into the attempts by the Lee Myung-bak administration to suppress its critics, including politicians and professors, are shocking. The investigation’s findings, which were released on Sept. 25 by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) reform commission, show that not only former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and opposition party politicians such as Park Jie-won and Chung Dong-young, but even ruling party politicians, including Hong Jun-pyo, Chung Doo-un and Won Hee-ryong, were the targets of a smear campaign that was carried out both online and offline.

The only entities in South Korea that could have ordered the military and the NIS to carry out clandestine operations are the supreme government institution [the Blue House] and its leader. It goes without saying that the meddling in the elections (including the general and presidential elections) by the NIS and the military was itself a manifest violation of the constitutional government that shook the country’s fundamental democratic order to its foundations. Now that operations against politicians have been brought to light, the time has passed when officials who served in the Blue House under Lee can try to spin this story by prattling on about “political retribution.”

The documents released by the NIS reform commission show that after public criticism of the government escalated following Roh’s death, the NIS posted critical comments on the Daum Agora online chat room and had the Korea Parent Federation and other groups protest in front of the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation. As part of offline psychological operations, the NIS also carried out a concerted operation to manipulate public opinion by subsidizing subscriptions and advertisements to Media Watch, a website operated by far-right political commentator Byun Hee-jae. The political machinations of the Lee administration covered an unimaginable range of areas and domains, as we have already seen in the blacklist of artists and cultural figures.

The “cyber psychological warfare operations guidelines” drafted by the Military Cyber Command in Feb. 2012 have already been released, and a document about “the results of a meeting for cooperation with ‘BH’ (Blue House) in connection with the cyber command” from March of the same year that was released on Sept. 25 is serious, too. The March document, which summarized the proceedings of a meeting held between the Blue House and the Military Cyber Command at the request of Kim Tae-hyo, external strategy and planning aide at the Blue House, appears to have been approved by Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and contains the expression “the president’s instructions.”

The document emphasized in bold text that “hiring more civilian employees in the military…is the president’s instructions” and that “the president has given these instructions on two occasions.” The document states that Lee personally gave orders two times for more civilian employees to be hired by the Cyber Command and ordered the Ministry of Strategy and Finance to allocate funding for this.

It’s despicable to see close associates of Lee dragging Roh into the picture again and going on about “killing the previous administration,” as if wasn’t enough to organize a smear campaign against the man so soon after his death. In circumstances such as these, it’s tragic that some people seem to be confused about the severity of these matters, considering that some of the prosecutors’ requests for arrest warrants connected with the NIS’s comment operations have been rejected. History teaches us that if such undemocratic violations of and crimes against constitutional government are allowed to slide, they will reoccur with even greater flagrancy.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]