Marking 50th year, NIS power swells under Lee

Posted on : 2011-06-10 14:20 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Once weakened during democratization, NIS renews clout as administration arm

By Son Won-je, Staff Writer 

 

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) is now fifty years old. Its former incarnation was the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), formed on June 10, 1961, just after the May 16 military coup that brought Park Chung-hee to power, with the goal of detecting and crushing anti-coup efforts. The sinister character it harbored from its foundation seemed to gradually fade over the course of democratization. But critics are saying that under the Lee Myung-bak administration it is once again wavering between the roles of national intelligence institution and administration arm.

An operation in the 1970s to acquire “unification rice” seeds, which contributed to making South Korea a self-sufficient rice producer, is a leading success story among secret operations. Unification rice seeds were thought to have been independently developed by the Rural Development Administration, but in reality they were secretly brought in by overseas KCIA agents and improved over a five-year period by the RDA. The agency’s behind-the-scenes contribution to the two inter-Korean summits also helped to promote its value. Then-Minister of Culture and Tourism Park Jie-won, who participated in preliminary coordination for the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, offered high praise for the NIS North Korean line that had helped him, calling it a “National Treasure of a North Korea channel.”

The “scarlet letter” on the service’s history as a body working to guard the administration has to do with human rights violations and political interference. In 1973, Seoul National University College of Law Professor Choi Jong-gil was taken to the KCIA in connection with a case involving an espionage ring based in Europe. There, he died following torture. The same year, future President Kim Dae-jung was abducted by KCIA agents in Tokyo, narrowly escaping death thanks to intervention by the United States.

Leading examples of political interference include the “North wind” and “show of force” incidents during the Kim Young-sam administration, in which the Agency for National Security Planning attempted to use North Korea as a means of preventing the opposition from taking power, and the “Mirim” incident during the Kim Dae-jung administration, in which a secret NIS organization conducted large-scale wiretapping of government and business figures.

Under the Lee administration, the NIS once again found itself in a controversy over political interference and human rights violations, as with its monitoring of National Assembly members Park Geun-hye and Chung Doo-un and a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Analysts have highlighted a number of intelligence failures, including an attempted theft of documents from an Indonesian delegation and the inability to verify rumors of a China visit by Kim Jong-un as possible side effects of an emphasis on the NIS‘s role as an arm of the administration.

Academy of Korean Studies Professor Yang Dong-an said that if the NIS is to gain a new lease on life as a state intelligence organization, it first and foremost needs to “reflect on the villain role it played as an administration security organization in the past.”

Some observers are suggesting that this should be accomplished by having the NIS focus on gathering North Korea and foreign intelligence while domestic security functions are assigned to a new competing organization along the lines of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

“If the two aspects are separated, [the NIS] can get away from the controversy over political involvement and focus its energies on its proper activities as an intelligence organization,” a former high-ranking NIS official said Thursday.

Yonsei University Professor Moon Chung-in said, “We need to strengthen legal controls by amending the National Intelligence Service Act and clearly defining what the NIS can and cannot do.” Moon is the editor of the book “National Intelligence,” which is considered required reading for students preparing for the NIS exam.

  

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

 

 

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