NIS faces a new round of allegations of political interference

Posted on : 2013-06-22 12:29 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Evidence surfaces that intelligence authorities illegally provided the transcript of a 2007 summit conversation
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By Kim Nam-il, staff reporter

After meddling in last December’s presidential election, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) is once again getting involved in politics. As the Blue House and the Saenuri Party (NFP) are pleading ignorance and contesting the storyline, evidence suggests that the NIS has entered a second round of political interference vis-a-vis information peddling. This analysis is suggested by the timing of the NIS’s unauthorized release of the transcript from the 2007 inter-Korean summit, which was only made available to the ruling party.

■ Timing of the Unauthorized Release of the Summit Transcript

It was 4pm on June 20 when Han Gi-beom, first assistant director of the NIS, brought the original summit transcript and excerpts to room No. 646 at the National Assembly (room of Seo Sang-gi, Saenuri lawmaker and chair of the Intelligence Committee). The only people waiting for Han were Seo and four other Saenuri committee members.

At 3:07pm, less than an hour before, Seo had given his aide instructions to notify Jeong Cheong-rae, a Democratic Party (DP) ranking member of the same committee, that they would be able to view the summit transcript at 4pm. According to DP lawmakers, ruling and opposition members on the committee had always contacted each other directly; they had not spoken to each other through their aides.

Despite the fact that this was a viewing of sensitive records, the notification was unilateral and there had been no prior consultation between the ruling and opposition parties. Jeong and the other DP lawmakers on the committee declined to view the documents, and the ruling party lawmakers viewed the transcript by themselves, comparing the excerpts with the original for 40 minutes, starting at 4:05pm. Around 4:45pm, immediately after the five ruling party lawmakers finished viewing the transcript, they held a press conference, claiming that the transcript showed that a reference to abandoning the Northern Limit Line (NLL) had been made during the summit meeting by then-President Roh Moo-hyun.

That morning, the situation had taken a turn for the worse for the NIS. The floor leaders of ruling and opposition parties had come to an agreement to work on pushing forward the investigation of the NIS online public opinion interference during the June temporary session of the National Assembly. It was also announced that both sides had agreed to start working to reform the NIS immediately. These circumstances give credence to the argument that NIS Director Nam Jae-joon, who had been pushed into a corner when public opinion forced the Saenuri to agree to a parliamentary investigation of the NIS, dispensed with the standard protocol that both ruling and opposition parties must agree to a viewing of documents. Nam acted to release the summit transcript without authorization as soon as the Saenuri Party requested for permission to view the transcript, critics claim.

Seo did not provide specific information about when the Saenuri asked the NIS for permission to view the transcript. While Seo claims that the overall mood led them to the decision of asking to view the transcript, sources indicate that this request was made on June 19, only one day before the NIS brought the original meeting transcript and excerpts to the National Assembly. In the space of a day, the NIS reserved its position of not allowing the transcript to be viewed, a position that it had held since 2012.

■ Misrepresentation of What Was Actually Discussed at the Meeting

Others believe that the NIS’s political agenda had a considerable effect on what was included in the excerpts from the summit meeting that the NIS brought the Saenuri lawmakers. “The excerpts that the NIS delivered are probably not identical to what was submitted during the investigation by the prosecution,” said Seo. “We would have to check to be sure, but it seemed like the number of pages had increased.”

Presumably, the meeting transcript that the NIS submitted as part of the prosecutors’ investigation of Saenuri lawmakers who were charged with spreading false information about abandoning the NLL would have only included the sections dealing with the NLL, the subject of the investigation. In other words, there is no reason that the excerpts that the NIS allowed NFP lawmakers to view should have been different from what they submitted to the prosecution.

Upon examination of the details of the transcript that some conservative newspapers carried on June 21, the discussion of the NLL only accounted for one portion of the content, while in fact the majority of the content was not directly connected with the NLL and instead reflected the unique situation of an inter-Korean summit meeting, addressing topics such as US sanctions against North Korea and the attitude toward the US. If former president Roh Moo-hyun had really intended to abandon the NLL, that would have been the focus of the discussion. In a word, the focus of the discussion has been misrepresented. This is why suspicions are increasing that the NIS mined quotes from various sections of the transcript of Roh (who was known for his candid manner of speaking) and cobbled these together in the excerpts they released with the hope of dragging public opinion, which had turned against the current administration, into an ideological debate.

It is true that the remarks about the NLL were brought back up by Park Yeong-seon, a DP lawmaker who is chair of the National Assembly legislation and judicial committee. On Jun. 17, Park said that “the remarks about abandoning the NLL are a fiction contrived by the NIS and the Saenuri Party.” However, others are suggesting that the NFP used this as an excuse to deliberately escalate a debate that had for all intents and purposes been brought to a conclusion at the end of the presidential election last year. The idea was move the discussion away from the case of NIS interference with the election.

On June 18, Saenuri lawmaker Jeong Mun-yeon’s called for an investigation into Park. Saenuri floor leader Choi Kyoung-hwan followed this on June 19 by saying, “During the process of the presidential election in 2012, the NIS was so persistent in refusing our requests for associated materials to be submitted that we submitted a proposal for the NIS director to be dismissed. We ask the prosecutors to undertake an investigation.”

“We strongly urge the Democratic Party to take part in a resolution of at least two-thirds of current members of the National Assembly to disclose those parts of the meeting transcript that can be disclosed so that we can move beyond this time-consuming debate,” said Kim Tae-heum, floor spokesperson for the Saenuri Party, on the same day.

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