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President Moon Jae-in presides over a meeting of the National Security Council

On June 23, the Blue House moved quickly to quash a controversy about changes to the THAAD deployment agreement provoked by President Moon Jae-in’s interview with Reuters on June 22. After Moon’s remarks during the interview that “the original agreement [between South Korea and the US] was to deploy one launcher by the end of 2017 and the remaining five launchers next year” unexpectedly caused a disagreement between the two countries, the Blue House explained that “the crux of the president’s remarks was not that the number of launchers changed but rather that the deployment process was pushed forward.”

“The remarks came after the Reuters reporter asked questions on the assumption that the THAAD deployment was being delayed and President Moon was explaining that [an environmental impact assessment] has procedural transparency and legitimacy and that [the deployment] could have happened more quickly if this step had been taken,” a senior official at the Blue House told reporters who were asking about the significance of Moon’s remarks during the interview. “The question of whether the original plan was for ‘one plus five’ [one launcher now and five later] or ‘two plus four’ isn’t fundamentally important.” But despite the Blue House’s explanation, questions remain.

The first question is why Moon went public with the original terms of the agreement before the South Korea-US summit, considering that those terms had not been previously disclosed. The Blue House only obliquely revealed that Moon became aware of this fact during the Defense Ministry’s investigation at the end of last month into the omission of information about the delivery of four additional launchers from a report. Blue House Senior Secretary to the President for Public Relations Yoon Young-chan was apparently aware that the original agreement had been for ‘one plus five’ during the briefing about the investigation into the omission of information from the Defense Ministry’s report. “We can make some educated guesses [about the change in the deployment schedule], but I’m unable to reveal everything,” Yoon said at the time. According to the Blue House’s explanation, Moon had been aware since the beginning of this month that the original agreement had been changed to move forward the deployment schedule and that he revealed this during the interview to aid the reporter’s understanding while he was explaining that the environmental impact assessment was not intended to delay the THAAD deployment.

The Blue House has remained silent about when the ‘one plus five’ agreement mentioned by Moon was reached. “I’m not in a position to know the timing of the original agreement or other details. [This question] will be revealed through a Defense Ministry investigation,” said a Blue House source. But given the context of Moon’s remarks and the information released by the US and South Korea thus far, the original agreement was presumably made before July 8, 2016. That was the date when the South Korean Defense Ministry and the Pentagon announced their agreement to deploy the THAAD system by the end of 2017. When Seongju County in North Gyeongsang Province was announced as the THAAD deployment site on July 13, the size of the THAAD system was specified as “one battery,” which is composed of six launchers.

The hypothesis that the original agreement was reached before July 2016 conflicts with Moon’s subsequent remarks in the interview. Immediately after mentioning the original “one plus five” agreement, Moon said, “But for some reason that I do not know, this entire THAAD process was accelerated” over the course of former President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. This implies that the content of the agreement changed after Nov. 2016, when the impeachment process got underway.

Another possibility is that Moon was conflating two different things during the interview. Perhaps the “one plus five” agreement tentatively reached during the initial THAAD negotiations became “one battery by the end of 2017” in the agreement’s final stage, and perhaps the “end of 2017” deadline for completing the deployment was pushed forward during the impeachment process at the end of last year for reasons that are unclear. In that case, Moon may have gotten his facts mixed up. This assumes that what Moon originally wanted to point out was the “lack of transparency” in the entire deployment process. In July 2016, the government announced that the deployment would take place by the end of 2017, but that schedule was pushed forward to September shortly after the National Assembly passed the motion to impeach Park, and then two launchers were unexpectedly delivered at the beginning of March, in the early stage of the presidential election, and then deployed at Seongju at the end of April, shortly before the presidential election.

By Lee Se-young, staff reporter

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