hankyoreh

Former NIS Director Won Sei-hoon heads to the courtroom to attend a retrial regarding his role in the 2012 NIS election interference scandal on Aug. 10. After appealing his conviction to the Supreme Court

Soon after Won Sei-hoon became director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the first target of the campaign to manipulate public opinion using the NIS’s psychological operations team was former President Roh Moo-hyun, documents show. These documents also show that the psychological operations team was ordered to shift public opinion in favor of former President Lee Myung-bak whenever there was a major political crisis.

Records of Won’s orders and their subsequent implementation that the Hankyoreh received from the NIS on Aug. 27 show that Won gave orders on Mar. 3, 2009 calling for a response to an article that Roh had posted on his website (entitled, “A World Where People Live”) opposing the National Security Act. This was shortly after Won had finished being briefed on his responsibilities, following his appointment on Feb. 12.

Two days earlier, Roh had written that, “The reason we oppose the National Security Act is that it infringes on the democratic principle of tolerance,” and Won ordered a psychological operation aimed at rebutting this article.

The psychological operations team reportedly gave Won a detailed briefing of how it had carried out these instructions. The day after receiving the order, the team went into action online using broadcasters and far-right websites. The team reported that it had posted more than 800 posts attacking Roh on the Daum internet portal and on Democracy 2.0, a debate website that Roh had set up, with team contributions being ranked as the top two posts.

Op-eds in the press written by experts, columns that ran on a far-right website billing itself as the “National Security Defender” and a denunciation of Roh by a figure who appeared on a religious broadcast were also reported as being results of the team’s activity. Considering when the team submitted its report, it had continued to attack Roh’s remarks until the end of March.

Won also instructed the psychological operations team to take action soon after Roh’s death on May 23 of that year. Won ordered them to blame Roh’s death on leftists, and the team reported that it had carried out a psychological operations campaign online using an argument it had developed to silence the Left. This was probably motivated by intense public criticism of Lee after Roh’s death, as Lee was believed to have been behind the prosecutors’ investigation of Roh that was taking place at the time.

At the same time, Won also gave orders for an overt propaganda campaign to whip up public support for Lee. These efforts to manipulate public opinion not only dealt with major government initiatives such as the Four Rivers Project and Sejong City, but also centered around the “conversation with the president” that Lee participated in on Nov. 27, 2009.

Won ordered all assets to be mobilized in an online psychological operation aimed at bolstering public support for President Lee, and he also received a detailed briefing about how conservative organizations and media had been enlisted in this operation. A NIS report from around this time also mentions that, “the Blue House encouraged NIS activities,” increasing the plausibility of allegations that Won orchestrated this manipulation of public opinion with the blessing of the Blue House.

It is worth noting whether further investigation into Won by the prosecutors will uncover a connection to Lee and other former Blue House officials.

By Seo Young-ji, staff reporter

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