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As of his inauguration as president on May 10, 2022, Yoon Suk-yeol moved the presidential office from the Blue House to the former Ministry of National Defense in Yongsan, Seoul, pictured here. (presidential office pool photo)

The South Korean presidential office put out an official position on Tuesday flatly denying that the CIA was eavesdropping on Korea’s National Security Office, calling the allegations “absurd lies.”

In a notice to the press pool sent on Tuesday, the office of the presidential spokesperson wrote, “As a military facility, the Yongsan presidential office has constructed and is operating a communications monitoring prevention system far superior to the Blue House of the past.”

The announcement appears to be a move by the administration to refute criticism that there are issues with the security of the presidential office following revelations of suspected eavesdropping by the US.

The spokesperson’s office refuted arguments by the opposition connecting the suspicions with President Yoon Suk-yeol’s hasty decision to move the presidential office out of the Blue House.

“With no attempt to distinguish fact from fiction, the Democratic Party has been raising false, negative suspicions that eavesdropping occurred due to the moving of the presidential office, bent on riling up the public,” the office said.

Saying that the components of previous administrations had been “scattered about” at the Blue House, the presidential office said, “The current integrated security system and those responsible for it maintain ‘ironclad security,’” at the Yongsan office.

Going on, the office called suspicions raised by the Democratic Party “self-destructive behavior that destabilizes the ROK-US alliance amid unrelenting provocations and nuclear threats from North Korea.”

“Koreans will judge the Democratic Party’s acts of diplomatic self-destruction, which come at a critical point where we should be strengthening and developing the ROK-US intelligence alliance,” the office went on.

Regarding the leaked classified documents containing circumstantial evidence of American eavesdropping on allies, South Korea’s presidential office said that the South Korean and US defense chiefs “concurred that a substantial number of the relevant documents were forged.”

Yoon’s office expressed plans to “further strengthen” bilateral trust and systems for working together based on a “steadfast ROK-US intelligence alliance.”

By Bae Ji-hyun, staff reporter

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