In South Korea scandal, echoes of watergate

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: April 9, 2012

SEOUL, South Korea — An unfolding political scandal ahead of Wednesday’s parliamentary elections has many South Koreans drawing comparisons to Watergate: illicit surveillance, an attempted cover-up, destruction of evidence, arrests of people connected to the president — and questions over what the president himself may have known.

Recent disclosures have fueled a public furor, forced prosecutors to reopen a 2010 investigation and dominated the election season, with opposition leaders calling for President Lee Myung-bak’s apology and even resignation.

The case centers on an ethics team from the prime minister’s office that monitored public officials for possible corruption. In 2010, seven of the team’s members were convicted of having conducted illegal surveillance in 2008 of two private citizens — a businessman who had posted a video clip ridiculing Mr. Lee, and the wife of a legislator from the governing party — and of destroying computer files before prosecutors raided their office.

At the time, prosecutors failed to determine the scale of the ethics team’s operations or who told it to monitor the private citizens.

But on March 30, journalists at the Korean Broadcasting System, South Korea’s leading television network, posted online files retrieved from a team member’s memory stick. They represented some of the 2,691 files that prosecutors had submitted to the court in the case and revealed that the team kept reports on a broad range of people beyond the public servants it was mandated to watch, including politicians, journalists, civic groups and labor activists.

The files also showed that the ethics team carried out many missions under an “instruction” from the Blue House, the presidential office, the network said.

The ethics team did not shrink from comprehensive surveillance. It kept nearly minute-by-minute records of a senior government official’s extramarital affair, noting the facial expressions of the man (“entreating”) and the woman (“impudent”) during one evening tryst.

The ethics team members warned that the man the government had backed to lead the Korean Broadcasting System was “too sure of himself.” But they praised an acting president of YTN, an all-news cable channel, calling him “loyal to the government” and recommending that the government use its influence over the network’s major shareholders to help make him president. (He did go on to assume the post).

It was unclear how much of the information in the files was collected by illegal spying. Mr. Lee’s office pointed out that 80 percent of the files dated from the tenure of his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, whose supporters are now in the opposition.

“The Blue House is countering its critics by likening them to the pot calling the kettle black,” said Hahm Sung-deuk, an expert in political science at Korea University. “If the ruling camp doesn’t handle this properly, it could become a Korean Watergate. It’s not just what they did, but how they lied to cover up lies.”

Suspicion of the presidential office’s involvement in spying against citizens has intensified in recent months. In a series of interviews, a former ethics team member, Chang Jin-soo, said that the team had reported directly to the Blue House and that he and his colleagues had erased computer files during the 2010 investigation by order of Lee Young-ho, then the presidential secretary for labor affairs.

Last month, Mr. Chang released a recording of a telephone conversation he had in 2010 with another presidential aide, Choi Jong-seok, in which Mr. Choi pleaded with him to not divulge any sensitive details during his trial. “If you need money, I’ll find a way,” the aide said, adding, “It’s not just me but others who may go down as well.”

Lee Young-ho, who resigned 2010, then called a news conference and admitted ordering the destruction of the investigators’ files “to prevent a disruption of state affairs.” But he insisted that the affair went no higher, and that the president was not involved. He also admitted giving Mr. Chang about $17,700 as financial “help.” (Mr. Chang later returned the money when he started speaking publicly about the surveillance.)

Facing accusations of a whitewash in their 2010 investigation, the prosecutors reopened the case, arresting Lee Young-ho and Mr. Choi last week on charges of conspiring to destroy criminal evidence. They are also investigating an additional $44,200 that Mr. Chang said he received from another presidential aide.

Now, politicians and journalists are focusing on whether the ethics team and former presidential aides were overzealous or were following instructions from above.

“If anyone is found to be responsible as the result of this investigation, he will be held responsible no matter what his rank is,” President Lee’s spokesman, Choi Geum-rak, said March 31.

The scandal has given the opposition a new weapon to use against the president’s New Frontier Party, which was already facing a challenge in maintaining its National Assembly majority in the elections on Wednesday.

“The specter of the past military dictatorship is still haunting our country,” Han Myung-sook, the leader of the main opposition Democratic United Party, told a crowd of voters last week. “You are living in a country where the government snoops into your life, following you around and listening in anytime they want.”

Park Geun-hye, the head of the governing party and its expected candidate in the presidential election this year, has been keeping her distance from President Lee, saying that she, too, was a target of surveillance.

“It’s become clear that all governments have conducted illegal investigations,” she said at a campaign stop last week. “This is a vestige of the old politics.”

Every South Korean president has maintained a special task force whose official brief is to investigate accusations of misconduct by public servants and to vet political appointees, often enlisting help from the police, prosecutors and tax auditors. Over the years, presidents have been accused of using these teams against political enemies.

The main government spy agency and military intelligence unit have been found to have kept political dissidents under surveillance as late as 2003. In the last such case to have been made public, two former spy chiefs were arrested in 2005 and convicted of authorizing illegal wiretapping of government critics, politicians and other prominent figures between 1999 and 2003.

*This article was posted on ‘The New York Times’, on  April 9th, 2012