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Investigators Raid Agency of
Military in South Korea
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: October 22, 2013
SEOUL, South Korea —
Military investigators raided South Korea’s Cyberwarfare Command on
Tuesday after four of its officials were found to have posted
political messages online last year, in what opposition lawmakers
have called a smear campaign against President Park Geun-hye’s
opponents before her election in December.
Ms. Park defeated her main
opposition rival, Moon Jae-in, by roughly a million votes in the
election and took office in February. But in a snowballing scandal,
prosecutors have since said that agents of the National Intelligence
Service posted thousands of anonymous Internet messages during the
presidential campaign supporting Ms. Park and her governing Saenuri
Party or berating government critics, including opposition
presidential candidates, as supporters of North Korea.
Last week, opposition
lawmakers alleged in the National Assembly that the military’s
secretive Cyberwarfare Command had carried out a similar online
campaign, separately or in coordination with the spy agency, to help
sway public opinion in favor of Ms. Park before the Dec. 19 election.
On Tuesday, the Defense
Ministry confirmed that four cyberwarfare officials had posted
political messages. It quoted them as saying they had acted on their
own. Still, “the ministry will investigate whether there was
command-level involvement,” the ministry’s spokesman, Kim
Min-seok, said, explaining the raid on the command headquarters.
The Cyberwarfare Command was
created in 2010 to guard South Korea against North Korean hacking
threats.
The political opposition first
raised the possibility of illegal electioneering during the
presidential campaign last year. Three days before the voting, the
police announced that they had found no evidence to support the
accusations.
But in June, prosecutors
indicted Won Sei-hoon, the intelligence agency’s former director,
on charges of supervising an online smear campaign against Ms. Park’s
political opponents. They also indicted Kim Yang-pan, the former
chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police, saying he had whitewashed an
investigation into the matter by junior officers, a charge he denies.
Mr. Won and the spy agency
insisted that the online messages were posted as part of normal
psychological warfare operations against North Korea and did not
amount to meddling in an election. Ms. Park has denied using the spy
agency for her campaign.
Since Ms. Park’s
inauguration, South Korean politics has been paralyzed by scandals,
including the one surrounding the spy agency. Rival political rallies
have rocked downtown Seoul in recent weeks. Student activists
demanded reform within the intelligence agency. But older,
conservative Koreans have encouraged the agency, known by its
abbreviation N.I.S., to “wipe out North Korea followers” from the
National Assembly and cyberspace.
Last month, the spy agency
arrested a far-left nationalist opposition lawmaker on charges of
plotting an armed rebellion against the South Korean government in
the event of war with North Korea. “To many in Korea and abroad, it
appears that the N.I.S. is using a crude distraction in order to
avoid scrutiny of its own alleged illegal activities, and to justify
its existing powers,” more than 200 scholars on Korea living abroad
said in a joint statement.
The scandal has kept growing.
Last month, a Seoul court ordered the prosecution of two more senior
intelligence officials for involvement in the alleged online
campaign.
On Monday, during a National
Assembly hearing, Yoon Seok-ryeol, a senior prosecutor who had led
the investigation of the scandal until recently, said his team had
been under “external pressure.”
Mr. Yoon was removed from the
investigation last week after his team detained three intelligence
agents and searched their homes. He said his team had collected more
evidence of the spy agency’s online campaign: 55,700 messages,
posted or reposted by intelligence agents through Twitter, that
praised Ms. Park or disparaged her opposition rivals before the
election. One of them called Mr. Moon, the main opposition candidate,
a “servant” of North Korea, and another called Ahn Cheol-soo, an
independent who supported Mr. Moon, “a woman in men’s clothes.”
Cho Yong-gon, head of the
Seoul District Prosecutor’s Office, who supervised Mr. Yoon, denied
putting political pressure on Mr. Yoon’s team. He said Mr. Yoon had
been removed from the investigation because he did not discuss the
agents’ detentions in advance with his superiors, as regulations
require.
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