Ex-NIS aide points to Blue House

A senior National Intelligence Service official who is said to have executed the cash transfer to North Korea before the inter-Korean summit in June 2000, yesterday told the independent counsel that the service was just a “conduit” for an “errand,” sources in the counsel’s office said. The remark was taken as an indication that the Kim Dae-jung Blue House was the wire-puller behind the alleged cash-for-summit scheme.
The sources said that before his appearance yesterday, the NIS official, Choi Gyu-baek, presented a letter to the counsel stating that he sent the $200 million Hyundai Merchant Marine had received from the Korea Development Bank to a foreign bank account owned by a North Korean group. Mr. Choi said the order for the cash transfer was made by Lim Dong-won, then the head of the service. But he wrote, according to the sources, “The service only played the role of conduit in a large framework.”
A close aide of Mr. Choi who participated in writing the letter said, “Saying that the service played the role of a conduit means that the whole scheme was planned not by the service but by an outside body.”
When asked if the “outside body” was the Kim Dae-jung Blue House, the aide said, “Investigation of the case will answer the question.”
A government official who asked anonymity said the only person who could give orders to Mr. Choi, the No. 2 man in the NIS at the time, was the head of the service or the Blue House.
“If Mr. Choi said the cash transfer was planned other than by the service, the ultimate planner of the whole scheme must have been the Blue House,” the official said.
The counsel is now expected to focus its investigation on the Kim Blue House. Earlier this month it searched the house of an aide of Park Jie-won, the Blue House chief of staff in the Kim government. “There is a reason for us to search the house,” a counsel official said after the search.
Suspicion that Han Kwang-ok, another Blue House chief of staff in the Kim administration, called the head of the Korea Development Bank to persuade him to give irregular loans to Hyundai Merchant Marine has been consistently raised. Both Mr. Park and Mr. Han are likely to be summoned, observers said.
The counsel yesterday said it had confirmed that the money sent to the North amounts to $500 million.

by Jeon Jin-bae