Roh bids intelligence service tackle social ills

Hemmed in by a rush of social turmoil, President Roh Moo-hyun yesterday took a step back from his plan to expand the National Intelligence Service’s intelligence-gathering capacity and eliminate its domestic surveillance functions. He asked the agency to join him in working to tackle social conflicts.
“Your agency’s capacity in mediating social conflicts and in general government affairs is too valuable to waste, so it should be maintained transitionally,” Mr. Roh said in a meeting with 170 central intelligence employees.” But he stressed that the job of handling information to mediate social conflicts and state affairs would not be a long-time task of the intelligence service.
“He requested that the service help the government with facts and information in cases of social conflict and other situations,” said Lee Hae-sung, the Blue House senior secretary for public information.
On recent reports that Mr. Roh has begun receiving briefings from the National Intelligence Service, Mr. Lee said, “Responsible aides are first briefed, after which they brief the president.”
When Mr. Roh took office in February, he said that the service should no longer conduct surveillance on politicians, and that he would not receive daily briefings from it. Intelligence officials are not regularly invited to the policy coordination meeting steered by Prime Minister Goh Kun. They dispatch officials to the Blue House, but so do other government agencies.
But with a growing number of social conflicts in Korea, the Roh Moo-hyun Blue House is coming to the view that the service’s ability to gather and decode information should be tapped again. In the previous administration, the National Intelligence Service was in charge of handling domestic crises like those that have arisen recently involving the strike of independent truckers and sharp division among educational groups over a new database system known as NEIS.
With yesterday’s visit to the intelligence service, Mr. Roh has completed a round of get-acquainted meetings with his power agencies. He met rank-and-file prosecutors in March, chief tax officials and chief police commissioners this month.
“The first reform goal for the service is to work for the people and the nation, not for a specific administration,” Mr. Roh said at the luncheon. “The second goal for the service is to transform into a pure intelligence-gathering agency. Political surveillance, naturally, will be eliminated.”
Mr. Roh then said, “I will create a government that does not rely on the four authorities: the National Intelligence Service, the prosecution, the National Tax Service and the police.”
Director Ko Young-koo in response said, “We will be true to our capacity as an intelligence agency.”

by Choi Hoon