Spy chiefs accused of chicanery by their own agency

Former National Intelligence Service chiefs Park Jie-won, left, and Suh Hoon, right.

The country's spy agency said Wednesday it filed criminal complaints against two of its former bosses for undermining investigations into North Korea's murder of a South Korean fisheries official in 2020 and the rushed repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in 2019.

In a statement distributed to reporters, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said its own internal investigation uncovered evidence that Park Jie-won, the agency’s chief from 2020 to 2022, deleted intelligence reports on the fisheries official’s killing without authorization.

The NIS said it had reported Park to the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, alleging that he violated the National Intelligence Service Act by abusing his authority and also committed damage to electronic public records.

The spy agency said it also filed a complaint against Suh Hoon, NIS director from 2017 to 2020, alleging that he violated the National Intelligence Service Act by prematurely terminating an inter-agency investigation into Seoul’s repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in 2019 and fabricating documents in relation to the case.

The repatriation of the fishermen and the killing of the South Korean fisheries official have re-emerged as major political controversies since President Yoon Suk-yeol took office.

At a joint press conference on June 16, the Defense Ministry and Coast Guard apologized for saying that fisheries official Lee Dae-jun, who disappeared while on duty just south of the inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea, was attempting to defect when he was discovered and shot dead by North Korean soldiers in September 2020. They admitted there was no evidence to support that conclusion.

The apology was a notable reversal from one year and nine months earlier, when South Korean military authorities under the Moon Jae-in government said Lee was attempting to enter North Korea to escape a gambling debt, and had been killed by the soldiers out of Covid-19 fears.

The reversal by the Defense Ministry and Coast Guard raised suspicions that high-ranking officials in the Moon administration had directed investigators looking into Lee’s death to approach it as a botched defection in order to maintain smooth relations with Pyongyang, with whom Seoul was pursuing an end-of-war declaration.

Less than a week later, President Yoon told reporters his administration could reopen an investigation into the Moon government’s decision to repatriate two North Korean fishermen captured in the East Sea in 2019, who had expressed a desire to defect to the South.

The case was the first time North Koreans were forcibly sent back by the South Korean government, who returned them blindfolded and bound with rope at the inter-Korean border area at Panmunjom.

An inter-agency investigation into the case — which the NIS now alleges was meddled in by its chief Suh Hoon — concluded that the two sailors killed the captain of their fishing vessel boat and 15 fellow crew members.

Lawmakers from the opposition People Power Party (PPP) pointed out that the fishermen had expressed a wish to defect, and questioned whether the Moon administration decided to repatriate them to avoid irking Pyongyang at a sensitive time in inter-Korean relations.

The repatriation provoked criticism from defector groups in the South and international human rights organizations, who said the pair were branded as criminals without due process.

PPP lawmaker Ha Tae-keung, who is in charge of a party task force looking into Lee’s murder, called it a case in which “the state was complicit in systemic violence and violated the human rights of a citizen” and “made no effort to save the victim, thereby tarnishing his surviving kin as the family of an attempted defector.”

In a phone call with the JoongAng Ilbo, former NIS director Park strongly denied the allegations filed against him by his former agency.

“I never deleted any intelligence reports,” he said bluntly. “Information gathered jointly by the United States and South Korea does not disappear just because the NIS decides to suppress it.”

In a Facebook post, Park accused the NIS of “writing a novel” by filing criminal charges against him. He also accused the agency of becoming a tool of political revenge, saying its criminal complaint illustrated “why people who use the NIS as a cudgel in politics should be eliminated, root and stem.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]