Tag: NIS

It appears the removal of the leadership of the NIS this week had nothing to do with ideological differences with the Yoon administration and instead it was simply people in the NIS not being able to get along:

This Nov. 1 photo shows Kim Kyou-hyun, director at the National Intelligence Service, attending an audit at the National Assembly in Seoul. Kim, a former diplomat who became the first chief of the spy agency under the Yoon Suk Yeol administration, resigned, along with its first and second deputy directors, Sunday. Yonhap

After returning from an overseas trip on Sunday, the first thing President Yoon Suk Yeol did was to accept the resignations of the chief of the National Intelligence Agency (NIS) and his two deputies. Yet given the deep, long-running tensions between top agents over the past year, few believe their departure was voluntary.

Despite rising security threats from North Korea, which claims to have successfully launched its first reconnaissance satellite last week, Yoon took the risk of leaving the spy agency’s top post ― held by Director Kim Kyou-hyun ― empty for the time being. Meanwhile, Hong Jang-won and Hwang Won-jin, veteran NIS agents, replaced Kwon Chun-taek and Kim Soo-youn as first and second deputy directors, respectively.

Speaking to The Korea Times on Monday, insiders refused to disclose details of how the infighting and feud within the NIS started and apparently aggravated under Kim’s watch. But one said the bone of contention had nothing to do with ideological differences suspected by some.

Conflicts over personnel affairs are known to have largely caused and deepened the division among NIS leaders ― particularly between Kim, a former vice foreign minister who became the first NIS director under Yoon, and Kwon.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

These so called X-Files must have some pretty interesting information in them:

A former spy chief apologized Saturday for speaking publicly about an archive of secret “X-files” kept by the National Intelligence Service (NIS).

Former NIS Director Park Jie-won, who left the agency last month, told a local radio station on Friday that the files were created over the past 60 years from the governments of President Park Chung-hee to President Park Geun-hye and contained mostly unconfirmed rumors about politicians, entrepreneurs, journalists and others, including love affairs.

He lamented that he was unable to legislate a special bill to destroy the files.

The NIS called out Park in a press release Saturday, saying it was “inappropriate” for a former director to publicly speak about information he had obtained while in office, regardless of whether it was true or not.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

The Daily Beast has an article published about how the left-wing operative and convicted criminal, Park Jie-won has taken over Korea’s National Intelligence Service:

The old Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a fearsome tool of terror for bygone South Korean dictators, has now lost the right to spy on politicians and torture foes of the regime. Instead the agency, renamed the National Intelligence Service years ago, is morphing into an instrument for North-South Korean reconciliation.

Nothing shows the changing role of the NIS more sharply than the appointment by South Korea’s liberal President Moon Jae-in of an old-time leftist politico as NIS director. Imprisoned in 2006 for agreeing to send North Korea $500 million to bring about the first North-South Korean summit in June 2000— between then-South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, father of current ruler Kim Jong Un—the 78-year-old Park Jie-won hopes to use the agency to get back in the good graces of the North Koreans.

The NIS may still engage in routine intelligence-gathering, but Park, who was Kim Dae-jung’s closest aide, envisions the agency pursuing “peace, cooperation and unification” of the two Koreas. As for his signature on an old document promising payoffs to North Korea, he called it “fake,” a forgery.

The controversy over the signature revived memories of the scandal in which Park was alleged to have signed an “agreement on economic cooperation” with North Korea before the June 2000 summit. The document states the payoffs came to $3 billion, including another $2.5 billion in long-term aid and investment, all to get Kim Jong Il to agree to host Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang. Several months later, “DJ,” as he was widely known, won the Nobel Peace Prize for which he had been lobbying for years.

Park might say he knew nothing, but he was sentenced in 2006 to three years in prison for arranging payoffs that critics say aided and abetted North Korea’s rise as a nuclear power. Some have claimed the final total sent to North Korea amounted to far more. In any event North Korea conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006 and has staged five more since then, most recently in September 2017.

Daily Beast

You can read more at the link, but any fair observer can conclude that all the payouts did was accelerate the Kim regime’s nuclear capabilities and made them the even more dangerous threat they are today.

I agree that the National Intelligence Service should not be organizing people to leave comments in support of a political party, but I doubt this had much if any effect on the election:

A newly formed investigative team in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) announced Thursday that the former intelligence chief, Won Sei-hoon, who served in the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration, orchestrated a smear campaign to help former President Park Geun-hye get elected.

Park ultimately won out against current President Moon Jae-in by a small margin, though it is unclear how much impact the NIS had on public opinion at the time.

The team, which launched their probe last month after Moon became president in a snap election in May, has yet to mention whether it will hand over their evidence to prosecutors or formally ask them to dig deeper, which would likely affect the prosecution’s own trial with Won.

Last week, prosecutors requested a local court hand down a four-year jail term. A verdict is expected to come later this month.

The NIS team said Thursday that Won was found to have led a group of civilians from 2009 to 2012, who were ordered to post online comments slandering liberal politicians and presidential candidates. The group, according to the NIS, was funded through state coffers.

The so-called “commentary troop,” a term coined by the local media, gathered members from all over the country, said the NIS team, from office workers and CEOs to students and housekeepers.

The troop grew over the years, peaking at nearly 3,500 members in 2012 by the time Korea held its presidential election.

Their tasks ranged from tracking North Korea’s espionage attacks on the country’s most popular search engines to leaving right-leaning comments on online posts. Some 200 million won ($177,800) was collectively paid to troop members every month, according to the internal probe.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest of the North Korea restaurant worker defector case:

A Seoul court held a hearing Tuesday after a group of lawyers challenged the legitimacy of the South Korean government holding a group of North Korean restaurant workers who defected in April in a state protection facility.

Last month, the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, also referred to as Minbyun, filed a petition with the Seoul Central District Court questioning whether the defectors came to the South out of their own free will, after the country’s top spy agency denied an interview with the defectors.

The defectors themselves did not attend the first hearing at the Seoul Central District Court on Tuesday afternoon, but their legal representatives did. On the same day, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) decided that the 13 North Korean restaurant workers would not be sent to a defector resettlement facility but rather be kept in a protection facility that it operates.

The group of 12 female workers and their male manager who worked at Ryugyong in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, one of Pyongyang’s many overseas restaurants in China, defected to the South in early April.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but I am still suspicious of these progressive lawyers who seem like they are more about representing North Korean interests than the best interests of these defectors.

Is South Korea's Intelligence Agency Spying on Its Own Citizens? http://t.co/zPOIX8zCCi pic.twitter.com/kBa9fyUOJY

— The Diplomat (@Diplomat_APAC) August 3, 2015

It will be interesting to see if this guy’s suicide note is ever released to public to see what the “national interest” information is:

An employee of South Korea’s spy agency has been found dead in his car with his will, which contains information about a hacking incident that has triggered a controversy in the country, police said Saturday.

Police said that the person identified only by his family name Lim worked for the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and was discovered around noon on a mountain road in Yongin, south of Seoul. Investigators present at the site said there was a burnt coal inside the car and no sign of forced entry, making it likely that the 45-year-old took his own life.

They also said he left a three-page, handwritten will on the front passenger seat that expressed his feelings about family and work, which included matters of “national interest.”

Police said they could not release more details about the will because relatives were opposed to the contents becoming public.

Family members reported his disappearance after Lim left home around 5 a.m. and could not be contacted, authorities said.

The apparent suicide and the will are expected to further stoke the controversy surrounding where and how the NIS used the hacking program.

The software program, which uses Remote Control System technology, allows hackers to manipulate and track smartphones and computers by installing spyware.

The NIS said it bought the program made by an Italian company in 2012 and confirmed it can be used to hack into up to 20 mobile phones simultaneously.

The NIS claimed it used the program for the purpose of strengthening cyber warfare capabilities against Pyongyang.

Such explanations, however, are met with skepticism by many in the country, and in particular, the main opposition party, which thinks the NIS used the program to spy on South Korean civilians.  [Yonhap]