[The Fountain] Alliance eclipsed by the art of wiretapping

The romantic rhetoric of alliance is being dwarfed in the face of the cold reality of national interest.

YOON SUNG-MINThe author is a political news editor of the JoongAng Ilbo. “Arrogant creeps, they must have looked down on the Republic of Korea so much that they dare to put a wiretap on the president’s desk!” Actor Lee Sung-min, who plays the role of former president Park Chung Hee in the movie “The Man Standing Next” (2020), throws the phone on the Blue House desk. It was revealed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency bugged the Blue House.

It was a scene at the beginning of the movie that served as an opportunity for the head of the KCIA (Lee Byung-hun) to be pushed back by the chief of presidential security (Lee Hee-joon) in the struggle for second in power.

This scene refers to the mid-to-late 1970s. It was the time when Korea and the U.S. had engaged in a war of nerves over the U.S. mentioning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea and Korea’s push for nuclear development. In October 1976, the Washington Post reported that the Korean government lobbied the U.S. Congress through Park Tong-sun with cash.

How did this information leak? The answer can be found in the documents the U.S. government submitted to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on International Relations after the report. The documents contained the contents from a closed-door Blue House meeting, where it was decided that lobbying efforts in the U.S. would be streamlined to Park.

The allegation that the U.S. government was eavesdropping on confidential meetings in the Blue House became a fait accompli. Since then, former President Park Chung Hee made important conversations in the courtyard in front of the Blue House.

Wiretapping was the basic source of information for the U.S. government to survey global trends and draw up international strategies. In the early and mid-1970s, the U.S. eavesdropped as far as Micronesia near the Philippines. As the Micronesia archipelagos were under U.S. trusteeship, the U.S. wiretapped the secret conversations among local politicians to find out whether they had the intention to become independent.

Along with Korea and Japan, Micronesia was a defense base in the Pacific to prevent the spread of communism. The New York Times criticized the wiretapping in Micronesia in a 1976 editorial as a vicious practice beyond law and government control.

But the vice continued for a long time. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA agent, revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency wiretapped the leaders of 35 countries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Once again, U.S. wiretapping is controversial. A secret U.S. document leaked on social media includes a part where the U.S. had eavesdropped on conversations of members of the National Security Office in Korea. American intelligence agencies do not deny the allegation.

The mechanism of international politics in which the boundaries between allies and enemies are blurred in the face of national interests has been confirmed. No matter how many times you ruminate over the “Korea-U.S. alliance,” nothing changes. The romantic rhetoric of alliance is being dwarfed in the face of the cold reality of national interest.