“Recruiting a Spy and Monitoring Civilians Is Not a Problem,” Prosecution Service Sides with the National Intelligence Service

Prosecutors dropped charges on former directors of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Lee Byung-kee, Lee Byung-ho and Suh Hoon, and NIS agents suspected of recruiting a spy and monitoring civilians. They accepted the intelligence agency’s argument that it was a legitimate secret operation. The victims who were monitored by the NIS argued, “A secret investigation by the NIS is illegal.”

According to the Kyunghyang Shinmun coverage on June 1, Public Investigation Division 3 (chief prosecutor Yi Jun-beom) of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office dropped the charges on 24 NIS employees including former director Lee Byung-kee, who was reported last October for abusing his authority according to the National Intelligence Service Korea Act and for making false accusations and fabricating information according to the National Security Act. Among the NIS employees, the prosecutors dismissed the reports on former NIS directors Lee Byung-kee, Lee Byung-ho and Suh Hoon. The prosecutors only prosecuted NIS investigators for installing a secret recording equipment in a camping trailer and secretly recording the conversations of the victim and his family (violation of the Protection of Communications Secrets Act).

Earlier in October 2019, Choi Seung-je, head of the civic group, Unification Economy Forum, who was under the eyes of Gim (Kim), an informant who worked with the NIS, reported Lee Byung-kee for illegally monitoring civilians. Gim received instructions from the NIS and, from October 2015 to June 2019, worked as an executive at the Unification Economy Forum run by Choi, an older man who had gone to the same university. Gim disclosed to the press that he received a basic wage of two million won a month with hundreds of thousands of won in bonuses from the intelligence agency in exchange for filming and recording dozens of people connected to the organization.

According to the document stating the grounds for the prosecutors’ decision to drop charges, the prosecutors acknowledged the fact that Gim was hired by the NIS as a paid informant in March 2015 and that he handed over information on Choi and recorded conversations by Choi and others without the court’s permission. Yet they still concluded that this was a legal secret investigation. They said, “After a comprehensive review of multiple laws and previous cases, it is hard to see the activities of a paid informant themselves as illegal.”

The prosecutors presented the Act on the Performance of Duties by Police Officers and the internal guidelines of the intelligence agency as their grounds. The Act on the Performance of Duties by Police Officers states a person “who reports an offender or an offender’s whereabouts, leading to the arrest of the offender” and a person who reports or captures a person who violated the National Security Act to an investigative or intelligence agency are to receive a reward.

According to the prosecutors, the NIS using Gim to record conversations between Gim and Choi on a total of 223 occasions without the permission of the court was not a problem because, “Gim voluntarily accepted the investigator’s proposal to record the conversations and carried it out.”

As for the NIS secretly installing a camera inside the accommodations provided by the intelligence agency to capture videos of Choi, the prosecutors did not raise an issue with it claiming, “They planned to collect evidence, but they only installed a fake smoke detector and did not install a camera to shoot the video.”

The victims of the secret investigation appealed protesting the prosecutors’ decision, but the Seoul High Prosecutors’ Office dismissed the appeal in January. The victims immediately appealed again to the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office.

The prosecutors concluded that the National Intelligence Service using a paid informant was not illegal, but the victims argued that the reward stipulated in the Act on the Performance of Duties by Police Officers was only a kind of compensation for preventing crimes based on the voluntary reports from citizens and that the law did not justify the latest case. They said, “The NIS instructed Gim to invite the people he was monitoring to his child’s first birthday party and gave a large number of instructions to keep an eye on a man who was battling cancer,” and added, “They cajoled and threatened Gim to continue the illegal activities despite that he had expressed his intention to quit on numerous occasions.” They also said, “The investigators admitted that they used a fake smoke detector, a device owned by the NIS, in the accommodation in question,” and added, “Even if they did not install a camera, it could have had other functions, such as wiretapping, but the prosecutors did not investigate it properly.”

Choi, the person who was being watched, said over the phone Friday, “A state agency used my university alumnus (Gim) as a spy to keep an eye on civilians, yet the prosecutors claim there is no problem. That is the level of our Prosecution Service.” He further said, “We need to hold them responsible for violating the rights of a civilian over a long period of time with a secret investigation that was fruitless.”