Former National Intelligence Service chief Won Sei-hoon, who was sentenced to three years in jail by the appellate court, is to bring his case to the Supreme Court. The Seoul High Court on Monday found Won guilty of meddling in the 2012 presidential election as well as illegally engaging in political acts as the country’s spy chief. Won was taken into immediate custody by the court.
In September, a Seoul district court had found Won guilty of illegally engaging in political acts in violation of the law that bans the NIS from doing so, but did not find him guilty of meddling in the presidential election. The court gave him a 2 1/2-year prison term with a four-year suspension.
Contrary to the Seoul district court, the Seoul High Court did not make a distinction between engaging in political acts and meddling in the presidential election. The appeals court viewed the state spy agency’s online activities as aimed at smearing the opposition candidate starting Aug. 20, 2012, the date Park Geun-hye was nominated as a presidential candidate, to be in violation of the Public Official Election Act.
It also admitted a far greater number of online activities as evidence: 716 Twitter accounts as opposed to the 175 accounts recognized by the lower court; 274,800 posts, about double the number recognized by the lower court, were admitted as evidence of meddling in politics; while the lower court did not find any evidence of posts related to the election, the appeals court recognized 136,017 such posts.
Park won the 2012 election by a margin of 3.5 percentage points over her closest rival, Moon Jae-in.
Won, who was surrounded by a group of men in Marine Corps uniform ― presumably a conservative group of ex-Marines who had shown up to show their support for Won ― expressed no regret for his actions after the sentencing. Rather, he said as he was being taken into custody, “I thought I was working for the good of the country and the people.”
The Seoul High Court clearly thought otherwise. In its ruling, it said that meddling in elections could not be justified or rationalized for any cause and that acts that damage liberal democracy should be dealt with strictly.
A spy agency seeking to influence an election by conducting a smear campaign on the opposition candidate and supporting the ruling party candidate brings us back to the time of authoritarian regimes when rulers sought to squash opposition. Nearly 30 years have passed since Korea achieved democratization; it is abhorrent that the country’s spy chief thought he was doing his country good when he ordered his organization to meddle in a presidential election.
The National Intelligence Service should take the court’s ruling to heart and make a clean break from engaging in domestic politics and focus all its attention on its original mandate, gathering intelligence on North Korea.
