Critics Uneasy About S. Korea Security Plans

SEOUL —  The screams in the night, the torture by terrifying national security agents, the coercive demands for false confessions--none of this was supposed to happen anymore in the shining civilian democracy of South Korean President Kim Young Sam.

But Park Choong Ryol claims that it still does. He experienced it all last year, he says, when the government accused him of meeting an alleged North Korean agent.

Park, a 33-year-old magazine business manager who says he never met the man, was ultimately found not guilty of the charges.

But during the 22 days he was held by the National Security Planning Agency, or NSPA, last November, he says, agents beat him and forced him to stand for up to 23 hours a day holding a chair aloft during interrogations. He says they brought him to a cemetery and said they could slay him; stripped him by a river and threatened to let him freeze to death beside the icy water.

He believes that he was targeted for publicly calling Kim’s democratic reforms cosmetic.

Yet Kim--a longtime dissident who ushered in South Korea’s first civilian government after three decades of authoritarian rule--is now proposing to strengthen the very security law that he vowed during his presidential campaign to abolish.

Among other things, the law punishes those who “praise, encourage or sympathize” with North Korea or fail to report pro-Pyongyang activities.

In a grand democratic gesture, Kim stripped the agency of its investigative powers in those two areas in 1993, leaving the job to police.

Now Kim wants to restore those powers, saying the reform inadvertently weakened the nation’s ability to protect itself from a widening web of spies, sympathizers and radical students that Pyongyang is spinning in the South.

“The NSPA has been completely crippled to the point where they can’t conduct investigations at all,” says Chung Hyung Keun, a National Assembly member and former NSPA deputy director. “Our security is at stake.”

Kim’s controversial stance pits a raw fear of the North’s unpredictable Communist regime against the demands of South Korea’s fledgling democracy.

While Kim’s supporters laud what they see as his decisive leadership, others voice apprehension that he could bring back the chilling days of repression to silence his political critics in advance of next year’s presidential election.

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Officials of the NSPA--a shadowy spy organization created in 1961 with a checkered history of kidnappings, torture, extortion and political suppression--declined an interview request.

But the agency’s position paper on the issue asserts that democratic safeguards in Kim’s 1993 reforms--such as guaranteeing a suspect’s right to meet his family and banning efforts to meddle in politics--prevent the old abuses.

In addition, the National Assembly’s intelligence committee gained the right to review the agency’s budget, personnel and activities--information shrouded in secrecy--for the first time in 1994.

The agency says it has caught 29% fewer alleged spies, and telephone tips have plunged by two-thirds since it lost its investigative powers.

“North Korea’s espionage operations . . . are becoming more active and subtle,” the agency says. “But the legal limitations are causing problems in . . . preventing attempts to topple our system by impure elements.”

The fearsome organization was originally established as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency by then-Gen. Park Chung Hee after he seized the presidency in a 1961 military coup.

Even critics acknowledge that, at the time, the agency was needed urgently because North Korea loomed as a stronger military and economic power that brazenly sent assassination squads into Seoul and launched frequent firefights along the border.

But it was not long before the agency--still accountable only to the president--was implicated in activities far afield from its purported mandate.

Agency officials were implicated in illegal get-rich schemes, such as stock market manipulation and embezzlement. They routinely used torture and fabricated pro-Communist charges to silence thousands of those seeking nothing more than democracy, critics say.

In one of its most spectacular scandals, the agency is believed to have masterminded the 1973 kidnapping of and assassination attempt against opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, a harsh Park critic.

As he lay manacled in a boat listening to his captors plot his murder, Kim says, a warning flare that dropped from what he believes was a U.S. spy plane saved his life.

“Rather than overseeing national security interests, the KCIA . . . was readily identified as nothing more than a political instrument of military leaders,” according to a 1996 essay by four Korean scholars led by Moon Chung In of the Korean Society for the Study of National Intelligence.

“In other words, the primary function of the KCIA was to make up for the regime’s weaknesses, which arose from its lack of political legitimacy,” the essay says.

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The debate over whether the agency--renamed NSPA in 1980--is more concerned with the security of the nation or the prevailing political regime still rages today.

But government officials argue that their motives are sincere and point to two recent events as evidence that North Korea is expanding its infiltration.

In September, an armed North Korean submarine drifted into southern waters, setting off a bloody manhunt that left more than two dozen soldiers and civilians dead and sent North-South relations into a deep freeze.

One month earlier, thousands of leftist student leaders rioted with lead pipes and Molotov cocktails at Yonsei University as a unification rally turned violent, trashing the campus and injuring more than 1,900 people.

South Korean officials claim Pyongyang is directly fomenting campus unrest and sending students such materials as speeches of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

“The general public was shocked to see so many university students still following the already-dead ideology favoring socialism over capitalism,” Information Minister Oh In Whan says.

But Yoon Ho Joon, Korea University student body vice president, says riot police deliberately provoked the violence. Students have held the unification rallies for the last six years, he says, but this time riot police stormed the campus and apprehended thousands of participants.

In past years, he says, police usually led away only token numbers of students.

“The government is thinking of next year’s presidential election,” says Yoon, 24. “There will be a lot of voices criticizing the government, and they want to silence them to create a favorable environment.”

Yoon is not the only one skeptical of arguments that a growing North Korean threat justifies rearming South Korea’s security force.

Scores of political dissidents, writers, scholars, religious leaders, labor activists and others painfully familiar with the agency’s dark legacy say pro-North charges are commonly fabricated to quash anyone who dares challenge the government.

Perhaps no one has been targeted by such tactics more than Kim Dae Jung. After surviving the assassination attempt, Kim was sentenced to death in 1980 by President Chun Doo Hwan on charges of forming an “anti-state organization” after the opposition leader called for reunification under a federal government system. Because Pyongyang supported a similar plan, Kim was accused of being pro-North.

“I told them [South Korean authorities] that the United States started the federal government system, not North Korea, but it was no use,” Kim said in an interview.

Kim was eventually pardoned. But he was indicted again in 1989 by the government of President Roh Tae Woo for failing to immediately report an associate’s secret meeting with the North’s Kim Il Sung.

The opposition leader says he reported the meeting as soon as he learned of it, and that his associate’s charge that he concealed it for two months was a lie. In dramatic courtroom testimony, the associate revealed that he had been tortured by security agents to falsify the timing and frame Kim.

“I have been much misunderstood by our people because of the military government’s ill-minded propaganda,” Kim says.

Lee Bu Young, a former journalist and now a National Assembly member, has also run afoul of the security law--in his case, three times. In 1975, for example, he arranged interviews between foreign correspondents and associates of more than 1,000 people who he believed were being falsely accused of pro-Communist activities. That landed him in prison, where Lee has spent a total of seven years.

Even those who criticize the North have been nabbed.

Labor activist Shin Eon Jik decries Pyongyang’s treatment of workers and lack of democratic freedoms. Yet Shin, 33, was convicted of aiding the enemy in 1990 for daring to educate workers about the concentration of wealth in the hands of South Korea’s giant chaebol business conglomerates.

As evidence of his subversive activities, authorities presented his textbook, “Korean Economy for Workers,” which asks why workers have to labor long hours for paltry wages.

Shin says prosecutors admitted in court that he had not directly praised the North, but that “North and South are virtually at war, and criticizing South Korea benefits North Korea.”

Many critics argue that the NSPA should stick to foreign intelligence-gathering and let police and prosecutors handle domestic investigations in a division of labor similar to the CIA and FBI in the United States. The police and prosecutors, they say, are more open, accountable and self-controlled.

Park, the magazine manager, can attest to the difference. While the security agents tried to terrorize and torture a false confession out of him, he says, prosecutors only used verbal abuse in their 30-day interrogation.

For its part, the government argues that only the crack force of its tried-and-tested security agents can root out Pyongyang’s sympathizers and spies--a mammoth force that Chung, the former NSPA deputy director, estimates at between 40,000 and 100,000.

The police are deploying a 4,200-member “anti-Communist squad” to assume the old NSPA jobs, but Chung says they are “hopeless” and have not managed to catch a single spy. (The police say they have snared three but acknowledge that morale is low.)

“Most of them are incapable old guys about to retire because no one wants to serve on that squad,” Chung says, adding that anti-Communist duties became anathema among police after some officers tortured a student dissident to death in 1987, igniting a national outcry.

Chung also calls reports by Park and others of continuing NSPA tortures “a total lie.” He argues that South Korea has progressed beyond those dark days--and at least one former dissident agrees.

Lee Ho Chul, a writer, was convicted in 1974 for meeting a high school alumnus who security agents claimed was pro-North.

The charges were fabricated, Lee asserts, because he had signed a declaration with 60 other writers calling for democracy under the repressive Park regime. But Lee, who spent nine months in prison, says such injustices probably could not happen today and supports a stronger NSPA.

“Someone must be in charge of these matters, and the NSPA is the best qualified despite its history,” Lee says. “I believe Korean democracy has matured enough not to allow the NSPA to abuse its powers--and if they do, I will join the protests and not sit still.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.