The National Intelligence Service headquarters building and its agency motto stone. Photo courtesy of the NIS
Police have raided the National Intelligence Service twice this year as part of an investigation into whether the spy agency illegally funneled part of its budget to the presidential National Security Office.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency’s anti-corruption investigation unit searched the NIS in January and again last month, seizing documents and data stored on computers, according to information the office of Rep. Yoon Kun-young of the Democratic Party of Korea obtained from the NIS and police on the 11th. Investigators are examining allegations that the agency illegally transferred part of its own budget to the National Security Office in 2022, during the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. Police are reported to have questioned 20 current and former NIS employees, including an official who served as a senior executive at the agency at the time.
The investigation began in October last year when Rep. Park Sun-won of the Democratic Party of Korea filed a criminal complaint alleging that the NIS’s budget execution related to the National Security Office violated the National Finance Act. Article 47 of the act bars the head of each central government agency from using budget funds that fall under the jurisdiction of another central agency.
According to Yoon’s office, the NIS drew up a “foreign influence operations plan” in July 2022, reported it to the National Security Office, and then spent about 170 million won across 50 separate occasions through June of the following year. The NIS set out principles including a ban on handing over cash, a requirement that NIS employees accompany any spending, and that funds be used in cooperation with other agencies or the private sector. But Yoon contends that the actual spending records included expenditures unrelated to the program’s stated purpose.
Of the 50 cases in total, only eight involved contact with foreign nationals in line with the program’s purpose, while 38 were spent on contact with Korean nationals or logged as advisory projects, Yoon said. The main spending records included the cost of boxed-lunch meetings inside the National Security Office, as well as meal expenses incurred when Kim Tae-hyo, then first deputy director of the National Security Office, met with journalists, business executives, former senior government officials and professors, Yoon said.
In a post on Facebook, Yoon wrote that “this kind of conduct is clearly illegal,” adding that “the presidential office and the National Security Office plainly have their own budgets, but former first deputy director Kim Tae-hyo twisted the NIS’s arm and used the agency’s money like his own personal credit card.”
Separately, police also raided the NIS in January over allegations that the agency sought to influence the 2023 by-election for the head of Seoul’s Gangseo District. The allegations center on claims that a senior executive was involved in deciding when to release the findings of a security review of the election management system, which the NIS announced shortly before the vote, and that the announcement contained false information. That case was also opened following a criminal complaint by Rep. Park Sun-won.