By Gregory Elich: Political Firestorm in South Korea!

Actions by South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) have generated a political furor that is growing by the day, pitting the ruling New Frontier Party against the main opposition Democratic Party against the main opposition Democratic Party and threatening the existence of the Unified Progressive Party. The NIS intervened in the election of December 2012 in an endeavor to bring victory to conservative candidates. NIS director Won Sei-hoon ordered the agency's psychological warfare division to launch a campaign to discredit liberal and left political candidates. Agents were instructed to each create three or four posts on the internet per day, praising the ruling party and attacking the opposition. Three teams were tasked to carry out this mission, and one team alone alone generated an average of 1,200 to 1,600 posts per month. Won was motivated by a paranoid McCarthyst frame of mind, and he was heard to say, "If there is a person or a force which condemns the government and the ruling party, they are no different from North Korea even if they are our citizens." The psychological warfare teams used IP switching software to prevent tracking. Many of the posts smeared liberal and left candidates as "followers of North Korea." According to South Korean investigators working with the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office, the NIS utilized software to generate millions of automated re-tweets of their postings, flooding the internet. In a further boost to the campaign of presidential Park Geun-hye and other conservative candidates, the NIS leaked excerpts from a classified document to the press and to the ruling New Frontier Party, containing a transcript taken from the October 2007 meetings between liberal South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. The excerpts leaked by the NIS dealt with discussions of the Northern Limit Line, the western maritime border between the two Koreas. The NIS intentionally distorted the excerpts it provided and fabricated content in order to make it appear that Roh was offering to turn over South Korean territorial waters to South Korean territorial waters to North Korea, expecting the resulting outcry to damage the chances of liberal presidential candidate
Moon Jae-in. The NIS removed a statement from the version leaked to the New Frontier Party, in which Roh stated that the Northern Limit Line should not be changed. In another example, the NIS spliced together a phrase from a morning session with a phrase from an afternoon session so as to misrepresent Roh's position. The NIS also altered words and phrases, and inserted content of its own invention into the transcript in order to discredit the liberal candidates. Two days before the December 19 election, Kim Moo-seong, head of Park's election campaign, publicly revealed quotes from the fabricated transcript, and angrily announced that he was "filled with indignation" over its  content. His comments received broad media coverage, which helped to swing votes in favor of Park. It was not until after the election that the extent of NIS meddling was revealed, and Won Sei-hoon was indicted in June. In response to demands by opposition parties that the NIS be reformed, President Park Geun-hye merely asked the agency to come up with a proposal to reform itself.