In the late 1970s, it was not hard to locate intelligence agents and police officers in plain clothes on campus. Hardly disturbed, they hung around the campus and, in their free time, read newspapers and magazines on the lawn and benches.

Their job was to monitor student activists and crack down on antigovernment demonstrations. They made sure prodemocracy protests were thwarted or put under immediate clampdown. 

That was a time when the military dictatorship was free to mobilize security and law-enforcement agencies to suppress dissidents. The powerful agencies -- the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Security Command, state prosecution and police -- were nothing but a part of the governing system geared to uphold the dictatorship.

Things have changed a lot. Today’s collegians would never imagine government spies and cops roaming around the campus. My children still cast unbelieving eyes toward me and my wife whenever we talk about what the campus was like before they were born.

Indeed, the younger generations live in a much freer world. This does not mean, however, that we can say we live in a mature democracy, which, in my view, should transcend mere changes of government by elections.

Hacking scandal

The currently raging hacking scandal involving the National Intelligence Service shows that despite the steady development of democracy we have achieved over the past decades, we have yet to abandon some legacy of the past authoritarian regimes. 

The hacking scandal is the latest in a series of cases in which the nation’s top intelligence agency has been accused of spying on the wrong people and intervening in domestic politics. Why should we go through things like this persistently? Why can we not do away with controversy over the political neutrality of the intelligence agency?

The first reason is that despite the end of military dictatorship, those in power cannot resist the temptation to rely on and exploit the power of the intelligence agency, whose operation is clandestine to the degree that even the size of its staff and budget are classified.

Park Chung-hee created the KCIA shortly after he seized power in a coup in 1961. Park and his lieutenants touted national security, but as it turned out, it was aimed at safeguarding the rule of the military junta. The KCIA did so many awful things -- detention of dissidents without warrants, torture, election riggings and framing up of dissidents as communists -- so much so that it was identified with the reign of terror during the Park administration. It was said that the “KCIA can bring down even a bird in the air.”

The Park Chung-hee era gave way to another military dictatorship after he was downed by bullets fired by none other than KCIA director Kim Jae-kyu in 1979. The new strongman, Chun Doo-hwan, purged the KCIA of Kim’s cronies and renamed it the Agency for National Security Planning.

There had been more cosmetic changes, but the agency under Chun remained the same as in the past, flexing its fearful muscles to buttress the iron-fist rule of the Chun regime.

Then there was the transitional government of Roh Tae-woo, another Army general who succeeded Chun and instituted some democratic reforms -- like revival of the popular, direct election of the president. This eventually led to the Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung governments.    

No one should question that the two Kims were towering figures in Korea’s painstaking -- sometimes bloody -- struggle toward democracy. But after occupying the Blue House, the two former opposition leaders who had undergone so many ordeals at the hands of the intelligence agency were little different from their predecessors in exploiting the power of the spying agency.

Shameful history

There were many cases of the two Kims using the agency for domestic political purposes, one of which was similar to the current hacking scandal -- wiretapping operations. 

Many felt a strong sense of betrayal when it was disclosed that the two former leaders, who had risked their lives to fight for democracy, allowed the agency to conduct indiscriminate wiretapping operations on politicians, senior government officials, executives of chaebol companies, journalists, lawyers, academics and civic activists.

Their successors -- the liberal president Roh Moo-hyun and conservative Lee Myung-bak -- also did little to keep the agency out of domestic politics. Most recently, the NIS during the Lee administration was embroiled in a controversy over its agents’ online activities before the 2012 presidential election. 

Now the hacking scandal has come and it calls upon President Park Geun-hye, for whom the NIS is another legacy from her father, to face the issue of NIS’ political independence head-on.

To be fair, it has yet to be determined whether or not the NIS -- as the opposition suspects -- hacked the mobile phones of civilians that have nothing to do with national security. But I bet things like the hacking scandal would also have taken place had Moon Jae-in beat Park in the 2012 election.

I’m also certain that if we do not find a fundamental solution, the hacking scandal will die down and be forgotten as time passes, and it won’t be long before we encounter another scandal. That is exactly what we have witnessed since 1961.

By Chon Shi-yong

Chon Shi-yong is the chief editorial writer of The Korea Herald. He can be reached at sychon@heraldcorp.com. –Ed.