South Korea's spy agency said yesterday that then-president Park Chung-hee had approved the infamous 1973 kidnapping in Tokyo of dissident Kim Dae-jung, who later ruled the country and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) also said a 1987 mid-air airplane explosion was committed by North Korean agents.
The NIS was announcing the result of a three-year investigation into two of the most notorious incidents in South Korea's turbulent history. The probe was ordered by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and carried out by a civilian-led "truth committee."
Two years after narrowly losing a 1971 presidential election to authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee, Kim was abducted by South Korean agents in a Tokyo hotel and whisked to a waiting boat where, according to most versions of the story, agents planned to kill him and dump the body.
"This committee confirms that its precursor, the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), undertook a kidnapping in Japan, and expresses deep regret over this," the National Intelligence Service report said.
Kim was blindfolded and taken to the port city of Osaka where a group of agents put him on a boat and tied him down to a cross-shaped wooden board while debating ways to sink it.
"There is physical evidence to support the possibility that, up to a certain point, the plan had been pursued as an assassination," the NIS report said.
The US Central Intelligence Agency and Japanese officials learned of the plot and the US sent what is believed to have been an aircraft to find the boat and buzz the kidnappers, intelligence officials and Kim himself have said.
With the kidnappers caught in the act, Kim's life was spared. He was later taken to South Korea and placed under house arrest.
It has long been a mystery who was behind the abduction, with fingers of blame pointed at either Lee Hu-rak, Korean CIA head at the time, or President Park himself.
"Alongside the possibility that ex-President Park might have ordered it in person, he must have given at least a tacit approval," the NIS said in a six-volume, 3,300-page report into these and other historical incidents.
The report marked Seoul's first official admission that a state agency was to blame for the kidnapping. South Korean ambassador Yu Myung-hwan visited the Japanese foreign ministry yesterday to explain the findings to Senior Vice Foreign Minister Hitoshi Kimura.
The report said President Park began trying to curb Kim after the opposition leader very nearly defeated him in a 1971 presidential election.
"As Kim Dae-jung's political standing rose dramatically in the aftermath of the presidential poll, Park started considering Kim as the most serious obstacle to his plan to extend his presidency," the report said.
It cited testimony by former lawmaker Choi Young-keun, who quoted then South Korean CIA head Lee as saying in early 1980: "I had no choice but follow the order from President Park."
The South Korean CIA head also told his deputy, who objected to the kidnapping order: "Hey, do you think I like to do this myself?"
The truth committee called on the government to "make an official apology to Kim Dae-jung for threatening his life and breaching his human rights."
A spokesman for Kim, now 81, said Park had given the order to murder the dissident and expressed regret that the NIS probe did not pin the blame more firmly on the ex-president.
Park in 1972 changed the constitution to perpetuate his rule. He was assassinated in 1979.
Regarding the bombing of a Korean Airlines plane over the Andaman Sea off Burma in 1987, which killed all 115 aboard, the NIS confirmed the plane was blown up by a time-bomb planted by North Korean agents.
Two North Korean agents were captured afterwards in Bahrain but the man committed suicide while his female companion was taken to Seoul.
She later made a chilling confession that they blew up the plane on orders from Pyongyang to try to scare away foreigners from the 1988 Seoul summer Olympics.
The NIS said its immediate predecessor, the National Security Planning Agency, had given rise to unwarranted conspiracy theories by conducting an over-hasty investigation and relying only on the testimony of the arrested agent, Kim Hyun-hee.
The agent was jailed but later pardoned and now lives in South Korea.
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