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Choe Jae-hae, chair of the BAI, and Ryou Byeong-ho, secretary general of the BAI, appear at a parliamentary inspection of their agency held at the National Assembly on Oct. 11. (National Assembly pool photo)

After reviewing how the previous administration dealt with the death of Lee Dae-jun, a public servant who was shot and killed by North Korea in the Yellow Sea in September 2020, South Korea’s Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) concluded that the Moon Jae-in administration concocted a narrative that Lee had been trying to defect to North Korea.

On Thursday, the BAI asked the public prosecutors to investigate a large number of former officials in the Moon administration. The request covers 20 individuals connected with the handling of Lee’s case at five institutions: the National Security Office (NSO), the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Unification, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and Korea’s Coast Guard.

The subjects of the investigation reportedly include key figures who handled national security for the Moon administration, including Suh Hoon, former NSO director; Park Jie-won, former NSI director; and Suh Wook, former defense minister. They face charges including dereliction of duty, abuse of authority, and falsifying official documents.

The BAI concluded that the Coast Guard, under orders from the Moon administration’s NSO, covered up evidence and distorted results of experiments to support the narrative that Lee Dae-jun had been defecting to North Korea.

The BAI was accused of political motivations when it undertook a full-scale audit on June 16, just one day after the Defense Ministry and the Coast Guard voided investigation results they’d announced during the Moon administration. The Defense Ministry and Coast Guard said they’d failed to find evidence that Lee had intended to defect to North Korea.

Accusations that the BAI had disregarded the opinion of its own council of commissioners led some to argue that the audit itself was illegal.

The opposition Democratic Party objected that this audit was “made to order” and that the results were “tuned to the presidential office’s wavelength” and “tailored to please the administration.”

The BAI’s audit concluded that the Moon administration, under the leadership of the NSO, had jumped to the conclusion that Lee had sought to defect to North Korea and had deliberately omitted evidence to the contrary.

According to the BAI’s audit, intelligence that Lee had expressed his intention to defect to North Korea was shared during a meeting of related ministers at 1 am on Sept. 23, 2020. Based on that, the NSO instructed the Defense Ministry to make voluntary defection to North Korea the focus of its comprehensive analysis. From this point onward, the BAI said, the administration was committed to the defection narrative.

The evidence cited by the Defense Ministry in support of Lee’s intention to defect was that he was the only person on the ship wearing a life preserver, that a pair of sandals were discovered at a blind spot in security camera coverage, and that he’d been using a small flotation device when he was discovered.

But the BAI provided the following counterpoints: the ship had the standard complement of life preservers at the time of the Coast Guard’s investigation; the security cameras had been nonoperational and the owner of the sandals unconfirmed; the camera blind spot isn’t mentioned in the Defense Ministry’s materials; and no potential flotation devices had been misplaced aboard the fishing guidance ship.

Those facts, the BAI said, had been ignored by the Defense Ministry and the Coast Guard at the time.

The BAI said that Lee had expressed his desire to defect (as confirmed through monitoring North Korean communications) “in the hope of being quickly rescued and assuring his safety.”

The BAI also focused on the fact that there were Chinese characters on the life preserver Lee had been wearing. That circumstance was ignored by the authorities, even though it raised the possibility that the life preserver wasn’t from South Korea.

The BAI’s press release also cited a Coast Guard employee’s testimony that the Coast Guard chief had said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that” after being briefed on Sept. 28, 2020, about Defense Ministry evidence that Lee’s life preserver had had Chinese characters on it.

The BAI also said the NSO had “called for a consistent approach based on voluntary defection” after the Defense Ministry announced that its analysts had concluded that Lee had defected based on intelligence gleaned through signal monitoring.

Various experiments that were provided as evidence for Lee’s defection attempt were also used to prop up the narrative, the BAI said.

For example, four organizations used a dummy model to estimate Lee’s movement on the ocean and the point of discovery. But the administration only announced the results of one organization’s test — the one that supported the defection narrative — while ignoring the results of the other three organizations’ tests, which were inconsistent with that narrative.

The BAI also found that the Coast Guard had doctored the testimony of criminal psychologists who had supposedly concluded that Lee had meant to defect.

The Coast Guard only provided negative information about Lee over the phone to seven criminal psychologists, and only two of those responded that Lee could have defected. But the Coast Guard pasted together sections from the psychologists’ various opinions to reach the conclusion that Lee had “defected in a state of mental panic in an attempt to escape reality.”

The BAI added that the claim that Lee had gambled away funds allocated for purchasing crabs — which had been offered as his personal motivation for defecting — remains unsubstantiated.

The BAI also found that 60 reports about military intelligence were deleted from the Military Intelligence Management System (MIMS) on orders by the defense minister early in the morning on Sept. 23, 2020, after the intelligence about Lee’s defection was shared in the meeting of related ministers.

“The official who maintains MIMS had already gone home for the day, but he was called back to the office early that morning to delete the reports,” the BAI said.

While the Defense Ministry initially announced that the North Korean military had incinerated Lee’s body, it later changed its official position, declaring that the facts were unclear and that further investigation was needed, on orders from the NSO.

“The NSO’s crisis management control tower wasn’t in operation,” the BAI said, detailing issues with the initial response to the incident.

When the NSO was informed by the Defense Ministry at 7:18 pm on Sept. 22 that Lee had been discovered in North Korean waters, it only communicated the situation to the Coast Guard, but not the Ministry of Unification, and didn’t even hold an “initial situation assessment meeting” to decide on a course of action.

“After the NSO submitted a written report describing the situation as it was understood thus far to the president via the Blue House’s internal briefing board at 6:36 pm on Sept. 22, the NSO director and other important officials went home for the day at 7:30 pm, even though the incident was still developing,” the BAI also said.

The Defense Ministry concluded that though military operations ought to be considered in the event that Lee had been detained by North Korea, “no response was needed since the situation needs to be overseen by the Ministry of Unification.”

The BAI found in its investigation that despite being notified by the NSO and the NIS about Lee’s discovery, the Coast Guard made no effort to rescue Lee or to find any more information because the NSO said the information was a matter of national security.

The section chief at the Ministry of Unification who had learned about Lee’s disappearance that day told the BAI he hadn’t reported it because of the minister’s dinner plans and hadn’t spoken on the phone with the vice minister. The section chief went home that evening at 10:30 pm.

Former President Moon Jae-in makes two appearances in the document released by the BAI. While South Korean intelligence learned about Lee’s death in the early hours of Sept. 23, Lee’s killing and the incineration of his body weren’t mentioned in the daily situation briefing on national security delivered to Moon that morning. And during a meeting of related ministers on Sept. 27, 2020, Moon said the Defense Ministry had been too definitive in its announcement of the body’s incineration and instructed the defense minister to conduct another analysis of the incineration.

The BAI’s request for an investigation provoked strong pushback from the Democratic Party.

“They’re obviously trying to bring in Moon Jae-in by hook or by crook. The ultimate goal of this audit has been made clear,” said Kim Eui-kyeom, the party’s spokesperson, in a statement.

“In partnership with the Korean public, the Democratic Party will fight back even more fervently against this targeted audit, which is aimed squarely at the Moon administration,” Kim said.

“We hope the truth about the West Sea killing will be brought to light through a thoroughgoing investigation and that the honor of the deceased and his bereaved family members will be restored,” said Kim Mi-ae, floor spokesperson of the People Power Party.

By Shin Hyeong-cheol, staff reporter; Jung In-hwan, staff reporter

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