Kim Jaegyu - KCIA Director

KCIA Director

On February 4, 1976, Kim was summoned by President Park and was appointed as the director of Korean Central Intelligence Agency(KCIA), one of the most powerful and feared position under Park's dictatorship. KCIA was created in 1961 to coordinate both international and domestic intelligence activities including that of the military with primary aim of combatting communism and North Korea. Since then, it was also used to suppress any domestic opposition to Park's regime using its broad power to wiretap, arrest, and detain suspects without a court order. KCIA was responsible for widespread violation of human rights in South Korea, engaging in torture, political murder, and kidnapping. It was also heavily involved in behind-the-scene political manueverings to weaken the opposition parties using bribery, blackmail, threat, arrest, and/or torture of opposition lawmakers. Later Kim claimed that he did not want the position but thought that it would give him the best chance to persuade President Park and reform the Yushin system.

Kim's tenure as the KCIA director has many contradictions. On one hand, Kim asked President Park to lift the Ninth Emergency Decree at least three times, which punished any criticism of Yushin Constitution with a prison term of at least one year, until it was finally replaced with the Tenth Emergency Decree, which relaxed many restrictions of the Ninth Decree. He also released many activists and students who had been arrested under the Ninth Decree. Declassified U.S. diplomatic cables revealed that Kim was thought as an unusual KCIA director who often spoke of democracy and one of more approchable figures who often carried Washington's messages on human rights to President Park. On the other hand, Kim was responsible for KCIA activities that took place during his tenure including the assassination of former KCIA director Kim Hyeong-wook, political sabotage of the opposing New Democratic Party's internal election, and the violent arrest of female workers of a wig company YH Trade. Nearly 200 female workers of YH Trade held sit-in demonstrations at the headquarters of New Democratic Party (NDP) when 2,000 policemen stormed the NDP headquarters on August 11, 1979. In the process, one female worker fell to her death and 52 people including 10 workers, 30 NDP members, and 12 journalists were injured, some requiring hospitalization. Furthermore, KCIA Deputy Director Kim Jeong-Seop and Kim Gye-won testified in their trial after Park's assassination that Kim pursued the firm action in YH case over the objection of subordinates and that Kim wanted stronger measures than the Ninth Decree allowed. However, their claims are not thought to be credible since some other testimonies are demonstrably untrue and they needed to distance themselves from Kim.