Spy agency hit for meddling in state-issued history textbooks making

By You Soo-sun

Korea’s spy agency is likely to undergo a prosecutorial probe over allegations it had systematically interfered with the introduction of the single state-issued history textbook under the previous Park Geun-hye administration.

The Ministry of Education said it will request an investigation this week over allegations the National Intelligence Service (NIS) had tried to support the state-issued history textbook system by forging opinion documents to help introduce the controversial system.

This follows a request by an investigation committee that discovered a host of identical statements produced by one printing office on Yeouido, Nov. 12, 2015, the last day the education ministry accepted public opinion statements on the matter.

The ministry announced 152,805 people had voted for the state-authored textbook while 321,075 had voted against it, according to the investigation committee launched last month to look into related issues.

Upon reviewing 103 boxes of statements, however, the investigation committee found 53 boxes containing 40,000 statements produced in the same format. And in 26 boxes containing 28,000 pages of documents, there were four formats that recurred frequently.

There were 4,374 people who filed the statements in favor using one of these formats, and within them 1,613 had used the same address.

Hundreds of documents were filed by one person, but citing different reasons for supporting the state-authored textbook.

The names also included Park Geun-hye and her father Park Chung-hee who ruled the country from 1963 to 1979. The written address under their names was Cheong Wa Dae.

The investigation committee conducted a phone survey of 677 people, randomly selected among the 4,374, and of the 252 respondents, only 129, or 51 percent, acknowledged submitting a statement in favor of the textbook.

The committee members urged a thorough probe of the matter, saying “We suspect Cheong Wa Dae, the National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Education systematically interfered with the process from the beginning and hope the probe will reveal the truth about the exact roles they played.”