By Lee Tae-hoon
A military intelligence agency has begun to look into a possible breach of the Military Secrets Protection Act by legislative staff following the main opposition party’s call for a probe into their alleged dumping of sensitive military documents, a senior defense official said Monday.
“A unit under the Defense Security Command (DSC) has begun to look into the case in response to The Korea Times’ earlier reports,” the official said asking for anonymity.
“It will review whether military documents allegedly dumped by legislative staff were published or ought to be regarded as classified documents by consulting with offices of the armed forces and defense agencies that produced them.”
The official noted that it may take a few weeks for the DSC to complete its review of the security levels of the documents littered in the corridors of the National Assembly Members Building late last month.
The opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) called for a thorough investigation into former and incumbent Saenuri Party lawmakers, Thursday, for allegedly dumping restricted military documents in response to reports by The Korea Times.
The newspaper broke the news on June 4 that piles of military documents were thrown outside offices of ruling Saenuri Party lawmakers, including former Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo, Kim Hak-song, the former head of the parliamentary defense committee, and Rep. Chung Ui-hwa, the former vice speaker of the Assembly.
Multiple sources that examined some of the littered documents said that a considerable portion of them, especially by the office of former defense chief Kim, should be classified as military secrets.
A senior official said a report that addresses a shortage of the country’s precision guided missiles by specifying the number of days each of the high-end weapons would last in case of a full-scale war should be considered as Level II secret information.
The document reveals the Air Force suffers from a lack of GBU-24s, 907 kilogram laser guided bombs used to destroy hardened targets, Small Diameter Bombs (SDB), 113 kilogram guided glide bombs, and the Korean GPS-Guided Bomb (KGGB), a 226.8 kilogram fire and forget weapon.
An official from the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that a document that discloses the details of its military operations concerning the salvage of the Navy warship Cheonan that sunk in March 2010 might be labeled as secret information Level III.
It contains sensitive military information, including the locations of the 14 warships of the South Korean and U.S. Navies as well as 12 helicopters of the South Korean armed forces as well as the weapons on the Cheonan.
Shin Jin-an, a senior aide to former Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo, admitted that he failed to properly dispose of military documents that Kim and his staff members received from the armed forces and related agencies.
Shin said he would fully take responsibility for his negligence in overseeing the disposal of sensitive military documents by junior staff members, acknowledging that he did not show up to the office on the last two days of Kim’s term in the Assembly.
“I’m so sorry to disgrace former Minister Kim,” he said. “I assumed that other staff members would have disposed of confidential military documents but it turned out that this was not the case.”
Staff members of Rep. Chung, however, denied mishandling sensitive military documents, saying all the files left unattended in the corridor were ordinary documents and they were immediately cleared shortly before the paper’s report early this month.
However, military officials that examined documents that sat idly outside the office of Rep. Chung said some of them should be considered confidential, including one titled the “Progress of the Korean Attack Helicopter Program,” as it contains information about the specific number and deployment schedules for new attack helicopters.