Urgent Senior security aide to Lee offers to resign over Japan pact

A senior foreign affairs aide to President Lee Myung-bak offered to resign Thursday to take responsibility for an escalating scandal surrounding Seoul's push for an unprecedented military pact with Japan, the presidential office said.

Senior external policy secretary Kim Tae-hyo has been under fire for allegedly mishandling the military intelligence-sharing deal with Japan, following revelations the Cabinet secretively approved the sensitive pact with Korea's former colonial ruler.

Kim, one of the longest-serving aides to Lee, expressed his intention to step down in a face-to-face meeting with Lee Thursday and the president is expected to accept the resignation, presidential spokesman Park Jeong-ha said.

Park, however, dismissed opposition calls for sacking higher-level officials, including Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik and Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan, saying, "This is not an issue that the prime minister and the (foreign) minister should be held accountable for."

The General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) lays out procedural frameworks on military information exchanges between Seoul and Tokyo. The pact is seen as mainly aimed at facilitating intelligence sharing on North Korea, a perennial security concern in the region.

If signed, it will mark South Korea's first-ever military pact with Japan, which ruled the Korean Peninsula as a colony from 1910-45. Reaction to the agreement among the South Korean public has been pretty negative due in large part to resentment associated with the colonial rule.

Dealing a critical blow to the pact were revelations the Cabinet covertly passed the deal late last month. Prime Minister Kim apologized for what he called "procedural problems," though he claimed it was in accordance with diplomatic protocol not to make the passage public.

The uproar forced South Korea to put off the planned signing of the pact at the last minute on Friday last week, casting dark clouds over the prospect of whether Seoul will be able to press ahead to sign it.

President Lee and other officials have indicated their intention to push ahead with the signing, stressing that despite the procedural flaws, the agreement is still necessary and is in the country's national interest.

But opposition parties, some media and other critics have called for rescinding the deal altogether, questioning whether South Korea really needs such a pact with Japan when Seoul is believed to have more information on North Korea than any other nation in the world.

Critics say Seoul would end up gaining little from the pact.

Kim, 45, has been considered Lee's right-hand man on foreign policy issues.

Beginning as a foreign policy advisor to Lee during his 2007 presidential campaign, Kim joined the presidential office as Lee took office in early 2008, and has since served as a key security advisor.

By the official chain of command, Kim is under the senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security. But critics have said Kim wielded greater influence than his job allows, sometimes overstepping his authority.

Last year, Lee promoted Kim by a notch by creating a senior secretary level post for him, a move that was seen as showing how much confidence that Lee has in Kim.

Kim is widely known as a hard-liner on North Korea and a strong advocate of the alliance with the United States. Some security experts have claimed that it was because of Kim's hawkish stance on Pyongyang that the inter-Korean ties plunged to the lowest ebb in decades.

Before entering the government, Kim had been a well-known security expert, serving as a professor at the state-run Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security before taking a professor's job at Seoul's Sungkyunkwan University. (Yonhap)