SEOUL, South Korea — A former South Korean intelligence chief accused of directing agents who posted online criticisms of liberal candidates during the 2012 presidential election campaign was convicted Thursday of violating a law that banned the spy agency from involvement in domestic politics.
Won Sei-hoon, who served as director of the National Intelligence Service under President Park Geun-hye’s predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but the Seoul Central District Court suspended the sentence. Mr. Won had just been released from prison Tuesday after completing a 14-month sentence stemming from a separate corruption trial.
Prosecutors indicted Mr. Won in June of last year, saying that a secret team of National Intelligence Service agents had posted more than 1.2 million messages on Twitter and other forums in a bid to sway public opinion in favor of the conservative governing party and its leader, Ms. Park, ahead of the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2012.
Many of the messages merely lauded government policies, but many others ridiculed liberal critics of the government and of Ms. Park, including Ms. Park’s rivals in the presidential election. Some messages called the liberal politicians “servants” of North Korea for holding views on the North that conservatives considered too conciliatory, prosecutors said.
For the spy agency to “directly interfere with the free expression of ideas by the people with the aim of creating a certain public opinion cannot be tolerated under any pretext,” the court said in its ruling on Thursday. “This is a serious crime that shakes the foundation of democracy.”
But though Mr. Won was convicted of violating the law governing the spy agency, the court dismissed a separate charge: that he had violated the country’s election law, which prohibits public servants generally from interfering in elections. In explaining that decision, the court said Mr. Won had not ordered his agents to support or oppose any specific presidential candidate.
That finding spared Ms. Park a potentially serious political liability. Had Mr. Won been convicted of violating the election law, it would have provided fodder for critics of Ms. Park who say that the agency’s online smear campaign undermined the legitimacy of her election. Ms. Park, who was elected by a margin of about a million votes, has said that she neither ordered nor benefited from such a campaign.
Two other former senior officials of the spy agency who had been indicted on similar charges were each sentenced to a year in prison on Thursday, but their sentences were also suspended. Both the prosecutors and the defendants have a week to appeal the verdicts.
The intelligence service has denied trying to discredit opposition politicians, saying that its online messages were posted as part of a normal campaign of psychological warfare against North Korea. It said the North was increasingly using the Internet to spread misinformation in support of the Pyongyang government and to criticize South Korean policies, forcing its agents to defend those policies online.
The intelligence agency was created to spy on North Korea, which is still technically at war with the South. But over its history, it has been repeatedly accused of meddling in domestic politics and of being used as a political tool by sitting presidents. In recent months, courts have acquitted two defectors from North Korea who had been indicted on charges of spying for Pyongyang; the courts said the intelligence service had kept them in solitary confinement for several months, failed to provide the suspects with appropriate access to lawyers and, in one case, even fabricated evidence to build its cases.
The South Korean military’s Cyberwarfare Command was also accused of smearing opposition politicians online before the 2012 elections. Last month, military investigators formally asked prosecutors to consider legal action against the former heads of the command, which was created in 2010 to guard against hacking threats from the North.
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