http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/world/asia/former-spy-chief-in-south-korea-sentenced-in-election-case.html?_r=0
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JEJU, South Korea — In a political blow to President Park Geun-hye, a South Korean appeals court on Monday convicted a former government intelligence chief on charges of intervening in the 2012 vote that elected her president.
The former intelligence chief, Won Sei-hoon, was arrested at the Seoul High Court and taken to jail after the court sentenced him to three years in prison.
The court did not comment on whether Mr. Won’s intervention helped Ms. Park get elected. But it said that agents from the government’s National Intelligence Service, under Mr. Won’s instruction, began an online smear campaign against Ms. Park’s political rivals ahead of the December 2012 vote, often depicting the rivals as North Korean sympathizers.
Ms. Park defeated her main opponent, Moon Jae-in, by a margin of 3.5 percentage points or roughly one million votes. Some opposition politicians have insisted that the spy agency’s online smear campaign undermined the legitimacy of her victory by illegally swaying votes in her favor, although they have not officially claimed that it should be nullified.
“The accused used the valuable function and organization of the National Intelligence Service in opposing specific political parties and politicians,” Justice Kim Sang-hwan said in his ruling. “The state agency directly intervened in online forums, systematically spreading opinions on key election issues while pretending to be ordinary citizens.”
The court also sentenced two former subordinates of Mr. Won to up to one and a half years in prison on similar charges. But their sentences were suspended.
“What I did was for the nation and for the people,” Mr. Won told reporters on Monday.
In September, a lower court convicted Mr. Won of violating laws that banned public servants from meddling in politics but acquitted him of the more politically sensitive charge of intervening in a presidential election. At the time, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but his sentence was suspended.
Neither Ms. Park’s office nor the intelligence agency commented on the verdict on Monday, which overturned the lower court’s decision.
Ms. Park has said that she did not order or benefit from the spy agency’s election-year Internet activities. For its part, the agency has denied trying to discredit opposition politicians, saying that its online messages were part of a legitimate psychological warfare campaign against pro-North Korean content.
The court ruling on Monday came a day after Mr. Moon was elected as head of the main opposition party, the New Politics Alliance for Democracy.
On Monday, his party called on former President Lee Myung-bak, under whose government Mr. Won served as spy chief, to apologize for the scandal.
Ms. Park’s governing Saenuri Party reminded the opposition that the case still had to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, and warned against “a wasteful debate” over the legitimacy of the 2012 election results.
Prosecutors indicted Mr. Won in June, saying that a secret team of National Intelligence Service agents had posted numerous messages on Twitter and other online forums to sway public opinion in favor of Ms. Park and her conservative governing party ahead of the parliamentary and presidential 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 her rivals in the presidential election.
On Monday, the appeals court said that spy agents’ online comments meddling in the election sharply increased after Ms. Park won the governing party’s presidential nomination in August 2012.
On Twitter, the agents called Ms. Park “the only answer” to North Korean threats, praising her “solid and right views on national security,” the court said. In contrast, they derided Mr. Moon as “an ex-convict” for being arrested for protesting the military dictatorship in the 1970s. They also called him “childish” and said that there was “zero chance” he would carry out campaign promises.
The intelligence agency was created to spy on North Korea, which is still technically at war with the South. But the agency has been repeatedly accused of meddling in domestic politics and of being used as a political tool by sitting presidents.
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