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Little Interest. Lee says it was common for the KCIA to hand junketeering Congressmen cash-filled envelopes to compensate them for their own and their wives' personal expenses on trips to South Korea. Thus the Congressmen could properly record and pay for their wives' expenses without being out of pocket at all. Lee, following his defection after 20 years of government service, testified to the FBI in 1973, but his allegations began to arouse interest only last summer, when a House International Relations subcommittee, headed by Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser, again quizzed Lee. Fraser got the Justice Department to open its investigation of Korean bribery.
For all of its zeal, the KCIA is regarded in Washington as a ham-handed offspring of the U.S. CIA—which has helped finance the KCIA in the past. The KCIA does not bother to gather intelligence from South Korea's closest enemy, North Korea. Aside from its efforts to buy influence in U.S. political circles, its main mission seems to be to suppress criticism of the Park regime at home and abroad, notably in the U.S., which has big Korean populations in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington. The FBI has been probing—so far inconclusively—complaints by Korean dissidents in the U.S. of KCIA harassment through threatening phone calls and other bullyboy tactics.
The Seoul regime's influence-peddling efforts in the U.S. stem from an understandable worry about its American connection. Under constant threat from the North, the South Koreans depend for survival on their U.S. ties—and those have seemed less secure in recent years. The Park government's political activity in the U.S. began in 1970, after the Nixon Administration announced it would cut American forces in Korea from 60,000 to 40,000 troops. Fretful about a Jimmy Carter campaign pledge to pull out more troops and perhaps cut economic aid as well, the Koreans kept up their U.S. political activity this year —until adverse publicity forced them to pull back.
Focal Point. Seoul still denies any connection with Tongsun Park, the partygiving Washington rice broker who remains a focal point of the investigations. But federal probers believe the regime ordered the millionaire mystery man, last reported shuttling between Japan and Great Britain, to stay clear of both the U.S. and South Korea. Should Park decide never to return to the U.S., as seems possible, he would be leaving behind considerable assets—including two homes, a business building and the George Town Club, where he has done much of his Washington entertaining. He also had a $249,000 secret interest in a new Washington bank called the Diplomat National, according to a front man who held some of the Park stock —another facet in the still murky picture of Korean money and political muscle in the U.S.