The Swindler From Seoul

To some 20 Congressmen. South Korean Rice Broker Tongsun Park was a well-heeled friend who entertained lavishly and contributed thousands of dollars to their election campaigns. To the Park Chung Hee regime in Seoul, Businessman Park (no kin to the autocratic President) was a wily influence peddler who over the past decade spent millions of dollars in Washington to head off threatened cutbacks in U.S. military aid or the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. In fact, TIME has learned, federal investigators have turned up evidence that Park was a master swindler. In a scheme worthy of Terry and the Pirates, he tricked both his friends and his government, siphoned off much of the money for his own use and, after his close association with a handful of Congressmen became a scandal, scampered to London last fall, one step ahead of the law.

Federal investigators have managed to piece together only a partial picture of his double-dealing after about 1 1/2 years of digging. Some information has come from electronic surveillance of Seoul's Blue House, the executive mansion of the President of South Korea. Another source has been Kim Hyung Wook, who headed the Korean Central Intelligence Agency from 1963 to 1969, and has been a political refugee in the U.S. since 1973. Last week Kim testified before the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, chaired by Democrat Donald M. Fraser.

Kim described to the subcommittee how he let Park use $3 million in South Korean government funds in 1967 to help finance the fashionable George Town Club, which Park founded in 1966 as a way to get cozy with top U.S. officials. The posh club's 1976 roster of 400 members included six Supreme Court Justices; former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz; Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano and a score of Senators and Representatives. In all, federal investigators believe, Park may have spent as much as $2 million on parties at the club he had founded and gifts for his friends.

Piddling Sums. According to Justice Department officials, Park reported to Seoul that he was buying up Congressmen right and left, but the probes have so far found that he gave only piddling sums to about 20 legislators, usually as campaign contributions. Donations went to at least three former Congressmen: $22,500 to Richard Hanna of California and undisclosed amounts to Cornelius Gallagher of New Jersey and Otto Passman of Louisiana. The wife of Edwin Edwards, then a Congressman and now Governor of Louisiana, got $10,000. Other contributions included $4,650 to John Brademas of Indiana, deputy House Democratic leader, and $4,000 to John McFall of California.

During those years, Park's personal fortune increased meteorically. In 1969, he was so broke that he hocked his mother's jade hairpins to help pay off debts amounting to more than $1 million. By 1975, however, his assets in Washington included a $750,000 office building, two houses worth $1.2 million, a fleet of at least two limousines and sports cars, an expensively stocked wine cellar and about 300 well-tailored suits. He had also squirreled away an undetermined amount of money in numbered accounts at several foreign banks.

But investigators have not been able to build a legal case against Park or his friends in Congress. Republicans have complained--with some justification--that Democrats are far less eager to look into Koreagate, which chiefly involves Democrats, than they were to pursue Republicans implicated in Watergate. Still, as a House ethics committee staffer explains, "there is no smoking pistol." For one thing, although investigators have called more than 70 witnesses before a grand jury, they have not been able to establish whether Park was a South Korean agent; if he was, he broke U.S. law by not registering with the Justice Department, and the Congressmen may have broken the law by accepting campaign gifts from him. Nor is there any evidence of what the Congressmen did--if anything--in return for the money. Another problem is that Kim's testimony cannot be used in court because the five-year statute of limitations has run out on the incidents he witnessed. Last week Kim told the House subcommittee that Park "was definitely not an employee on the payroll of the KCIA" and had merely "offered to cooperate."

Chief Targets. TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil reports that House Speaker Tip O'Neill, convinced that no present Congressman is guilty of wrongdoing in the scandal, has told the House Ethics Committee "to leave no stone unturned." The committee's chief targets apparently are the former House members who were Park's beneficiaries. Moreover, Hanna's and Gallagher's tax returns are being examined by federal prosecutors, who hope to turn up violations that can be used to force the former legislators to open up about other Congressmen's dealings with Park.

Hanna and Gallagher will probably be called before Eraser's subcommittee or the Ethics Committee to talk about the Park connection. One likely subject: Did they--as Kim claims--help persuade the Korean government to give Park a monopoly on importing rice to Korea, which paid him commissions of up to $6 million?

The Justice Department has also asked if Park would talk to its agents in the safety of his London sanctuary. It is an offer he will probably refuse, but it reflects how desperate the investigators are for information about the sly and skillful stinger from Seoul.

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