Memories of Ice Mountain

No answers from Korea's host with the most

After nearly ten months of closed-door sessions and intensive staff work (not to mention occasional leaks to the press), the House Ethics Committee last week held the first public airing of its investigation of South Korea's attempts to curry favor in the U.S. by bribing Congressmen and other officials. Not surprisingly, the three days of hearings further depressed relations between the U.S. and South Korea, which were already at an all-time low. Committee Special Counsel Leon Jaworski expressed the mood on Capitol Hill in his opening statement before the committee. The regime of President Park Chung Hee, he said, had "no right to cover up and obstruct our investigation," and he asked Congress to pass a resolution demanding that South Korea give its "full and unlimited cooperation" in providing "total disclosure" about any Korean who had sought congressional favors.

While Jaworski was talking tough in Washington, the Korean government was stonewalling a visiting team of U.S. law enforcement officials in Seoul. Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti and two associates sought a way to question Tongsun Park, Korea's Washington host with the most, who fled the U.S. before a federal grand jury indicted him on 36 violations of federal statutes, including bribery and fraud. After almost 30 hours of wrangling, during which the Koreans insisted they alone should control the interrogation of Park, the U.S. delegation returned home exhausted, frustrated and emptyhanded.

The Koreans' reluctance to allow Park to testify freely was understandable. In testimony before the House committee, Former Korean CIA Chief Kim Hyung Wook told how Park had been set up as the middleman in the U.S. rice trade with Korea by former California Congressman Richard Hanna, who was indicted two weeks ago for seeking bribes, and fraud. According to Kim, Park earned $9 million in the process--and was given full support by the Seoul government for his influence peddling in Congress. Witnesses also provided fresh details of President Park's personal role in the scandal. A former Korean CIA agent and first secretary in the embassy, Kim Sang Keun, discussed two bribery operations, "Ice Mountain" and "White Snow," and implicated President Park --whose own code name, Kim said, was "the Patriarch." Though he had, on orders from the Korean CIA, destroyed the Ice Mountain list of 40 to 50 Congressmen the agency wanted to buy, Kim said he remembered many of the names and had given them to the committee staff. Another embassy defector, Jai Hyon Lee, repeated a now familiar story of how he had accidentally surprised Ambassador Kim Dong Jo in his office stuffing envelopes containing cash into a briefcase. Asked where he was going with the money, Ambassador Kim replied, "To the Capitol."

Other testimony revealed, in at least one instance, exactly where in the Capitol Kim was headed. Nan Elder, an aide to Kansas Republican Representative Larry Winn Jr., recalled that in 1972 a Korean had dropped an envelope off in her boss's office and that she opened it, at Winn's request, to find "more money than I've ever seen in my life." She tracked the man down at another Congressman's office, and he returned to pick up the rejected gift. Elder has identified the Korean from a selection of 14 pictures as the former ambassador, who is now President Park's foreign affairs assistant. Committee Member Bruce Caputo, a New York Republican, elicited the allegation from another Korean embassy employee that a Senator and a top aide in the Ford White House had also received Korean cash.

No more testimony is scheduled until Congress convenes next year, and while the hearings so far have been illuminating, it will be a while until the committee shows just how serious Congress is about investigating Congress.

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