South Korea has asked the United States to check on recent allegations that its intelligence agency bugged the South Korean mission there, Seoul’s foreign ministry said Tuesday.
The South Korean Embassy in the U.S., along with European Union missions and 37 other diplomatic missions, was allegedly targeted by the U.S. National Security Agency, which tapped their phone calls and e-mails, according to media reports based upon documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“(The South Korean government) has asked the U.S. government to check on the revealed facts via diplomatic channels,” Seoul’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Han Hye-jin told reporters.
“Now we are trying to verify the reports, and we will take appropriate measures if necessary,” she added, without elaborating further.
While the embassy declined to comment officially on the incident, an official told Yonhap News Agency a day earlier that it “has no knowledge” about the NSA’s alleged eavesdropping or other surveillance activities.
Asked to verify a recent local media report that President Park Geun-hye does not have any plan to hold a summit with her Japanese counterpart “for the time being,” Han simply said she expects a summit “when bilateral relations are going smoothly.”
“If Japan has a right historic perception and strives to help create friendly ties with its neighbor, there will be opportunities for the two leaders to have productive dialogue,” she said.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo have come under fresh strain after Japanese politicians made attempts to glorify its militaristic past and gloss over its wartime atrocities.
In April, they paid homage to a controversial war shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo that honors Japan’s war dead, including Class A criminals, and made controversial remarks and actions justifying its wartime sexual enslavement of women from neighboring countries. (Yonhap News)
