The Nation: Fresh Stirrings On Koreagate

Jaworski is the catalyst, but he faces some stone walls

Becalmed for much of the summer, the Koreagate investigation suddenly lurched forward last week. Former Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, 71, who was appointed counsel to the House ethics committee in July, held his first meeting with the panel and declared bluntly, “I advise those who may believe that the investigation will blow over or prove fruitless to take a closer look.” Then, threatening a contempt citation, he got close-mouthed Girl-About-Town Suzi

Park Thomson, former secretary to retired House Speaker Carl Albert, to testify for five hours before a closed session of the committee. Clearly, Jaworski was determined to get to the bottom of the scandal, which could implicate scores of present and former Congressmen as well as the South Korean government.

That attitude may well have induced the committee’s potential star witness, Rice Broker Tongsun Park, to surface at a press conference in Seoul last week nine months after he fled from Washington to London to avoid questioning. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency presumably arranged Park’s flight from London to Seoul to keep him out of Jaworski’s way, and then stage-managed his press conference as well. As one of Park’s old Washington cronies observed, “He said not a word in Washington or London. Then he gets to Seoul and holds a press conference. You figure it out.”

Parrying questions for 50 minutes in his corporate conference room in Seoul, Park said he had returned home “under very tragic circumstances.” His mother was extremely ill and could not possibly get better until she “saw my face.” Why, he was asked, was he so cozy with so many Congressmen? “I was extremely active in social circles,” he said. “For me to know prominent politicians or even Cabinet members or people in the White House is nothing unusual. That happens to be my hobby.” Did he use his fees from rice deals to give kickbacks to Congressmen? No, no, he said, the money was used to establish schools and new companies in Korea. “Washington is like my second home,” said Park, but he would not even think of returning without guarantees against the sort of “gross exaggeration” that he has seen in the U.S. press. “Under no circumstances,” he said, “will I respond to summonses from the U.S. Congress. Nor will I see Jaworski.”

Jaworski, asked by House Speaker Tip O’Neill to take over the foundering Koreagate probe in July, remained confident that he could get the facts. O’Neill made it clear to Georgia’s crusty John Flynt, chairman of the ethics committee, that neither he nor Jaworski would tolerate any obstructionism. “If Jack Flynt gets in our way, we’ll go around him,” said one investigator, “or maybe we’ll just run right over him.” At Jaworski’s first appearance before the committee last week, Flynt and other committee members indicated that such tactics would not be necessary. They all took turns praising Jaworski, who seemed delighted.

When Suzi Thomson took the stand, however, Jaworski got his first taste of just how tough Koreagate could prove. Pretty, fortyish and Korean-born (she was married briefly to an American), Thomson was known as a lavish partygiver, despite a salary that ranged from $9,000 to $15,000. She depicted herself as just a working girl with no official contacts with the Seoul government, no involvement with the KCIA, and nothing more than a social friendship with Tongsun Park.

Jaworski is counting on the White House and the State Department to pressure Seoul into sending Park back to the U.S. to testify. That will not be easy. A Korean official indicated that Seoul must complete its own probe into Park’s tangled business transactions, and that such an inquiry could last “easily as long as five years.” Not that Jaworski was totally without sympathy in Seoul. The opposition New Democratic Party, normally subject to KCIA harassment, had the temerity to ask the government to cooperate with Washington. There was just one catch. First, the party said, the Korean parliament should conduct its own inquiry—a procedure that could also drag on, since the government controls the parliament.