The Defense Ministry’s prosecution on Tuesday indicted two former cyberwarfare commanders and two other agents on charges of interfering with politics in breach of military rules on political neutrality. They were not detained.

Wrapping up its two-month probe into an online smear campaign scandal, the prosecution said the former commanders ― Yeon Je-wook and Ok Do-gyeong ― were notified and approved of cyberagents’ controversial activities in cyberspace.

“During their cyberoperations, Yeon and Ok received daily briefings on (military) responses (in cyberspace) and they issued their approval on those responses,” Yoo Myeong-sang, the head of the ministry’s Prosecutors’ Office, told reporters.

“The leader of the psychological warfare team, surnamed Park, was in charge of the general online cyberoperations and disseminated directives to his subordinate agents. During this process, we found that they interfered with politics.”

It was the first time since 1997 that military personnel were indicted for political interference. The scandal has seriously tarnished the image of the nation’s cyberwarfare command, generating the impression that the military entity was mobilized for domestic political purposes, rather than national security.

The prosecution had led a massive probe into the allegations that cyberwarfare operatives produced various online comments to sway public opinion ahead of the 2012 presidential election. It had questioned some 130 people including Yeon and Ok in connection with the scandal since the ministry’s Central Investigation Command ended its preliminary inquiry in August.

The CIC found that cyberagents had posted some 787,200 comments online between January 2010, when the command was established, and October last year, when the CIC probe began. Of the postings, the prosecution said that some 12,800 were classified as illegal political comments that criticized or supported particular political parties or politicians.

In August, the CIC said that it had identified only 7,100 comments as illegal. But the number jumped during the prosecution’s separate investigation as the prosecution interpreted the meaning of political interference in broader terms, officials said.

During the CIC probe into the scandal, investigators booked some 21 former and current cyberwarfare officials. The prosecution charged three additional cyberagents with political interference during its own inquiry.

The prosecution said that the authorities indicted only five people implicated in the scandal, including the one currently on trial for political interference. It decided not to indict the rest on the grounds that they acted only according to directives from their supervisors, given the character of the hierarchical military organization.

As for former Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin, who now serves as the chief of the presidential National Security Office, the prosecution found no evidence that Kim had been informed of the cyberagents’ political interference.

But criticism surfaced that the prosecution did not question Kim despite lingering speculations that he might have been aware of the case.

The official probe into the smear campaign scandal was launched a year ago after opposition lawmakers raised allegations during a parliamentary audit that the cyberwarfare command systematically posted political comments to help support the conservative ruling party’s election campaign in 2012.

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)