Unaware of Derwinski Tip on Agent, Bush Aides Say

Top aides to President-elect Bush, launching a review of FBI findings that Edward J. Derwinski leaked sensitive intelligence information to the South Korean government, said Friday that they did not know about the evidence before Bush chose him for the Cabinet.

C. Boyden Gray, who reviews the backgrounds of Cabinet designees, said that he was unaware before Derwinski’s selection to be secretary of the new Department of Veterans Affairs that the FBI had concluded the former congressman tipped off the South Korean Embassy in 1977 about the impending defection of a Korean CIA official to the United States.

Federal investigators said that Derwinski’s warning could have cost the defector, Sohn Ho Young, his life.

“This guy (the Korean defector) would have been severely punished or killed, as well as his family,” according to a senior law enforcement official, who noted that FBI agents had escorted the defector to safety only a half-hour before Korean CIA agents arrived at his home.

Gray, who is Bush’s counsel, said in an interview that he also did not know Derwinski had changed his story about the incident--first denying it and claiming that he was the victim of “guilt by association,” but then admitting it in unreported Senate testimony on his confirmation to a State Department post in 1983.

John H. Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff, said Friday in a meeting with Times reporters that he had discussed Derwinski’s situation with Gray after learning of the news account and that Gray “agreed to go back and review it.”

Bill Anderson, a former Chicago newspaperman who is acting as spokesman for Derwinski during the transition, said that the former congressman was not available for comment Friday. Asked why Derwinski never told Gray about the controversy, he said: “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t.”

Gray, who was briefed by FBI agents on Derwinski’s actions only hours before The Times reported them, said that it would be “dangerous to comment” on whether he was disturbed by the FBI’s findings, because the information is “incomplete.”

“There is a lot we don’t know,” Gray said. “We’re going to wait until the (FBI) investigation is complete and then we’ll go over the information with Derwinski.”

Gray, who was briefed only on the findings about the defector, estimated that the FBI’s full background investigation of Derwinski will be completed in about a week.

In cases of Cabinet designees such as Derwinski, who currently hold government jobs that were subject to Senate confirmation, “we weren’t doing any checks” before announcing their selection, Gray said. Derwinski, a 12-term Republican congressman from Chicago, was named counselor at the State Department and later undersecretary of state by President Reagan. The Senate confirmed him for both positions.

Arrest Records

Gray said that name or agency checks were run on Derwinski, but that these turn up only such things as arrest records.

The Derwinski nomination appears to have been passed through the selection process more quickly than most of Bush’s other selections.

Bush had received a list of other names for the veterans post, but he turned to Derwinski after all of the others encountered problems, Bush aides have indicated.

Derwinski himself said the day of his selection that while he had been interested in other positions in the new Administration, the first he had heard that he was being considered for the veterans job was the day before the announcement when Bush called and offered him the job.

Derwinski publicly denied that he had told Korean officials about the defection when the charges were raised in 1978. He dismissed the leak allegations as “guilt by association” because of his reputation as a staunch friend of anti-communist governments, including South Korea. He refused to testify before a federal grand jury that investigated the matter, and he gave no statement to the House ethics committee, which also looked into the episode.

Both inquiries ended inconclusively. U.S. officials said that pursuing them could have disclosed sensitive “sources and methods” of the American intelligence community. Government sources said that this referred to phone taps and other surveillance of some embassies in Washington maintained by the National Security Agency.

Phone Conversation

It was such surveillance that government sources said picked up a September, 1977, telephone conversation between Derwinski, who was in his congressional office, and the South Korean Embassy. During the call, Derwinski leaked word of the planned defection, the source said.

In 1983, five years after his denial, Derwinski admitted that he had given the highly sensitive information to a Korean diplomat in a telephone call, according to the unpublished record of a Senate confirmation hearing on his first State Department post.

At the time of the tip, the Justice Department and Congress were investigating a scandal that came to be known as Koreagate. It involved covert payments to members of Congress by South Koreans in an effort to influence U.S. policy toward that nation.

Derwinski said that the defector was to be asked to testify as part of “an ongoing (House subcommittee) investigation which I had opposed from the beginning.” He told senators that he never mentioned the name of the intended defector and termed his leak “inadvertent.” He added that “I considered this (Sohn’s planned testimony) sort of a grandstand development at the committee level, of which I did not approve.”

Derwinski, in the transcript of his 1983 meeting with senators, sought to minimize the importance of the defection, saying that he had not given much thought to tipping off the South Koreans about Sohn.

Derwinski, referring to Sohn’s 1978 testimony before the international relations subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of which the then Illinois congressman was a member, said:

“The individual turned out to be not very valuable in the sense of giving the committee any information and the whole issue passed away.”

However, former congressional staff members challenged this assessment Friday and said that Sohn had been “very valuable” as an informant, furnishing the subcommittee with KCIA code books and turning over written plans for covert KCIA operations in the United States.

These aides said that the KCIA plans envisioned the recruitment of American citizens from all walks of life--government, communications, business, religious life and universities--to sway American public opinion in favor of the government of Park Chung-hee.

Illegal campaign contributions to members of Congress, the use of unregistered foreign agents for covert operations in the United States and “infiltration” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were all proposed in the KCIA plans furnished by Sohn, they said.