Government Spying Charges Complicate Korean Vote SEOUL - An unfolding political scandal ahead of parliamentary elections on Wednesday has many South Koreans drawing comparisons with Watergate: secret investigations of government critics, an attempted cover-up, and the question of what the president may have known. Several officials have been arrested, including two former aides to President Lee Myung-bak, and Mr. Lee's former secretary for labor affairs has admitted to ordering the destruction of evidence. No evidence has surfaced that the president himself authorized any of the illicit surveillance at the heart of the scandal. But the revelations have dominated the election campaign, with opposition leaders calling for Mr. Lee's resignation. The affair centers on an ethics team from the prime minister's office tasked with monitoring public officials for possible corruption. In 2010, seven of its members were convicted of having conducted illegal surveillance in 2008 of two private citizens - a businessman who had posted a video clip ridiculing Mr. Lee and the wife of a legislator from the governing New Frontier Party - and then of destroying computer files before prosecutors raided their office. During that inquiry, prosecutors failed to determine the scale of the ethics team's operation or under whose direction it had acted. But on March 30, journalists at the Korean Broadcasting System, South Korea's leading television network, posted online some of the 2,691 files from the ethics team that had been submitted to the court by prosecutors but that had not previously been made public. Those files, which were retrieved from an ethics team member's computer memory stick, and whose authenticity was confirmed by the government, have rekindled the scandal. They have revealed that the team kept files on a broad range of people - not just the public servants it was mandated to watch, but politicians, journalists, civic groups and labor activists, the KBS journalists said. The files also showed that the ethics team carried out many of its missions under an "instruction" from the Blue House, the presidential office. It remains unclear how much of the information in the files was collected by illegal spying, and Mr. Lee's office pointed out that 80 percent of the files dated from the tenure of his late predecessor, President Roh Moo-hyun, whose supporters are now in the opposition. "The Blue House is countering its critics by likening them to the pot calling the kettle black," said Hahm Sung-deuk, a political science scholar at Korea University. If the ruling camp doesn't handle this properly, it could become a Korean Watergate. It's not just what they did, but how they lied to cover up lies. Suspicions of the presidential office's involvement in spying against citizens had intensified in recent months. A former ethics team member named Chang Jin-soo alleged in a series of news interviews that the team had reported directly to the Blue House and that he and his colleagues had erased computer files during the 2010 investigation by order of Lee Young-ho, then the presidential secretary for labor affairs. Last month, Mr. Chang released a recording of his telephone conversation in 2010 with another presidential aide, Choi Jong-seok, in which Mr. Choi appealed to him not to divulge any more sensitive details during his trial. "If you need money, I'll find a way," the aide said, adding, "It's not just me but others who may go down as well." Lee Young-ho, who had resigned as Mr. Lee's secretary in 2010, then called a news conference, and admitted ordering the destruction of the investigators" files "to prevent a disruption of state affairs." But he insisted that the affair went no higher, and that the president was not involved. He also admitted giving Mr. Chang 20 million won, or $17,700, not as a bribe but as financial "help." Mr. Chang later returned the money when he started speaking publicly about the surveillance. The disclosures have fueled the public imagination and enlivened newspaper headlines. One thing made clear by the files posted by the KBS journalists is that the ethics team did not shrink from comprehensive surveillance of targets" private lives. They kept nearly minute-by-minute records of a senior government official's extramarital affair, noting the facial expressions of the man ("entreating") and the woman ("impudent") during one evening tryst.