South Korea’s Presidential Security Service, an agency assigned to protect the president, prides itself on being the “last bastion for a safe and stable state administration.” It is now at the heart of South Korea’s biggest political mess in decades, acting as a final line of defense to prevent criminal investigators from detaining President Yoon Suk Yeol on charges of insurrection.
Since his impeachment over a short-lived martial law declaration last month, Mr. Yoon has been holed up in central Seoul, in a hilly compound that is now surrounded by barricades of buses, barbed wire and the presidential bodyguards. He has vowed to “fight to the end” to return to office. But a majority of South Koreans, according to surveys, want him ousted and arrested, and a court on Tuesday granted investigators a new warrant to detain him.
The only thing standing between them and Mr. Yoon is the Presidential Security Service, or P.S.S., which blocked the first attempt to serve the warrant last Friday. When 100 criminal investigators and police officers showed up at his residence, the agency’s staff outnumbered them two-to-one and held them off, questioning the legality of the court-issued document. The two sides went back-and-forth during a five-and-a-half-hour standoff, before investigators abandoned efforts to detain Mr. Yoon.
Much like the Secret Service does in the United States, the P.S.S. protects sitting and former presidents, presidents-elect and visiting heads of state. Created in 1963 under the former dictator Park Chung-hee, the P.S.S. was once one of the government’s most powerful agencies, with the military strongmen relying on its loyalty to escape assassination attempts. As South Korea democratized in recent decades, it had largely receded into the shadows. But under Mr. Yoon, it began attracting unsavory attention from the public as its agents dragged away protesters during public events.
Mr. Yoon appointed Kim Yong-hyun, his most loyal ally, to serve as his first security service chief before promoting him to defense minister. Although South Korea is currently being run by an acting president after Mr. Yoon was suspended from office following his impeachment, the service has sworn to defend Mr. Yoon because he remains the sole elected leader.
The security service has warned that there could be a clash if investigators try again to detain Mr. Yoon. The agency includes hundreds of trained bodyguards and anti-terrorist specialists, who are backed by detachments from the police and military.
The police have ordered Park Jong-joon, the head of the security service, to appear for questioning on potential charges of obstructing justice, an order he has so far ignored. They threatened to seek a warrant to detain him if he continues to defy summons.
“We should not let the people see the unfortunate scene of government agencies clash,” said Mr. Park.
South Koreans who wanted Mr. Yoon arrested have expressed outrage at his refusal to cooperate. Park Chan-dae, the floor leader of the Democratic Party, the main opposition, called Mr. Yoon a coward for hiding behind his presidential guards and trying to “instigate civil war and bloodshed.”
“The President Security Service has turned itself into a private militia for Yoon Suk Yeol,” said Jung Ji Ung, a lawyer and president of the bar association for Gyeonggi, the populous province that surrounds Seoul. By rejecting the court-issued warrant, he added, the security service “has put itself above the judiciary.” The security spat has added to the state of confusion that has paralyzed South Korea since Mr. Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law. Multiple government agencies are investigating him on insurrection charges.
Caught up in the struggle are the police and military, which have been called upon by both sides to provide help. Compounding it all are ongoing legal disputes over who can investigate whom and who must follow whose orders in the wake of Mr. Yoon’s impeachment.
Mr. Yoon faces a two-track investigation: one political, and the other criminal. The first is by the Constitutional Court, which will begin hearings next week to decide whether to formally remove or reinstate the president. The second is an unprecedented criminal investigation, the first time officials have tried to detain a president who is still in office.
Investigators want to question Mr. Yoon to determine whether he committed insurrection when he ordered troops to seize the National Assembly and round up his political opponents.
Mr. Yoon and his lawyers have said his declaration of martial law was a legitimate use of presidential power to tame an unruly opposition, which has stymied his political agenda. They have fired a flurry of legal challenges against those who seek to arrest him.
On Wednesday, Mr. Yoon’s lawyer, Yoon Kab-keun, reiterated that the president would not accept a detention warrant, but he said the president would surrender himself if a court issued a formal and proper arrest warrant because he did not want to escalate “the conflict, confusion and division” in the country.
Until recently, government prosecutors had usually investigated all politically sensitive criminal cases.
But Mr. Yoon’s liberal predecessor, President Moon Jae-in, created the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials, or C.I.O., in 2020, and it took away some of the investigative rights of prosecutors. But the new agency’s role was never clearly defined, and it has fewer resources. Prosecutors have arrested many key figures involved in Mr. Yoon’s ill-fated martial law, including army generals and Mr. Kim, the former P.S.S. commander, who was a close partner in Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree.
The C.I.O., which has argued that the insurrection case falls under its jurisdiction, teamed up with the police for added support in a joint investigation. But the office’s resources were so limited that it could mobilize only 20 officials in its operation to detain Mr. Yoon last Friday.
Even with 80 police officers backing them, it was unable to get past the security service, which mobilized 200 agents and soldiers, who locked arms to form barricades.
Stung by the embarrassing failure, the investigation office and the police are regrouping. They have indicated if they try to detain Mr. Yoon again, they would bring along more officials. Some fear a violent clash if neither side backs down.
“We will make thorough preparations to achieve our goal in the second attempt,” Oh Dong-hoon, the investigation office’s chief prosecutor, told a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.
Some opposition lawmakers are pushing bills to disband the security service and replace it with a security detail from the police.
They see it as a relic from decades ago, when South Korea’s military dictators feared North Korean assassins, as well as internal enemies, and used the presidential security detail as personal bodyguards, appointing their most trusted allies as their chiefs. (When the military dictator Park Chung-hee was assassinated by his national intelligence chief, Kim Jae Kyu, during a drinking party in 1979, Mr. Kim first shot Mr. Park’s chief bodyguard, Cha Chi Chol, whose influence eclipsed that of his spy agency.)
“The Presidential Security Service is a symbol of imperial presidency and a legacy of our authoritarian past,” said Shin Jang-sik, an opposition lawmaker who helped draft one bill to disband the P.S.S. “We need to stop it from acting above the law and acting like an agency of absolute power.”
