SKorean spy agency hits back over NKorea hotline claim

South Korea's supposedly secretive National Intelligence Service (NIS) is suing a former chief for being loose-lipped about an unacknowledged hotline with North Korea, local prosecutors said Wednesday.

No stranger to scrutiny, former NIS head Kim Man-bok made his comments in an interview last week and in a new memoir, which the spy agency is trying to block from being sold.

Kim, who led the NIS during the second ever inter-Korean summit in 2007, claimed that the North's late leader Kim Jong Il personally contacted his South Korean counterparts via a secretive telephone line during the liberal administrations of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.

He added that the hotline was cut under the conservative Lee Myung-bak’s presidency from 2008, as Seoul-Pyongyang ties came under greater strain.

Kim would have needed legal permission to reveal his "classified information", which was quickly rebutted in any case.

Former presidential chief of staff Park Jie-won took to social media to insist that “there were no hotline conversations between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong Il.”

Ex-Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok also refused to accept the claim.

“I served under President Roh for three years... and can tell you there was no hotline between President Roh and Kim Jong Il," Lee said at a symposium last week.

With pressure building on Kim Man-bok, he clarified publicly that there had been a misunderstanding and that messages from Kim Jong Il received by the NIS were only passed on to the South Korean presidential office.

Kim left his spy agency post in 2008 after being accused of leaking details of communication with a Pyongyang official -- he then escaped punishment in 2011 for sensitive comments picked up by a Japanese media outlet.

The NIS has suffered a series of recent blows to its reputation, not least over claims of interference in the 2012 presidential election.

Losing candidate Moon Jae-in, who also served under Roh Moo-hyun, was linked by NIS agents with a move to redraw a de facto maritime border in Pyongyang's favor.

This week also saw the release from prison Tuesday of Won Sei-hoon -- agency chief between 2009 and 2013 -- who was granted bail on charges of condoning the election meddling by his agents.

Won had served nearly 8 months of a three-year sentence when the Supreme Court dropped the case back to a lower court for a retrial.