Tongsun Park, an urbane, amiable international lobbyist who stood at the center of two bribery scandals separated by nearly 30 years, and who was once a Gatsby-like figure in Washington whose flamboyant parties were attended by lawmakers, officials and the occasional Hollywood celebrity, died Thursday in Seoul, South Korea. He was 89.

His death was reported by Yonhap News, South Korea’s major news service, which said he had been admitted to a hospital about a week earlier with an unspecified chronic illness.

Park, a Korean-born graduate of Georgetown University, leveraged a family fortune and an easy gregariousness to seduce the power brokers of Capitol Hill in the 1970s.

All along, in secret, he was working for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Besides giving lavish parties, he gave out some $850,000 to dozens of members of Congress, often in white envelopes, in an influence-buying scheme known, perhaps inevitably, as Koreagate.

“I thought I was taking part in the American political process,” Park told the House Ethics Committee in 1978.

The Justice Department granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony, and he soon dropped from the headlines.

But nearly three decades later, he resurfaced in the news as an illegal agent for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Park was indicted in U.S. District Court in New York City in 2005 for lobbying United Nations officials to relax the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

This time, Park did not escape culpability, and he received a five-year prison sentence.

Born into oil wealth, Park came to America under the guardianship of a former South Korean diplomat who was a family friend to attend high school and, later, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, according to news accounts.

His money and charm won him friends — he was elected president of his freshman college class — and in the mid-1960s he opened the exclusive George Town Club to keep the party going. There, and at his own mansion on Embassy Row, he welcomed the likes of Gerald R. Ford and Frank Sinatra and gave lavish birthday parties in 1973 and 1974 for Rep. Thomas P. O’Neil Jr. of Massachusetts, who later became speaker of the House.

“The Onassis of the Orient,” some in Washington called Park.

In 1978, he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery and making contributions as a foreign agent, and he fled the country. He returned with a promise of criminal immunity to testify in Congress and before a grand jury.

He said that he had passed money to 31 members of Congress — up to $273,000 in one case — and while he denied acting on behalf of the South Korean government, a former Korean intelligence officer told Congress under oath that Park was working for Korean intelligence as part of an influence-buying operation code-named Ice Mountain.

But the accusations, splashily covered in the post-Watergate period, largely fizzled out. Only three of the 31 current and former members of Congress Park named were indicted, and only one, Richard T. Hanna, D-Calif., was convicted. He served a little over a year in jail.

The House, which considered disciplinary action against 11 sitting members, ended up reprimanding just three, in what critics called an example of Congress’ inability to discipline its own members.

Koreagate turned out to be a mouse that squeaked.

“The press blew the story out of proportion, in a post-Watergate race to be first with the gory details,” The Washington Post wrote in 1978.

Park dropped out of sight in Washington, though he did not forsake lobbying that overstepped the law. His subsequent indictment in New York, in 2005, detailed how Iraq had hired him to exert influence over a U.N. program meant to provide humanitarian relief for Iraqi civilians. Known as oil-for-food, the program permitted Iraq to sell petroleum on the world market, with the proceeds held in a U.N. account to buy food and medicine.

But it turned into a corrupt venture exploited by lobbyists, oil tycoons and the Saddam Hussein regime.

Park, despite his past, was able to insinuate himself with the U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, who told an outside investigation that Park “knew everybody” and provided “first-class information” about world affairs, including in Asia.

The investigation, led by Paul A. Volcker, a former chair of the Federal Reserve Board, found that Park and an associate tried to give $1 million to Boutros-Ghali to open a back channel between him and an Iraqi official, though there was no proof that the secretary-general took or agreed to take the money.

Park was convicted in 2006 of being an unlicensed agent for Iraq, which paid him more than $2.5 million. At one point, he traveled to Baghdad and collected nearly $1 million in cash in a cardboard box from Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.

“You either bribed a U.N. official or you were acting as if you were going to bribe a U.N. official,” Judge Denny Chin told Park in sentencing him to five years in prison, the maximum, in 2007.

Park, whose Korean name was Park Tong Sun, was born on March 16, 1935, in Soonchun, in the province of South Pyongan, in what is now North Korea.

His father had become wealthy as a distributor of Gulf Oil Corp. products. Park and a brother inherited their father’s oil interests. In the United States, Park also set himself up as an exporter of American-grown rice to South Korea.

The money he used to buy support for South Korea in Congress came from inflated commissions that Park collected on rice sales, a scheme concocted with South Korean intelligence agents, according to the U.S. investigation of Koreagate.

Yonhap News reported that Park is survived by his brother.

After his release from prison, Park returned to South Korea, where he drew on his international ties to quietly become an adviser to political figures, according to South Korean news accounts last week. At the funeral home that prepared his remains, there were wreaths sent by former politicians and African and Middle Eastern embassies, according to the newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

A former National Assembly speaker, Kim Jin-pyo, visiting the funeral home, told the paper that he had often sought Park’s advice.

“In particular, since there was no proper research institute in the country that could study diplomatic issues in depth, he provided a lot of help and advice whenever a national diplomatic network was needed,” Kim said.

Mark G. Califano, a former U.N. investigator, told The Washington Post in 2007 that Park’s greatest talent was for making introductions.

“He was always known,” he said, “as a man who was willing to bring two people together for the right price.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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