How North Korea’s female spies are trained in the art of seduction, blackmail and murder

THEY are North Korea’s secret weapons, the female spies sent to seduce, blackmail and sometimes murder their targets.

THE murder of Kim Jong-un’s playboy outcast brother at the hands of two female assassins suggests North Korea’s so-called “honey trap” scheme is alive and well.

The isolated regime has clandestinely groomed women spies and killers to take down enemies of the state for more than half a century.

Scores of politicians, businessmen and journalists have fallen for the wiles of attractive agents dispatched by Pyongyang to extract sensitive information and, in many cases, bear their target’s baby for blackmail purposes.

Jang Jin-sung, who served as poet laureate to the regime before his 2004 defection to South Korea, blew the whistle on North Korea’s remarkable “seed-bearing program” in 2014.

Mr Jang, now the founder-editor of independent news site New Focus International said the program was the brainchild of Kim Jong-il, the father of Kim Jong-un, who was known as “Dear Leader” when he was running the country.

Kim senior came up with the idea after his hairbrained plot to kidnap businessmen from Japan, South Korea, Romania, Thailand and Lebanon and to turn them into spies failed after the victims proved resistant to brainwashing.

Mr Jang told how attractive young women were plucked from universities — and in some cases high schools — and trained in the art of sex and spycraft. They were then assigned to high-ranking visitors as translators, tour guides or “gifted” as prostitutes.

“The regime mainly targets foreigners who go to Pyongyang and, over time, build up a friendship with the woman who has been assigned to them as a translator or assistant ... but these women are in reality agents of the regime,” Mr Jang said in his book Dear Leader.

“The men don’t want to believe they have been fooled, they want to think that it is a genuine relationship. Some months later, when the man has left Pyongyang, he is told that the woman has had a baby.”

Love children from these trysts were raised in secret compounds in a practice which began decades ago and continues to the present day.

“There are districts in Pyongyang where the half-foreign children are kept, effectively as hostages,” Mr Jang said.

“The children are closely monitored by Office 915 of the Worker’s Party’s Strategic Command, with everything they require provided by the most powerful entity in North Korea, the party’s Organisation and Guidance Department.”

Convicted North Korean spy Won Jeong-hwa, 34, was arrested in 2008 after she had affairs with South Korean military officials to extract sensitive information. She also posed as a defector. Picture: Police handout via Reuters

The youngsters were not merely blackmail fodder — thanks to their racially ambiguous appearance they made perfect agents who could be used to infiltrate other countries, he said.

According to the UK Telegraph, suspicion in Japan about the fathers of some of these children has fallen on members of the Japan Socialist Party, which had good links with the Workers’ Party of Korea and frequently took part in political exchange visits to Pyongyang.

“The Japan Socialist Party used to have good relations with North Korea and some members of the party went there in the past,” a spokesman for the party told the paper.

“Since the case of the abduction of Japanese citizens came to light in 2002, however, we have stopped that relationship with the Workers’ Party of Korea.”

In 2008, the South Korean government issued a warning to military personnel and businessmen about North Korea’s “honey trap” scheme following the arrest of one of its most high-profile seductress-spies, Won Jeong-hwa.

The then-defence minister, Lee Sang-Hee, revealed that 34-year-old Ms Won had been trained and commissioned by Pyongyang to extract confidential information from a 26-year-old army captain, who was also arrested.

“This case means North Korea remains unchanged and is trying to strengthen its efforts for revolution deep in the South. We have to clearly understand that any military officer can become a target.”

Prosecutors say Won Jeong-hwa fled the North to China after fearing execution for theft but returned in 1998 to become a spy.

It is thought one of her assignments was to identify and send back home fellow countrymen in China who were attempting to defect to the South, an act which would effectively sign their death warrants.

Kim Hyun-Hee placed a bomb on KAL Flight 858 in 1987, killing all 115 on board. She was pardoned and granted exile in South Korea after she survived a cyanide pill suicide attempt.

In 2013, Australia’s ABC secured an exclusive interview with the queen of North Korea’s spies, Kim Hyun-hee, who was groomed by Pyongyang to plant a bomb on a South Korean passenger plane.

The mission, carried out in 1987, was successful and all 115 on board Korean Airlines Flight 858 were killed.

The motive, it later emerged, was to deter foreign teams from taking part in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

When authorities caught up with Kim and her co-conspirator in Bahrain, both women bit down on a cyanide pill, preferring death to being captured.

But Kim survived and was pardoned by the South Korean government in exchange for telling everything she knew. She now lives in exile in a secret, heavily fortified compound in South Korea. A fear of North Korean assassins means that she doesn’t go anywhere without being surrounded by bodyguards.

The 1987 attack killed all 115 people on board and led to the United States listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.

“From the moment I got on the Korean Air flight, left the bomb in the overhead locker, and until I got off, I was nervous every second of the operation,” Ms Kim told the ABC.

She claimed authorities approached her in the playground of her high school and forced her into spy training.

“In North Korea, I was taught that our leader Kim Il-sung was a god. You were taught to put him before your own parents,” she said.

“You learn from early childhood to say ‘Thank you, Great Leader’ for everything. And if you said the wrong thing, even if it was a slip of the tongue, you’d end up in the gulag.”