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By Root 1881 0

on October 7, 1987, two highly trained espionage agents, a veteran operative and a young woman who had posed abroad as his daughter, were summoned to their headquarters in Pyongyang and assigned to destroy a South Korean airliner. They were told that the order came directly from Kim Jong Il, son of the North Korean president, and that its aim was to dissuade the nations of the world from participating in the Seoul Olympics. On November 29, a powerful bomb planted by the two operatives destroyed Korean Air Lines flight 858, flying across Southeast Asia on its way from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. All 115 persons onboard, mostly young South Korean men on their way home from engineering projects in the Middle East, were killed.

Kim Seung Il, a 70-year-old veteran North Korean espionage agent posing as a Japanese tourist, and Kim Hyon Hui, a 25-year-old agent on her first espionage operation, had boarded the flight in Baghdad and disembarked at the next stop, Abu Dhabi. They left behind, tucked away in an overhead luggage rack, a time bomb concealed in the hollowed-out innards of a portable radio. The original plan called for the two agents to immediately board a flight from Abu Dhabi back to Rome and then Vienna, where they would meet North Korean diplomats who would arrange their trip home. However, unexpected airport procedures in Abu Dhabi forced them to fly to Bahrain instead. There they languished for two days waiting for seats on a Rome-bound flight while the world absorbed the news of the mysterious airline explosion and intelligence agencies gradually zeroed in on the father-and-daughter "Japanese tourists" who had briefly traveled on the ill-fated plane.

Japanese police were quickly able to determine that the young woman's passport was a forgery. She and her companion were arrested at Bahrain airport while preparing to board their Rome-bound plane. As they were seized, both of them bit into poison ampules hidden in the filter tips of cigarettes they carried. The veteran agent died instantly, but Kim Hyun Hui survived, due to the quick reaction of a Bahraini policewoman who snatched the cigarette from her mouth before she had ingested enough of the poison. After Bahrain was convinced she was a North Korean, she was flown under heavy guard to Seoul, where for eight days she steadfastly held to a prepared cover story before finally confessing to her true identity and details of her act. Miss Kim was tried and sentenced to death for the bombing but eventually was given a presidential pardon on grounds that she was merely a brainwashed tool of the real culprits, the leaders of North Korea.

Years later I sat in a downtown Seoul office with Miss Kim, who told me the story of her life as a diplomat's daughter, a trained terrorist, and, lately, a devout Christian who had substituted Jesus for Kim Il Sung as her savior. Although I had interviewed many defectors in the course of decades of reporting, this interview was uniquely unnerving. I found Miss Kim to be very beautiful, elegant, demure, and calm, tastefully dressed. I did not know then that she had been trained in North Korea to run ten miles in a single stretch, to benchpress 150 pounds, to shoot a silenced pistol with great accuracy, and to deliver karate chops that would swiftly kill. It was chilling to connect this attractive and intelligent young woman to the murder of 115 innocent people traveling home to their families.

As she had flown amid the passengers who would soon be killed by the powerful bomb in the luggage rack above her head, she did not dwell on the lives she would destroy but on her challenging mission. She had been told and believed, she said, that her act "was for national unification, which was a great purpose and aspiration of the nation" and therefore justified the human sacrifices. "People in democratic countries find it hard to believe, but I thought about it as a military order, to be accepted without question," she said.

From her youngest days, Miss Kim had been a star. As the daughter of a diplomat, she was selected as a small child to be