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By Root 1922 0

a leading actress in the country's first Technicolor film, playing a little girl whose family flees to the Socialist Paradise from the poverty and misery of South Korea. At age 10, she was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to the senior South Korean delegate to North-South talks in Pyongyang. At age 18, while attending Pyongyang Foreign Language College, she was selected for espionage work, given an assumed name, and sent to a military camp for rigorous ideological and physical training. Later she was intensively trained in passing herself off as Japanese or Chinese, and in clandestine communications and other espionage arts. North Korea carefully molded her for seven years before assigning her and her veteran partner in October 1987 to bomb the South Korean airliner.

When she was captured and brought to Seoul, her initial resolve was to maintain at all costs her false front. Miss Kim told me, "I had heard so many things about the torture and cruelty of the South Korean CIA that I was full of uneasiness and fear. I made up my mind I would have to face the worst part of this to keep my secret." In reality, however, she found that her captors treated her sympathetically and that South Korean television and walking tours of Seoul contradicted North Korean depictions of a corrupt, poverty-stricken American colony. "I began to doubt that the order [to bomb the airliner] was for unification of the country. I discovered I had just committed the crime of killing compatriots.... I thought I would die whether or not I confessed. I thought again and again. Finally I decided I had to tell the truth." After eight days of insisting she was a Chinese native who had lived in Japan, she suddenly spoke to her interrogators for the first time in her native Korean, "Forgive me. I am sorry. I will tell you everything."

In the wake of Miss Kim's confession, Washington assigned a senior Korean-speaking diplomat to make sure her story was true and had not been coerced. Once satisfied, the United States placed North Korea on its list of countries practicing state terrorism, triggering new economic and political sanctions, and it instituted an interagency drive to assist the South in sophisticated security arrangements for the upcoming Olympics. President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz personally took up the threat of North Korean efforts to disrupt the games with Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze in March 1988. "Do not worry," Shevardnadze told Reagan and Shultz. "We [the Soviet Union] will be in Seoul to compete. There will not be any terrorism." From that time on, he proved to be right.

THE RISE OF NORDPOLITIK

The Twenty-fourth Olympiad, September 17-October 2, 1988, provided the pivot for South Korea's foreign policy at the end of the 1980s. Roh's "northern politics" shifted South Korea's declared policy toward Pyongyang and eventually launched new rounds of public and secret negotiations with North Korea's leaders. More immediate, dramatic, and lasting were the fruits of Roh's drive to establish relations with the allies of North Korea, as a new pragmatism and efforts at reform swept over communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In time, these changes would alter the strategic alignments around the Korean peninsula in historic fashion.

Washington Post Tokyo correspondent Fred Hiatt and I interviewed Roh on July 1, 1988, midway between his inauguration in February and the opening of the Olympic games in September. In this first meeting with Roh as president, I found him more relaxed and confident than I had seen him before, even though the government party had surprisingly lost its parliamentary majority in April elections and he was undergoing a rough political shakedown. Speaking to us in the ceremonial reception room of the Blue House, Roh described a fundamental change in policy toward North Korea. In the past, Roh noted, Seoul and Pyongyang had tried hard to isolate each other, each doing all in its power to retard and interfere with the adversary's relations with outside powers. "We have