Femmes fatales
Spies know the power of a pretty face
In Malaysia three people, two of them women and believed to be agents of North Korea, have been arrested on suspicion of assassinating Kim Jong-nam on the orders of his younger brother, the pudgy, murderous leader of that rogue state.
In South Korea, in an undisclosed location and under heavy guard, is a 55-year-old woman trained as an assassin by North Korea who now lives in fear of assassination. In 1987, on orders from Pyongyang, she murdered 115 people.
Thirty years separate the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 from the killing of Kim Jong-nam, yet the earlier episode is key to what happened this week at Kuala Lumpur airport: the inherited paranoia of the North Korean dynasty, its imaginative ruthlessness and its contempt for international law.
But most importantly, these two episodes bring into focus a secret weapon that North Korea has deployed for decades: the use of women agents, highly trained and elaborately brainwashed, to kill opponents abroad and sow terror among its enemies. Pyongyang has long understood something that the West has discovered only recently: women often make the best spies.
Kim Hyon-hui was born in Pyongyang in 1962. Bright, studious and attractive, she first trained as an actress and starred in North Korea’s first Technicolor film. But after studying languages at Kim Il-sung University, she was enrolled in North Korea’s spy agency.
In a secret training compound, she was instructed in martial arts and spycraft, and taught Japanese by a young Japanese woman who had been kidnapped by the North Korean regime. She was also fed a diet of undiluted and extremely potent propaganda.
‘‘I was taught that our leader was a god,’’ she said later. ‘‘North Korea is not a state – it’s a cult.’’
In 1987 she was sent with an accomplice to bomb a South Korean airliner flying from Baghdad to Seoul. The orders came directly from Kim Jong-il, the father of North Korea’s present leader. South Korea was about to host the Olympic Games, and Pyongyang was determined to disrupt that event by bringing down a South Korean aircraft. Kim Hyonhui was told, and believed, that her act of terrorism would aid the revolution and unite the two Koreas.
The North Korean terrorists, travelling on fake passports, planted a bomb in an overhead luggage locker on Flight 858 and disembarked when the plane stopped in Abu Dhabi. It exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing everyone on board.
The bombers were arrested in Bahrain. Kim Hyon-hui’s accomplice bit on a cyanide pill concealed in a cigarette and died quickly; she attempted to do the same, but the suicide device was snatched from her mouth by a policewoman.
Kim Hyon-hui was flown to Seoul. Exposed to reality, and finally realising the extent of her indoctrination, she broke down and confessed. Initially sentenced to death, she was later pardoned on the grounds that the North Korean state had programmed her and was therefore responsible for her actions.
She lives in hiding, an outspoken critic of the North Korean regime, and now herself a prime target for Pyongyang’s assassins.
Kim Hyon-hui and her latter-day counterparts were able to avoid suspicion in part on account of their gender, and the unconscious, culturally ingrained and erroneous assumption that women do not kill as easily as men.
The Russians are especially adept at deploying women spies. Some of the ‘‘sleeper’’ agents uncovered in the United States in 2010 wore floral print dresses and cultivated hydrangeas. The most famous, Anna Chapman, was also the prettiest, and was recruited in part on that basis: the prurience of the West ensured that press coverage focused on her looks – ‘‘flamehaired, green-eyed Kremlin cutie’’ – more than the serious danger posed by undercover agents.
For more than a decade MI5 and MI6 have been actively recruiting more women – officers as well as agents.
But the modern assassin does not look like James Bond. Instead of a sharp suit and a gun, she is much more likely to be wearing a T-shirt with LOL on it and carrying a tiny handbag, with a poison spray inside.