Kim Hyon-hui has a chequered history in espionage, including knowledge of abducted Japanese citizens, writes DAVID McNEILLin Tokyo
IT HAS all the ingredients of the most far-fetched spy story: a beautiful North Korean destined to become an actress opts instead for a career in espionage.
Brainwashed to despise the North’s southern neighbour, she bombs a Korean Air jet in 1987, reportedly on the orders of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, killing 115 people. When captured, she attempts to kill herself by biting into a cyanide pill but is stopped by a guard. Her accomplice dies from the same method.
This week, this exotic product of the cold war touched down in Tokyo under heavy police guard. Kim Hyon-hui will spend the next few days briefing them on her extraordinary career and facing the families of Japanese who were abducted by Pyongyang in a bizarre military programme to train spies. Among them is the son of Yaeko Taguchi, her Japanese teacher who was whisked away by North Korean spies in 1978 and never returned.
Kim’s story, her direct connection to the Japanese abductees and her unlikely redemption, fascinates Japan. Such is the interest in her here that the authorities have waived rules that should have prevented her from setting down in the country at all.
As a foreign national at one time sentenced to death and who carried a fake Japanese passport during the Korean Air attack, she should have been arrested at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Instead, her status makes her something akin to a visiting VIP. Some Japanese critics have branded the visit a stunt that will yield little fresh information about the fate of the missing Japanese.
During her four-day stay, the 48-year-old will meet Hiroshi Nakai, Japan’s minister in charge of the abduction issue. In 2002 Pyongyang admitted kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens and released five, claiming the rest were dead.
Japan believes the number taken was larger and that some of the abductees are alive, including Yaeko Taguchi. Many Japanese also hope she will reveal evidence about the fate of Megumi Yokota, who disappeared weeks before her 13th birthday in November 1977, while walking home from school along the Sea of Japan coast.
Years later it was revealed she had been stuffed into a sack and spirited to Pyongyang. North Korea says she committed suicide in a hospital in 1993. Her parents believe she is still alive and want to talk to Kim, who met her in Pyongyang in the 1980s.
Taguchi was taken to Pyongyang aged 22, given a Korean name and forced to become a Japanese language tutor to future spies like Kim.
Her son, Koichi Lizuka, who was a baby when his mother was kidnapped, said he wants to ask her "about my mother's gestures and favourite things so I can get an image of her". Kim was sentenced to death by South Korea in 1990 but pardoned a month later. She went on to write a best-selling autobiography called Tears of My Soul.