Kim Hyon-hui

Kim Hyon-hui (, born 27 January 1962), also known as Okhwa, is a former North Korean agent and mass murderer, responsible for the Korean Air Flight 858 bombing in 1987, which killed 115 people. Kim excelled as a student and in after-school activities.

She was originally trained as an actress, starring in North Korea's first Technicolor film, though her father, disapproving of her being an actress, refused to let her act again after her appearing in two films. After graduating from high school, she initially enrolled at Kim Il Sung University to study biology, However, she had barely begun her studies there when she was recruited for work.

Espionage training Soon after joining the North Korean intelligence agency in 1980, Kim was given a new name, Ok Hwa, and sent to live in a compound outside of Pyongyang. The compound was mentioned by Kim as "Keumsung Military College", yet the name wasn't mentioned by anyone else before or since. There, Kim spent seven years learning spycraft. Her training included martial arts, physical fitness, and three years of Japanese. Kim's Japanese instructor was Yaeko Taguchi, one of many Japanese people kidnapped by North Korea. Later, Kim testified that Taguchi was known to her as Lee Un-hae (李恩惠, 리은혜). Additionally, students at this facility were shown propaganda films. At the end of her training, Kim was rigorously tested. Part of her final exam required her to infiltrate and memorise a document from a mock embassy.

She was sent to Macau to learn Cantonese, so that she would be able to pose as Chinese when sent on overseas missions. They were also trained to shop in supermarkets, use credit cards and visit disco clubs, amenities that did not exist in their homeland. In 1984, they flew first from Pyongyang to Moscow, from where they travelled to Budapest, where they were given fake Japanese passports and identities, and began posing as a father and daughter touring Europe together. Then, they visited Vienna, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Zurich, Geneva and Paris before going separate ways, the younger Kim returning to Pyongyang via Macau, Guangzhou and Beijing and the older Kim going to Seoul to complete a separate mission. There, the older Kim's contact was discovered by South Korean agents and police, and, according to the younger Kim, the older Kim barely managed to escape South Korea with his life.

Korean Air Flight 858

In 1987, Kim was given an assignment to plant bombs on KAL 858. She was told that the order came directly from Kim Jong Il, and was handwritten. She was told that if she were successful, she would be able to return and live with her family and would not have to work as an agent afterward. She was once again paired with Kim Seung-il, who was recovering from a stomach operation.

She was travelling with a fake Japanese passport under the name of along with Kim Seung-il, who posed as her father and used the name . The two travelled through Moscow, Budapest and Vienna, and eventually met other North Korean agents in Belgrade who provided them with the materials to complete their mission. Once they had left the timer bomb behind (disguised as a portable Panasonic radio, amplified by liquid explosives in a liquor bottle) in the luggage rack of KAL 858, Kim Hyon-hui and Kim Seung-il disembarked in Abu Dhabi and travelled to Bahrain. The two terrorists were apprehended in Bahrain after the authorities there became suspicious of their travel movements and investigators discovered that their passports were fake. At first, she insisted that her name was Pai Chui Hui, an orphan from northern China, who had met an elderly Japanese man with whom she was travelling. She denied any sexual involvement with her partner Kim Seung-il. However, the fact that the only form of Chinese that she spoke, Cantonese, is only spoken in southern China, was inconsistent with her claimed northern Chinese origin.

According to testimony at a United Nations Security Council meeting, Kim was taken on several occasions outside of her prison cell to see the prosperity of Seoul.

She later wrote an autobiography titled The Tears of My Soul, and donated the proceeds to the families of the victims of Flight 858, writing the autobiography under the South Korean-style spelling of her name, Kim Hyun Hee.

Publishers Weekly, in its 1992 review of the book Shoot the Women First by Eileen MacDonald, described Kim as "robot-like" and "wholly submissive to male authority".

In an interview with Washington Post correspondent Don Oberdorfer, Kim said that she'd been led to believe the bombing was necessary to aid the cause of reuniting the peninsula. She repeated this on a 2018 National Geographic documentary about the Kim family. However, the sight of Seoul's prosperity made her realise she'd "committed the crime of killing compatriots."

In March 2009, when meeting family members of Yaeko Taguchi, she mentioned that Taguchi may still be alive, and in connection with this she visited Japan in July 2010. She was also featured by a Japanese television documentary that dramatised her life and revealed how Taguchi used to sing lullabies to her children, from whom she had been separated after being abducted.

Kim has also offered analysis to news organisations about current affairs in North Korea. During the 2013 Korean crisis, Kim suggested on Australian television that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was too young and inexperienced, was "struggling to gain complete control over the military and to win their loyalty." She also commented that he was "using the nuclear programme as a bargaining chip for aid, to keep the public behind him."

In an interview with Mainichi Shimbun in February 2017, Kim argued that the assassination of Kim Jong-nam was a murder by hiring two Southeast Asian women, not by trained spies, and this was intended to make the victim let down his guard.

In an interview with BBC, Kim said that North Korea just pretended to be friendly on the issue of the 2018 Winter Olympics, and its priority still is the nuclear programme.

North Korea denies that Kim was born in the North, and regards her entire biography to be a fabrication of the South. Some North Korean-run schools in Japan have falsely claimed that Kim was a South Korean agent.

Personal life Kim married a former South Korean agent handling her case in 1997 and has two children.

Works Kim, Hyun Hee. The Tears of My Soul. William Morrow & Co, 1993,