Korean Spy Allegedly Used Sex to get Secrets
Associated Press | August 27, 2008
SEOUL, South Korea - Prosecutors announced Wednesday that they have arrested a woman from North Korea on charges of spying for the communist nation while living in South Korea, posing as a defector and using "sex as a tool" for her mission.
The suspect, identified as Won Jeong-hwa, 34, confessed after her July 15 arrest that she was a spy trained and commissioned by North Korea's intelligence agency, prosecutors said in a statement.
She is the first alleged North Korean spy arrested in South Korea since 2006, and the second in a decade, the statement said.
Won entered the South in 2001 after marrying a South Korean businessman in China, falsely reporting to authorities that she was a defector from the North, prosecutors said. She and her husband immediately divorced.
While in the South she gathered and passed classified information on to the North, including the locations of key military installations, lists of North Korean defectors and personal information on South Korean military officers, the statement said.
She dated a South Korean army captain and the officer cooperated with her, providing a list of North Korean defectors and destroying her faxed reports to the North's spy agency.
The captain, identified only by his surname Hwang, was also arrested, the statement said.
She used "sex as a tool for her spy activity," the statement said.
Prosecutors also allege that she plotted to assassinate South Korean intelligence agents with poisoned needles provided by the North.
The statement said Won often traveled to China to visit the Chinese office of the North's spy agency, where she received instructions and money for her mission. Prosecutors said she received a total of US$60,000 worth of cash and goods from the office.
Before entering South Korea, Won worked as a North Korean intelligence agent in China and played a role in arresting and sending about 100 defectors back to the impoverished nation, prosecutors said.
"There have been concerns that there might be spies among defectors as the number of defectors has risen," the statement said. "This is the first case where these concerns were confirmed."
No trial date has been set for Won, who is in custody. If convicted, she faces anywhere from seven years in prison to execution.
In recent years, thousands of North Koreans facing hunger and repression at home have defected to South Korea via China or Southeast Asian nations. More than 13,500 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the Korean War, most of them since the early 2000s.
The two Koreas fought the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, which means the peninsula still remains technically at war.
Their relations had warmed significantly after the first-ever summit of their leaders in 2000, but chilled again this year after conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February with a pledge to get tough on the North.
