North Korea's Trail of Kidnapping and Terror

By Melanie Kirkpatrick
Tuesday, July 1, 2008

On Nov. 29, 1987, a bomb exploded on Korean Air Lines Flight 858 off the coast of Burma. One hundred fifteen people died. The bomb had been planted by agents of the North Korean government, which hoped the attack would disrupt preparations for the Summer Olympics in Seoul. The mastermind of the operation was Kim Jong Il, son of Great Leader Kim Il Sung and then-chief of national security.

This is the event that propelled Pyongyang onto the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, a designation that took place on Jan. 20, 1988. Since then, Kim Jong Il has gone on to succeed his father as absolute ruler of his country. Under his leadership, North Korea has built several nuclear weapons, transferred nuclear technology to Syria and missile technology to Iran, counterfeited U.S. currency, and laundered U.N. funds.

Yet last week President Bush announced his intention to begin the process of taking North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror. It's a coup for Pyongyang, which can now lay claim to the mantle of being of a higher moral order than Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba, its former companions on the list.

In addition to the KAL 858 bombing, North Korea's terror record includes kidnapping Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s for the purpose of forcing them to train North Korean spies to pass as Japanese nationals. Pyongyang repatriated five abductees a few years ago and was proved to have lied about the death of the most famous one, Megumi Yokota, a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way home from school in 1977. There are 12 unaccounted-for victims on Japan's official list of abductees, but Tokyo believes the true count may be in the hundreds.

South Korea, too, has hundreds of missing citizens – either kidnapped by the North or captured during the 1950-53 Korea War. Kim Jong Il, a movie buff, famously abducted a South Korean actress and her director husband. (They eventually escaped.) There currently are 485 people on Seoul's list of abductees and more than 500 POWs still missing. The South Korean press reported last month that a 78-year-old Korean War POW escaped to China and is now waiting in a third country for repatriation to the South.

The State Department's most recent report on terror-sponsoring nations also notes that North Korea continues to give sanctuary to four members of the Japanese Red Army who participated in the 1970 hijacking of a domestic Japan Airlines flight. With the support of Washington, Tokyo has been seeking their return for decades, to no avail.

The details of the bombing of Flight 858 are known thanks to the confession of one of the conspirators, a young woman named Kim Hyun-hee. Ms. Kim and her co-conspirator traveled on false Japanese passports, posing as father and daughter. They boarded the plane in Baghdad and deposited their bomb in an overhead compartment before deplaning in Abu Dhabi.

Police caught up with the bombers in Bahrain, where Ms. Kim was arrested before she was able to kill herself by biting down on a cyanide capsule hidden in a Marlboro cigarette. (Her companion was successful in his suicide attempt.) She was convicted by a South Korean court in 1989 and sentenced to death, but then pardoned by the government, which said she was a victim of North Korean indoctrination. North Korea has never accepted responsibility for, much less apologized for, the bombing.

Contrast this tale of unaccountability with that of another airplane bombing – that of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. The terrorists responsible were from Libya, under the control of Moammar Gadhafi. In 2003, Gadhafi agreed to give up his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in return for an end to his country's international isolation. Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing, agreed to pay the families of each of the 270 victims a sum of up to $10 million, and turned over two intelligence officials for trial by a Scottish court near The Hague.

In 2006 – after Libya had fulfilled its promises – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that the U.S. would remove the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror. She called Libya an "important model" for resolving the dispute with North Korea. If only.