The Tears of My Soul. Kim Hyun-hee. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993.

This book is well worth reading primarily because it offers a glimpse into the training and operational procedures of North Korea’s intelligence services. I’m not sure if the descriptions of training are credible or not, but have not found information to the contrary. It also offers a view of life in North Korea a few years before the great famine of the mid-1990s, even if that of an elite, which serves to contrast the realities of life for those in Pyongyang today.

Kim Hyun-hee (김현희) and Kim Sung-il (김성일) were the two North Korean agents responsible for placing a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858 on 29 November 1987, killing all 115 on board. They were captured a few days later and both attempted suicide by biting down on capsules of cyanide gas concealed in cigarette filters. Kim Sung-il, 70, succeeded and died immediately, while Kim Hyun-hee, then 26, lost consciousness but recovered and was eventually interrogated in Seoul. The Tears of My Soul is her description of the bombing and the events in her life that led up to it.

Kim Hyun-hee was born in 1962 in the city of Kaesŏng, near the DMZ. Her father had an important position dealing with foreign affairs, and the family lived in Cuba for five years while Hyun-hee was a child. Even in Cuba her indoctrination wasn’t forgotten, and she notes that, “even among young children anti-American sentiment ran deep… my father spoke of the ‘imminent attack by the Yankee Imperialist’ … after that I was too frightened to even return to the beach [from which the U.S. could be seen on the horizon].”

Upon returning to North Korea, the family lived as regime elite in Pyongyang, and Kim was “enrolled in extracurricular activities with an ideological bent, and those were so intensive that we often did not come home until ten at night.” There are many examples of the indoctrination and activities of the Youth Corps.

During her last year of high school, Kim was accepted by the Kim Il-sung University Biology Department, where a “class was called a platoon, a department as company, the undergraduate group a battalion, and son on. The class leader was called lieutenant, and the Student Department head was caption.” However, she soon transferred to Pyongyang Foreign Language College and majored in Japanese language.

During her second year at Pyongyang Foreign Language College, at age 18, she was interviewed for what would become her future position in intelligence:

“What are the four basic principles of the Party?” one asked.
“Deification, Creed, Absoluteness, and Unconditional Acceptance,” I replied automatically.
Why do you study Japanese?”
“I am learning Japanese to help our nation prevail over Japan so that Korean can be reunified.”
“What will you do after school?”
“I will do whatever the Party tells me to.”
“Very good. No recited from memory the first chapter of The Memory of Kim Jung Sook, Kim Jung Il’s Wife.”
I was about to recite the lines almost without hesitation. He seemed amazed by my memory.
“How are your grades?”
“They are outstanding, sir.”
He handed me an excerpt from Kim Il Sung’s Memoirs in Japanese and asked me to translate it on the spot. I did so without error.

Seems a bit soon in training to be able to translate, but perhaps she was familiar with the work in Korean.

Kim Hyun-hee passed her interviews with the special agents, was accepted into the Korean Worker’s Party, immediately taken from school to begin training at Keumsung Military College, and given the alias Kim Ok-hwa.

Kim trained rigorously for three years at Keumsung Military College with a curriculum that included Japanese language, martial arts, firearms, knife fighting, infantry skills, etc., aside from the obligatory study of Kim Il-sung’s works and thoughts.

At the end of three years, her class had their final exam, which lasted several days and consisted of three parts: physical, written, and a field test.

The first portion of the physical test was a 15 km (9.3 miles) along mountain trails around the school. Surprisingly, a few of her classmates were not able to complete this task. Surprising since less than 10 miles is not a long distance, and considering how she described the training over the previous three years.

The physical portion of the test also included martial arts, marksmanship, and weightlifting, all scored for points. She was able to lift 75 kg (165 lbs), and an apparently muscle-bound agent-in-training lifted the most at 200 kg (441 lbs). In all my time in South Korea, I may have seen one South Korean able to lift that much – anyone that big would stick out like a sore thumb anywhere in Asia.

The written test included essay questions concerning the philosophy of – predictably – Kim Il-sung and socialist ideology, but also sections on math, language (Japanese for Kim), etc.

Each student had an individual field test; Kim Hyun-hee’s mission was to hike about six miles at night to break into a facility, crack a safe with Japanese documents in it, memorize the contents of the documents, and escape unnoticed. The training facility was mock-up of a Western embassy, complete with guards, cameras, furniture, etc., as well as other agents acting as embassy staff. She was supplied weapons (wax bullets), given a layout, and so on.

Though she didn’t get the documents and was soon found out, she escaped the mock embassy and got back to her college before he time limit was up. Obviously she passed all the exams and became a special agent.

Follow-on training before her fateful KAL 858 mission included overseas travel for acclimation to foreign mannerisms, including a stint in Macao, a longtime favorite of North Korean intelligence.

Eventually she received her final assignment, and gives a fair amount of detail into the planning and training she had for that, including additional foreign travel posing as a Japanese tourist daughter (Mayumi Hachiya) with her elderly father, Kim Sung-il (Shinichi Hachiya).

The plan to blow-up a South Korean airliner was, according the Kim Hyun-hee, ordered directly by Kim Jong-il:

[The Director said] “The order, you may be interested to know, was written by our Dear Leader himself, Kim Jung-il. Handwritten, that is.” Again he paused, to make certain that we understood the weight of this information.

The goal? The prevent the 1988 Olympics from being hosted by South Korea, thereby discredit the government and helping to create conditions for revolution in the South and allowing Korea to be reunified under the North Korean system. An absurd plan, and just as flawed as the 1983 North Korean terrorist bombing in Burma, also reportedly planned by Kim Jong-il, who is presently attempting to get North Korea off the U.S. State Department list of terrorist sponsoring nations.

The plan proceeded. North Korean agents in Baghdad, where KAL 858 originated from, provided them with a radio containing C-4 explosive and a liquor bottle containing Picatinny Liquid Explosive (PLX). Kim Hyun-hee and Kim Sung-il disembarked in Abu Dhabi, UAE while the flight continued on towards Bangkok, Thailand, exploding en route, 29 November 1987.

As noted at the beginning of this review, Kim Hyun-hee was apprehended and attempted suicide. She eventually made a full confession, faced trail in Seoul, was convicted and sentenced to death. However she was pardoned in 1989.

Her earlier travel abroad for training had alerted her to the possibility that North Korean paradise and Juche were not exactly correct, and her months with South Korean special agents assigned to both interrogate and guard her eventually brought her to reality. She confessed and repented; the proceeds from this book went to the families of the victims of KAL 858. The also married one of the special agents that watched over her during those months.

Her book was meant to what happened and why. It is also filled with the many little observations she had before her capture that made her doubt communism and the North Korean regime, as well as the larger reasons after. However, a bit of Korean nationalism still made its way it, the sort that’s good on both sides of the DMZ (from page 174):

“Yes, I think so too,” said [South Korean special agent] Li Ok, who had joined the conversation and taken my hand in her own. “You know, I think a foreigner might not understand this decision [to pardon Kim]. I thin one has to have lived through the painful division of Korea to appreciate it. People elsewhere couldn’t imagine what it’s like to have their country split in two…”

As noted in the book, Kim’s family likely went to the gulag and died there. Kim also quoted in detail comments made by her roommate in agent training that were decidedly pro-capitalist. I suppose Kim was trying to make the point that exposure can lead even the most indoctrinated North Koreans to see the truth of their regime, but even if she altered names and times, it probably got some people killed or sent to the gulags.

Very little current information on Kim Hyun-hee is available as she reportedly still lives under guard, against retaliation from both the families of the victims of KAL 858 and North Korean reprisals.

Not a must read, but still highly recommended.