North Korea spy awaits sentencing

The 34-year-old North Korean native was arrested during the summer along with her 63-year-old stepfather and accused of engaging in espionage and deceit for seven years after defecting to South Korea. Under questioning, she detailed for investigators a double life working for one of the world's most repressive regimes.

The case of Won, only the second North Korean spy to face trial here in the last decade, has riveted the South Korean public and embarrassed the nation's vaunted intelligence network. The press has dubbed her Mata Hari, after the notorious dancer-turned-World War I agent.

After arriving in 2001 at Seoul's Incheon airport, Won was touted by South Korean authorities as a model defector and assigned to tour military bases to lecture troops on the evils of the Stalinist state.

All the while, prosecutors said, she pursued her real agenda: collecting photos of military installations and weapons systems and keeping lists of North Korean defectors and personal data about Southern military officers.

North denies association

The life and motives of Won remain a mystery. Was she a major North Korean operative, as authorities claim? Or merely a hapless former thief brainwashed by the North to provide information that amounted to nothing more than what could be found on the Internet, as her court-appointed lawyer insists?

North Korea denies that Won, who is awaiting sentencing, was its agent, calling her "human scum" and describing the case as a "threadbare charade" to embarrass the North, which has remained technically at war with the South since their conflict ended in an armistice in 1953.

Last week, Won appeared in a crowded courtroom in Suwon as a three-judge panel considered her fate. Dressed in prison-issue top and pants, her hair tied in a ponytail, she avoided eye contact with observers and focused on the judges as the prosecutor read a long list of charges against her.

One of her main missions, the prosecution said, was to locate Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking North Korean defector, who is guarded by police against assassination attempts.

Many say the case, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War, raises questions about how many North Korean spies might be operating in the South. About 4,500 Northern operatives have been exposed since 1948.

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," said Dong-bok Lee, a former South Korean intelligence officer. "And apparently these planted North Korean agents have been very free to go about their work."

During the hourlong hearing, Won, the mother of a 7-year-old, pleaded for leniency, her voice breaking in the hushed courtroom.

"I wanted to turn myself in but I couldn't, because my family is in the North and they could be executed," she sobbed. "Please let me live with my daughter while I repent myself."

Won has told investigators that she is a second-generation North Korean spy -- the youngest daughter of an operative killed during an espionage mission in the South.

Authorities say she served time for theft in the North and feared she would be executed. She fled to China but soon returned and was recruited by North Korea's National Security Agency.

Her first assignment as a spy was to return to China to identify and send back home -- to certain imprisonment or death -- fellow North Koreans there who were trying to defect to the South.

While in China, she became pregnant by a South Korean businessman she met there.

Arriving in disguise