The Tears of My Soul - Kim Huyn Hee (1993).pdf

A North Korean spy, trained and indoctrinated by her government to kill ruthlessly and efficiently , offers rare insight into the rigors of her enforced service, which ended with a conviction for a plane bombing.

From Publishers Weekly
On November 29, 1987, two North Koreans were arrested in Bahrain, suspected of the terrorist bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in which 115 people died. One of the suspects committed suicide on the spot; the other, the author of this memoir, swallowed poison but survived. Extradited to Seoul, Hyun Hee confessed, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The court later granted a full pardon, ruling that she was not the true culprit in the bombing but an innocent victim of North Korean indoctrination. Here Hyun Hee reveals how she was recruited and trained, and provides details of the bombing. Her depiction of North Korea's Orwellian society is convincing and vivid: it is a world where children patrol the streets and report the slightest ideological infraction and where a citizen speaking disrespectfully of "Beloved Leader" Kim Il Sung can be summarily bludgeoned to death. Also affecting are Hyun Hee's comments about the culture shock she experienced in Seoul and her search for redemption through Christianity. This is a chilling account of brainwashing and subsequent deprogramming. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Daughter of a senior North Korean official, Hee was trained as a covert-operations expert from age 19. Her career ended with her 1987 arrest for placing the bomb that caused the deaths of 115 aboard a South Korean airliner. Subsequently tried and sentenced to death, she was pardoned because the "real criminals" were in North Korea, and she was allowed to settle in South Korea. With this kind of memoir, there are always doubts about its authenticity as well as about how much translation and editing (neither a translator nor an editor is credited in prepublication proofs) may have altered even a genuine account. Making allowances for such doubts, however, one finds here an absorbing and moving tale that strongly suggests that North Korea, one of the world's last Stalinist dictatorships, is not going to die easily or without danger to the rest of the world. Roland Green


Unusual Insight On North Korean Terror Operations
By C. Trew on August 7, 2003

North Korea is undoubtedly the most terror-oriented country in the world today -- both for it's own people and the world at large. This book is a stark exposure of that system.
Miss Kim and a much older agent, posing as her father, successfully bombed a South Korean airliner, killing all on board. As they were about to be arrested, her partner committed suicide with a cyanide pill. With his last words he told her how terrible he felt for her, "...I am old, my life is over...but you..."
As it turned out, this was just the start of another bizarre twist in her strange journey. From a young, innocent girl, to highly trained killer, to notorious celebrity in South Korea, this book tells her incredible story.
Written with assistance from the KCIA -- several years after a reprieve from a death sentence for mass murder -- this book is yet another damning expose of the North Korean regime. It traces her intensive training and indoctrination at various secret North Korean facilities, the terror-bombing of a South Korean airliner, and, eventually, her celebrity status in South Korea (Miss Kim received hundreds of marriage proposals after going public). Particularly insightful is her deprogramming in South Korea after her capture and her reactions to the new world she would now live in.