Assassination

North Korea: West’s enemies know female spies are deadlier

In Malaysia three people, two of them women and believed to be agents of North Korea, have been arrested on suspicion of assassinating Kim Jong-nam on the orders of his younger brother, the pudgy, murderous leader of that rogue state.

In South Korea, in an undisclosed location and under heavy guard, is a 55-year-old woman trained as an assassin by North Korea who now lives in fear of assassination. In 1987, on orders from Pyongyang, she murdered 115 people.

Thirty years separate the bombing of Korean Air
Flight 858 from the killing of Kim Jong-nam, yet the earlier episode is key to what happened this week in Kuala Lumpur airport: the inherited paranoia of the North Korean dynasty, its imaginative ruthlessness and its contempt for international law.

But most importantly these two episodes bring into focus a secret weapon that North Korea has deployed for decades: the use of women agents, highly trained and elaborately brainwashed, to kill opponents abroad and sow terror among its enemies. Pyongyang has long understood something that the West has discovered only recently: women often make the best spies.