Victims Were Allegedly Used to Train Spies, Terrorists : Japan Finds No Evidence N. Korea Kidnaped Women

Allegations that North Korean agents have been kidnaping young women from Japan and taking them to Pyongyang caused an uproar earlier this year, but Japanese authorities now say they have no solid evidence to substantiate the claims.

The alleged kidnapings first occurred 10 years ago, and the authorities say they suspected a North Korean connection more than three years ago. Japanese sources speculate that North Koreans abducted Japanese to provide teachers for training spies, not only in language but in such topics as fashion, trends and pop culture--topics with which North Korea’s isolated society lacks familiarity.

The issue was returned to the forefront of public attention by such an accusation. South Korea’s intelligence agency charged that one of the victims tutored the North Korean woman who confessed to putting a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, causing it to crash and disappear without trace in the Thai-Burmese border region or the Andaman Sea last November.

Yet Japanese police say that after two months of intensive searching, they have not found any sign that a Tokyo native answering the description given by the Korean woman was ever abducted.

The missing pieces to the puzzle raise questions about the statements of Kim Hyon Hui, 26, the terrorist. Although Japanese officials do not challenge the veracity of Kim’s confession, some are privately skeptical about the kidnaping story.

The puzzling episode could put a strain on working relations between South Korean and Japanese authorities, who plan to cooperate closely in providing security against terrorism during the Summer Olympic Games in Seoul later this year.

South Korea’s intelligence organization, the Agency for National Security Planning, furnished detailed information about the Japanese tutor’s personal background, along with an artist’s sketch, based on Kim’s recollections. Japanese police mounted a nationwide dragnet in early February, combing through missing person files and circulating about 1.5 million posters and flyers.

All 244 tips received by police by the first week of this month proved to be blind leads, a spokesman for the National Police Agency said. Information phoned in by the public enabled police to solve 32 unrelated missing person cases, but there was nothing to bring them closer to the mysterious woman, known only by her adopted Korean name, Li Un Hye, who purportedly was abducted on a beach about 10 years ago and separated from her parents and two young children.

High Solution Rate

Lack of progress has frustrated the police here. Japan, with its dense population and tightly woven social structure, is a rather difficult place in which to vanish. About 99.5% of the approximately 10,000 missing-person cases each year are solved. Moreover, police are not looking for the missing woman herself but for her friends and relatives, who have no apparent reason not to come forward.

“There’s something peculiar going on here,” observed Futaba Igarashi, a criminal defense lawyer. “The whole thing sounds like a fairy tale.”

But the National Police Agency maintains that Kim’s account of her kidnaped Japanese tutor must be taken seriously because other information that she provided has been independently corroborated.

For instance, her statements about traveling in Eastern Europe on a fake Japanese passport as “Mayumi Hachiya” were confirmed by Hungarian and Yugoslav officials. Kim’s accomplice, Shinichi Hachiya--later identified as Kim Sung Il, also a North Korean agent--died after the two took poison upon their arrest in Abu Dhabi. She survived and was extradited to Seoul, where she made a dramatic, televised confession.

No Doubts

“We expected to hear something by now from a relative or friend” of the tutor, a police spokesman said. “But at this point we’re not doubting the credibility of Kim’s statement.”

Japan joined South Korea and the United States in assailing North Korea for the bombing, and has since imposed sanctions that prohibit direct diplomatic contact, among other things. In doing so, Japan hurt its chances of securing the return of two Japanese seamen held for the past five years in Pyongyang on accusations of espionage after they played a role in the escape of a North Korean defector.

Japan is one of the few capitalist countries with significant economic ties to North Korea--two-way cash and barter trade has hovered between $350 million and $500 million for the past eight years. Japanese banks hold about $480 million in North Korean debt, which effectively has been in default since the mid-1970s.

The fragile, informal links between Tokyo and Pyongyang could suffer greatly if evidence surfaces to support the Li Un Hye kidnaping story.

Until now, the most notorious case of international kidnaping from Japan involved intelligence operatives from South Korea. Agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency or KCIA, as it was then known, bound and gagged Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung in a Tokyo hotel in 1973 and smuggled him back to Seoul to stand trial for anti-government activities.

Earlier Indications

There have been earlier indications that the North Koreans also have been involved in kidnapings. South Korean film actress Choi Eun Hee escaped to the West in 1986, nine years, she said, after being kidnaped by North Korean agents in Hong Kong.

In Japan, police released information about three young women who disappeared under suspicious circumstances along the Japan Sea coast in 1978, implying that they and their boyfriends might have been kidnaped by North Koreans.

South Korean intelligence authorities have released a remarkably detailed portrait of Li Un Hye, the woman who purportedly trained admitted terrorist Kim Hyon Hui in the speech and mannerisms of a contemporary Japanese woman.

Kim purportedly learned through conversations with Li, and with a maid at the spy-training center in North Korea, that the Japanese tutor had been abducted from a beach on the Japan Sea in 1978 or 1979 and taken away in a small boat. A divorcee who was about 21 at the time, she lived in a Tokyo condominium with her parents, brother, sister and her two children--a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son.

Detailed Description

Kim remembered that Li had a husky voice and a fondness for whiskey, hamburger steaks and sliced radishes with soy sauce. Li was a member of her high school tennis club and still suffered from hip pains from an old tennis injury. She once worked as a bar maid. Kim was fairly certain her teacher’s birthday is July 5.

However, no one by that description, it seems, is remembered among Japanese who have lost a daughter, sister or friend.

Still, the fascination continues in Japan for the Mayumi case, as the affair is known here after the name Kim used on her forged passport.

Japan has a large minority population of ethnic Koreans, many of whom trace their origins to the northern half of the peninsula--and among them are some with sympathies for the Pyongyang government. Authorities say the Korean community provides cover and a base of operations for North Korean agents.

Japanese police have prosecuted more than 40 cases of alleged North Korean espionage since 1950, nearly half of them since 1970. Because Japan has no law specifically prohibiting espionage, police brought charges related to violating immigration and alien registration laws.

Claims of Harassment

Some Korean residents of Japan charge that they are subjected to harassment and discrimination, especially since the sensational allegations about the plane bombing incident were aired. The General Assn. of Korean Residents in Japan or Chongryun, a pro-Pyongyang organization, has gone to great lengths to rebut the version of events put forth by Seoul and accepted by Japan and the United States.

To Japanese authorities, Seoul’s version of events is welcome partly because it dismisses early speculation that Japanese terrorists might be linked to the bombing. The Japanese Red Army, which has a track record of air piracy and terrorism, has shown signs that it is ending its long period of dormancy. The Red Army, for example, is suspected of being involved in last week’s bombing of a USO club in Naples.

The North Koreans “pretended that the (Korean airplane) attack was caused by Japanese,” said Shigeyuki Hiroki, assistant director of the Foreign Ministry’s Northeast Asia division. “If the two suspects hadn’t been caught and Mayumi hadn’t been kept alive, it would have been blamed on Japanese terrorists. Now we can tell the whole world we are innocent.”