If North Korea’s Attempt to Kill Hwang Jang Yop Isn’t the State Sponsorship of Terrorism, I Don’t Know What Is

Two North Korean agents sent to South Korea to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking official ever to defect from Pyongyang, have been arrested, intelligence and law enforcement authorities announced yesterday.

According to the National Intelligence Service and prosecutors, Kim Yong-ho, 36, and Dong Myong-gwan, 36, have been arrested. Both men were majors of the North Korean Army’s reconnaissance bureau, the authorities said.

The two agents were ordered in November by the bureau’s chief, Colonel General Kim Yong-chol, to assassinate Hwang, the former secretary of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party. [Joongang Ilbo]

According to the Chosun Ilbo, which has more on the Reconnaissance Bureau, the spies had orders to “cut Hwang’s head off.” The AP, quoting an anonymous prosecutor, reports that the instruction was to “slit the betrayer’s throat.”

As North Korean spies have often done in recent years, Kim and Dong posed as defectors; in this case, they came to South Korea via Thailand. This time, however, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service smelled a rat, and the two men confessed under questioning. The hunt is now on for the spies’ contacts in South Korea.

AFP puts the new revelation into the context of North Korea’s recent threats against Hwang.

You can find the legal definition of “international terrorism” at this section of the U.S. Criminal Code. The procedure for listing a government as a state sponsor of terrorism can be found here.

The assassins were trained in the Peoples’ Republic of China, which has long tolerated the presence of North Korean spies on its soil. Frankly, that may be the most sensational part of this entire story; after all, North Korea has assassinated people on South Korean soil before. I can’t foresee much support in Washington for the idea of listing China as a state sponsor of terrorism, but I certainly hope — this being an election year and all — that some members of Congress will hold hearings and ask the Congressional Research Service to investigate the question of what the Chinese government knew about the training and the plot. At a minimum, China’s support for the North Korean intelligence services is a crime against humanity, and China ought to pay a much higher price for it.