Won Jeong Hwa “Sex Spy” Jailed for 5 Years

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Won Jeong Hwa (34) was arrested in July on charges of passing classified information to the North Korea. These included the locations of key military installations, lists of North Korean defectors and personal information on South Korean military officers.

She is the first female spy to be arrested since Lee Sun-sil, a key figure in North Korea’s Communist Party, was apprehended on espionage charges in 1992, and the first defector to violate the National Security Law.

The Suwon District Court, south of Seoul, found Won Jeong Hwa had collected information on key military installations and passed it on to North Korean agents in China. She was also found guilty of involvement in the kidnapping of a South Korean businessman from China to her hardline communist homeland in 1999, and of trying to trace the whereabouts of a top defector living in the South.

Won Jeong Hwa allegedly relayed military secrets she obtained from Army officers with whom she was having sexual relations over the past five years to the North. According to investigators, she maintained romantic relations with three to four officers and even shared an apartment with an Army First Lieutenant Hwang. The 27-year-old Hwang reportedly suspected that his partner was a spy, but ignored the fact and handed her classified military information.