DPRK Mata Hari goes on trial today in South Korea accused of spying

The trial opened in Suweon , near Seoul, S. Korea today, of someone calling herself Won Jeong-Hwa . She is suspected of being a spy for North Korea .

According to the chief prosecutor Kim Kyeong Su, Ms Won, thought to be aged 35, was a convicted in North Korea after being caught stealing several tonnes of zinc. She fled to China, was rumbled and returned to the DPRK and agreed to help infiltrate the South as a refugee.

One of her tasks was to find where former secretary of the North Korean Workers' Party Hwang Jang-yop, a key architect of Pyongyang's Juche (self-reliance) theory and the highest-ranking defector in the South in 1997. It appears she failed ... principally because he is in North America.

Apparently she has been in South Korea since 2001 under the tutelage, control, care of "Uncle Kim" (now 63 and also arrested and held - thought to have arrived via cambodia a popular regugee smuggling route) with frequent visits (14 at least) to China to receive orders, money, poisoned needles etc. Her job it appears - after a lengthy debriefing , all defectors are subject to, was as a model defector delivering anti - communist lectures at military bases.

These meetings were used to seduce male military officers and obtain classified military information. Poor Captain Hwang, 26, fell for the honey in the trap and is held in prison.

More will probably become public of what she discovered (although no doubt the trial will go into secret sessions) - she is said to have passed back to the North information about military installations, lists of North Korean defectors and personal data about 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.

Sexy Ms. Won could face execution

Connections to Spyware attack on Military ?

No conection has been established with a recently reported incident when a North Korean spyware e-mail was transmitted to the computer of a colonel at a field army command via China in early August. This e-mail contained a typical program designed automatically to steal stored files if the recipient opens it. Little information is available or if the hack was successful, but their scale could be devastating given that the recipient is in charge of the South Korean military's central nervous system -- Command, Control, Communication, Computer & Information (C4I).

A National Security Council official is said to have lost files stored on his computer after a hacking attack from China earlier this year.

There are claims that an electronic warfare bureau at the North Korean Army's General Staff in accordance with leader Kim Jong-il's instruction in the mid-1980s to prepare for the new battleground. It seems unlikely that efforts started that early but from his first visits to DPRK in 1993, the brightest and the best were being trained and had a fascination for malware - which was then very primitive.

The school was as well kitted out as Google offices are today with pool tables, western music and food and they all spoke excellent (if Oxford accented) English.

The South Korean Defense Ministry believes that the skills of 500 to 600 North Korean hackers are on a par with those of CIA experts. This seems unlikely . In 1999, the department said it traced frequent cyber visitors and found that North Korea topped the list. (i.e 9 years ago - a log, long time in cyberspace)