For decades she has swum in the public memory as the irresistible Mata Hari of Korea — a dastardly seductress who played both sides, charming military secrets out of an American colonel and feeding them to her lover in the communist North.

In 1950, three days after conflict broke out on the Korean peninsula, Kim Soo Im was executed by the Seoul regime: a mysteriously hasty killing, the real motive of which was lost as the country descended into the bloody chaos of war.

Nearly 60 years later, the official story surrounding one of Korea's most infamous women agents has been exposed as a farrago of lies and cover-ups. The truth — and a very different Kim — have now emerged from declassified US National Archives.

Executed at the age of 39, she was not, as the South Koreans dubbed her, a “malicious international spy” or a pawn in the Soviet Union's so-called Operation Sex, but the victim of crude fabrication by a paranoid South Korean Government and a cover-up by the Americans.

The period immediately preceding the outbreak of war on the peninsula continues to intrigue historians and horrify modern South Koreans.

In its anti-leftist fervour, the Seoul regime of Syngman Rhee is now thought to have put more than 100,000 supposed communist sympathisers to death in 1950 alone.

According to the newly available documents an official, US-led inquiry was launched into the days that led up to Kim's execution.

The decision appears to have been made without any evidence or witnesses against her: all that her judges had was a last-minute confession that may well have been elicited by torture.

The documents — the 200-page “Baird Report” representing three months of investigation — further explode the “Korean Mata Hari” myth.

Kim was an attractive socialite and her relationship with a senior US officer was “inappropriate”. But the report concluded that she was no North Korean honey trap and her American lover, Colonel John E. Baird, could not have had access to the kind of sensitive military information that she was supposed to have charmed from him.

The “top communist” to whom she allegedly gave the secrets, Lee Gang Kook, may have been a CIA agent; he was executed as an American spy by the North Koreans just after the fighting ended in 1953.

The framing of Kim appears to have had its roots in the paranoia of the day. Highly educated and part of a circle of politically sophisticated friends, she was attracted to the intellectual socialist Lee.

As Seoul's crackdown on communists gathered pace he fled to the north, leaving his lover.

Kim began work as an assistant to Colonel Baird, a senior figure in the US occupying forces who liberated Korea from the Japanese.

But when Colonel Baird was redeployed and his American wife joined him in Korea, Kim was left without a protector.

A Seoul-led “witch-hunt” for suspected leftists closed in on the Colonel's former lover and Baird — the one man who might have defended Kim at her trial — was hurried out of the country “to avoid further embarrassment”.

Their relationship was long enough to produce a son — Wonil Kim.

Now a 59-year-old professor of theology in California, he has devoted himself to eradicating the popular myth that surrounds his mother: an innocent victim of her times, he says, who had “a passion for life; a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil and drowned”.

The Korean War

— The end of Japanese occupation in Korea in 1945 resulted in Soviet troops occupying the north and US troops the south

— In June 1950 North Korean troops invaded the south

— The following day the UN Security Council condemned the invasion

— The Soviet Union was unable to wield its veto because its delegates boycotted meetings in protest against China's lack of representation at the UN

— President Truman sent US troops into Korea immediately but Seoul fell to North Korea and most of the South Korean army was destroyed

— A UN Command under General Douglas MacArthur engaged North Korean and Chinese forces

— In mid-1951, with the land battle in stalemate, armistice talks began They dragged on for two years, largely because of disagreements over the future of tens of thousands of communist prisoners

— In 1953 thousands of former prisoners from each side were returned and a demilitarised zone was established at the border. A UN commission was set up to supervise the armistice

Source: www.britannica.com

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