S. Korea Sends Home Spies

Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans poured into the streets Saturday to welcome 63 former communist spies and guerillas — some on stretchers and in wheelchairs — returning home after decades in South Korean prisons.

South Korea repatriated the aging ex-convicts across the heavily-armed border Saturday in another step toward rapprochement with the communist North. Hours later in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, huge crowds standing in neat lines waved red flags and pink paper flowers as buses carrying the returning ex-spies drove through the city's main boulevards.

The scene played out on Northern TV footage monitored in Seoul, the South's capital. Pyongyang streets "turned into a veritable sea of flowers," said the North's official foreign news outlet, KCNA.

Once on the northern side, the former spies had tearful reunions with family members, KCNA said. Kim Jong Il sent his defense minister, Kim Il Chol, to greet them. A brass band played revolutionary songs.

The return of the convicted spies is a key part of an accord reached at a historic summit in June. At that meeting, the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to work together for reconciliation and reunification after decades of hostility.

The ex-prisoners, ranging in age from 66 to 90, refused to renounce their communist ideology during an average of 36.5 years in South Korean prisons. Some weeping, they crossed the border earlier Saturday at the truce village of Panmunjom inside the Demilitarized Zone, a buffer area between the two countries. Five were taken away by ambulance after crossing the border.

The North Korean ex-spies had been living as free men after serving prison terms ranging from 13 years to 45 years, but they had been barred from leaving the South.

"I feel like I am going on a picnic," said Kim In Su, 77, who spent 36 years in prison. "When I left the North, my son was six years old. Now, he is 46."

One of the ex-spies Kim Suk Hyong, 87, who spent 30 years in prison, has a wife and six children in the North.

"I have never given up my confidence that I will eventually return home," he said Saturday, shortly before crossing the border in a wheelchair.

North Korea, which badly needs a boost to the morale of its hunger-stricken people, used the return of "men of faith and indomitable fighters" to urge loyalty to its totalitarian leader, Kim Jong Il.

Their repatriation "is a shining fruition of the love, comradely sense of obligation and immense magnanimity shown by the Great Leader Kim Jong Il for revolutionary soldiers," said Rodong Sinmun, the official daily of the North's ruling Workers' Party of Korea. "He has spared no efforts to bring them under his loving care and bestow all happiness and honor upon them."

North Koreans cheered the former spies' motorcade along the 124-mile route from Panmunjom to Pyongyang.

Senior military and party officials hugged the tearfuex-spies in Pyongyang's main plaza. They later paid tribute to Kim Jong Il's late father, longtime President Kim Il Sung, who is lying in state in a mammoth memorial. The two Kims are revered as demigods in the isolated North.

About 1.2 million North Koreans fled to South Korea before or during the 1950-53 Korean War, and thousand of South Koreans are believed to have gone to the North voluntarily or after being drafted into the North's army. The two Koreas are separated by a heavily militarized border, and people on one side have been unable to contact those on the other for almost half a century.

The mass spy repatriation is part of thawing relations following the June summit, the first ever between the Korean states. Since the summit, the two Koreas have reopened dialogue between their governments and allowed reunions of some families separated since the war.

Some South Koreans objected to the spy repatriation, saying their government should have demanded the return of hundreds of their citizens believed to be held against their will in the North.

"Return kidnapped people!" 150 people, including eight opposition legislators, shouted as two buses carrying the North Koreans slowed to cross a bridge near the border.

The Seoul government says 454 South Koreans, mostly fishermen, have been forcibly taken by the North. About 300 Southern soldiers captured during the Korean War are also believed to be held there. Pyongyang has denied such allegations in the past.

Seoul said Saturday that five South Korean prisoners of war, a South Korean fisherman and his North Korean wife and son recently arrived in the South through an unidentified third country after escaping North Korea. The POWs toiled at mines in the North, the South's government said.

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