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The 51-year-old was given a death sentence after the 1987 attack, in which she and an accomplice managed to plant a bomb on a plane travelling from Baghdad to Seoul via Abu Dhabi.

Despite the death of all 115 passengers on board, she was later pardoned after the South Korean government decided that she had been brainwashed. In an interview from an undisclosed location in South Korea where she lives in fear for her life with her husband and two children, she provided a rare insight into the inner workings of the secretive state and its young leader.

“He’s struggling to gain complete control over the military and to win their loyalty,” she told Australia’s ABC Television. “That’s why he’s doing so many visits to military bases, to firm up support. He’s also using the nuclear program as a bargaining chip for aid, to keep the public behind him.” She added: “North Korea is a not a state, it’s a cult.

“North Korea is using its nuclear programme to keep its people in line and to push South Korea and the United States for concessions,” she said.

Ms Kim said she was first “chosen” to become a spy by party officials who turned up at her school in a black sedan. They told her to pack and gave her one last night with her family before she was given a new name and taken to a mountain spy school to be trained in martial arts, weapons and languages.

“I wasn’t even allowed time to say goodbye to my friends,” she said.

“In North Korea, I was taught that our [founding] leader Kim Il-sung was a god. You were taught to put him before your own parents. You learn from early childhood to say ’Thank you, Great Leader’ for everything.