Is North Korea Spying On US? Deadly Female Spies Used By Reclusive Nation In Global Missions

North Korea typically uses highly trained female spies to carry out some of its most covert operations, often involving sex scandals and deadly encounters, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

The death of Kim Jong Nam, half-brother to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, sent shock and inevitable curiosity around the world Monday after he was reportedly poisoned at an airport. Two women and one of their boyfriends have been arrested in connection to the incident.

Female North Korean spies are usually only discovered long after they've carried out their global missions. Duties for spies of any gender vary greatly dependent on the scenario at hand. For North Korean female spies, that has included forming secret political parties in South Korea in an attempt to topple the opposing government, extracting classified information from top-level military officers and other government officials, as well as retrieving fellow spies from dangerous situations on separate missions.

Female North Korean spies have reportedly used sex to get sensitive information from neighboring nations. They included Wom Jeong-hwa, who said she used her body as a "spying tool" at least once while posing as a defector from the North in South Korea around 2001. Despite claiming to reject orders to kill two South Korean officials she garnered relationships with, the former North Korean official was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

North Korean spies have also had to protect each other, according to Lee Sun-Sil, who helped establish the North’s Worker’s Party as an underground political party in South Korea. A North Korean agent rescued Sun-Sil via a secret submarine that brought both spies back to the North, just before 62 people were arrested in connection to the secret southern party, South Korea’s intelligence agency announced in 1992.

At a time when the U.S.' fragile relations with several nations appear to be unstable, with the North's repeated defiant ballistic missiles tests and Russian spy ships reportedly "loitering" off the U.S. coast near Connecticut, it might not be unrealistic to question whether Pyongyang is using spies to infiltrate the U.S., as it has repeatedly done in other nations.

North Korea has been successful in cyber attacks on U.S. entities, including a widely reported hack on Sony after the film production company released the comedy movie "The Interview" criticizing the reclusive North Korean regime.