SHE was "the Korean seductress who betrayed America," a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.
In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a "very malicious international spy".
The United States in the Fifties was gripped by anti-communist fever: one television drama
told viewers her "womanly wiles" had been the communists' "deadliest weapon".
However, in yellowing US military files stamped "secret," hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived.
The record of a confidential 1950 US inquiry and other declassified files in the US National Archives reveal that Colonel John E Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Miss Soo-im had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.
The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up. Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Col Baird was rushed out of Korea to "avoid further embarrassment".
She was left to her fate – almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done.
The son of Kim Soo-im and Col Baird, Wonil Kim, is now on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, "with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned."
The theology professor at California's LaSierra University was the first to discover the declassified US documents. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul film director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on Kim Soo-im.
"He betrayed her," Cho said of Col Baird. "He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family."
Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul's prestigious Ewha women's college.
She later met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated intellectual active in Seoul's leftist movement. She became his lover, and Lee rose to political prominence after Japan's defeat. But within a year of the US takeover, he faced arrest as an alleged security risk and fled to communist-run northern Korea.
Kim Soo-im's fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the US occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Col Baird, the Americans' 56-year-old, Irish-born military police chief.
Col Baird secured a house for her and took to spending nights there, according to Korean and American witnesses in the declassified record.
When the US occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory corps, Col Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American wife joined him in Korea.
Finally, on 1 March, 1950, Miss Soo-im, no longer US-employed, was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee's roundups of leftists.
On 14 June, 1950, nine days after Col Baird sailed from Korea, Miss Soo-im faced a five-judge South Korean military court and a long list of alleged crimes, including obtaining from the colonel vehicles that she lent or sold to "communist" friends, and transporting Lee Gang-kook to the northern border in 1946 with a US Army jeep.
The most serious charge accused her of eliciting the classified 1949 US withdrawal plans from Baird, and relaying them to the northern communists.
As her court-appointed lawyer noted, the government presented neither material evidence nor witnesses to back up the charges. But on the trial's third day, Kim Soo-im confessed and was sentenced to death.
Just weeks after her execution, however, and across the Pacific, US military investigators reviewing Col Baird's role were hearing confidential evidence from army officers.
It indicated that Kim's conviction was a contrivance of the Seoul authorities, and concluded that there was only a "remote possibility" Kim Soo-im used Col Baird.
The dancer who passed on secrets and the matron who helped allies escapeONE of the most famous female spies of all time is Mata Hari. Born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, as Margraetha Geertruida Zelle, she married a Dutch army captain of Scottish ancestry, Rudolph Macleod, who she divorced in the early 1900s.
Margaretha moved to Paris in 1903 where she worked as an exotic dancer. With fame came many lovers, including government officials and military officers.
By the early 1900s, it appears she was passing information to the Germans. During the First World War, she travelled as a dancer between The Hague and Paris. In occupied Belgium, she may have used her contacts to pick up secrets and pass them to the French. The French noticed Mata Hari still met with German military officers and other officials, became suspicious and arrested her on 13 February, 1917, on charges of spying.
She was tried by a military court, sentenced to death by firing squad and executed five months after her arrest.
• Edith Cavell was also executed for being a spy during the First World War.
Born in England, she was working in a Belgian nursing school when war broke out.
She worked undercover to help soldiers from France, England and Belgium escape from the Germans. At first she was allowed to continue as matron of a hospital and, while doing so, helped at least 200 more soldiers to escape.
When the Germans realised what was happening she was put on trial for harbouring foreign soldiers and convicted in two days. She was killed by a firing squad in October 1915 and buried near the execution site, despite appeals for clemency from the United States and Spain.
• French-speaking "Miss Jenny" was a spy during the American revolutionary war, working on the side of the British loyalists.
She managed to infiltrate the French troops and, in the summer of 1781, she reported to the British that the French and Americans were planning an attack on New York.
When caught by a French guard she claimed to be searching for her French-Canadian father. They gave up trying to make her confess and inflicted the informal punishment of cutting off her hair.
