Was Alice Hyun Korea’s Mata Hari or a revolutionary? Professor Byung Joon Jung will be exploring the complex identity of Alice Hyun, the first Korean-American to be born in Hawaii.
Alice Hyun worked for the War Department of the US during the Pacific War and after the end of WWII, she moved to Tokyo as one of the Japanese Nisei women linguists who served for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). She transferred to Seoul in 1945 where she served as a civilian employee of the War Department in the Civil Communication Intelligence Group, Korea (CCIG-K). But she was soon deported for her contacts with the Korean communists as well as the United States Communist Party. She moved to Los Angeles in the middle of 1946 and joined radical Korean groups supporting Korean Independence, a weekly newspaper published by Korean radicals in LA. She eventually moved to Pyongyang where she was caught as a spy of the U.S. Intelligence Agency. It is believed that Alice was executed by the North Korean regime without due trial in 1956.