Megumi Yokota was kidnapped by North Korean agents when she was 13 and taken to North Korea to help teach Japanese to spy. She reportedly committed suicide in 1993.

The North Korean regime's longtime use of terrorism as a weapon reached new extremes in the 1980s, as North Korean agents attacked a South Korean delegation in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), in 1983 and murdered four government ministers. In 1987, they planted a bomb on Korean Airlines Flight 858, resulting in 115 deaths.

But North Korea's most puzzling behavior was directed toward Japan, a former enemy that had become one of the isolated regime's few major trading partners and sources of investment. Between 1977 and 1983, North Korean agents abducted at least 13 Japanese citizens, who were forced to teach Japanese language and customs to spies who took over their identities. (Years later, five of the victims were allowed to return home, but eight died in captivity.) Additionally, North Korea for years sheltered members of the Japanese Red Army, a freelance terrorist group that had hijacked Japanese jetliners in the 1970s.

In 1993, the North Korean regime announced that it opposed all kinds of terrorism, including assistance to non-state terrorist organizations. However, in recent congressional testimony, various witnesses — including a former North Korean official — described an evolutionary shift to more insidious forms of aggression, including counterfeiting of foreign currencies and the production of heroin and methamphetamine, which are smuggled into Japan. In addition to their destructive effects, those tactics have the added benefit of producing income that can be plowed into North Korea's efforts to develop long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.