North Korea says it breaks up foreign-run spy ring

SEOUL, Sept 5 (Reuters) North Korea said today it had broken up a foreign-run spy ring trying to collect details on key military and strategic sites in the isolated communist state.

State media said security officials had arrested the spymaster, from an unidentified foreign intelligence service, along with ''some unsound'' North Koreans who had been lured into spying on their country while travelling abroad ''by the method of money and girls, threat and blackmail''.

The plot was revealed at a news conference in Pyongyang today by an officer of the Ministry of State Security, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

KCNA said the foreign intelligence service had turned the North Korean citizens ''into its paid spies in an attempt to spy on important military objects and strategic key-points related with the supreme interests of the DPRK''.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK is still technically at war with South Korea and its US ally half a century after a truce halted fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War.

The KCNA report said the spies' task had been to take photographs of an important military objective and confirm its coordinates and collect concrete data on the site with the help of a GPS device smuggled in to them.

''Their duty was also to obtain original texts of documents of the DPRK including ... state and military secrets and the ideological tendencies of the people and, at the same time, to create (an) illusion about the free world among senior officials and lure them out to third countries if possible.'' After infiltrating the hired spies back into the country, the report said, ''the foreign intelligence service sent an intelligence agent to the DPRK under the guise of a trader to command their activities on the spot''.

KCNA said counter-intelligence officers had had the spies and their controller under close surveillance, and had arrested them all at the point when data was exchanged.

REUTERS PDT KN2130