Bill Clinton brings home freed journalists from North Korea (Second Lead)

WASHINGTON - Former president Bill Clinton Wednesday brought home two journalists after winning their release from North Korea in a diplomatic overture for the Obama administration officially billed as a “private humanitarian mission”.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, reporters for Current TV LLC, spent more than four months detained in North Korea and had been sentenced to 12 years of hard labour for entering the country illegally.

“We feared at any moment that we could be sent to a hard labour camp and then suddenly we were told we were going to a meeting,” a tearful and emotional Ling said at a news conference minutes after the two women were reunited with their families at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank outside Los Angeles early Wednesday.

“We were taken to a location, and when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us president Bill Clinton,” Ling said. “We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end.”

She expressed her and Lee’s “deepest gratitude” to Clinton and his “wonderful, amazing” team.

The announcement of their release came after a “special pardon” followed a face-to-face meeting between Clinton and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il, the first such high-profile US mission to the reclusive country since Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s visit in 2000.

The mission took root in early July after one of the reporters told relatives in a phone call that North Korea would grant them amnesty in exchange for a visit from Clinton, according to a senior Obama administration official cited by CNN.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he was “extraordinarily relieved” that the journalists returned home safely.

“The reunion that we’ve all seen on television, I think, is a source of happiness not only for the families but for the entire country,” Obama said before boarding Marine One for a trip to Elkhart, Indiana.

He thanked Clinton and former vice president Al Gore for their “extraordinary work” toward the release of Lee and Ling.

Obama said he spoke with Clinton as well as the families of the journalists.

The former president will brief members of the White House’s national security team on his trip soon, according to administration spokesman Robert Gibbs.

“We are very pleased with the outcome, and I’m hopeful that the families are going to be able to get some good time together in the next few days,” Obama said.