end of the Korean War in July 1953, Won became a permanent member of the Supreme People's Assembly, North Korea's unicameral parliament, which was a powerful position. He accompanied President Kim Il-sung on hunting trips and identified birds for him. The President gifted him a hunting rifle and also sent him bird specimens from East Germany. Other privileges included a specially imported Polish FSC Żuk car for his institute. In the 1960s he published a three volume work on the birds of Korea and a monograph on the mammals. Won was the first to establish bird names in Korean. He was also a pioneer of bird conservation measures in which he trained former bird hunters. Contact with his son The youngest son, Won Pyong-oh, grew up separated from his parents in South Korea and unknown to his father, became an ornithologist of repute. In 1965 Professor Won found a ringed Daurian myna at a park in Pyongyang. The Professor had been allowed to communicate with Japan on ornithological matters and he contacted the International Council for Bird Preservation's Tokyo office for information and learned that the bird had been ringed by his son in Seoul in the spring of 1963 with the Japanese ring "C 7655". The recovery was also communicated by the ICBP to Won Pyong-Oh and this was the first time that the father and son learned of each other after the war. In July 1966, the son Won Pyong-Oh attended the 14th International Ornithologists Congress at Oxford where he happened to meet the Polish ornithologist Jan Pinowski who told him that he was researching sparrows in North Korea in association with his father. The two had long discussions and Won Pyong-Oh wrote a long letter with photographs to his father and although it was forbidden, the letter was smuggled into North Korea by another attendee at the Congress, Professor L.A. Portenko, who passed it on through another Soviet scientist visiting North Korea on work. Professor Won Hong-gu had believed North Korean propaganda that the South lived in abject poverty and misery. When he read the letter, he is said to have declared that: "[Now I know everything, now I can die]." The story went around rapidly and moved many including the Japanese author Kimio Endo who wrote a novel based on the two professors in 1984. In 1990, talks of reconciliation between the two Koreas began and