Washington, Aug 5 - 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.