The Ballad Of Kim Jong Il

Foreign correspondents can be a pretty jaded lot. Particularly when around one another, we tend to be full of an "If it's Tuesday it must be Tehran" sort of world-weariness that's partly feigned, but partly real. As a chartered Asiana Airlines 747 from Beijing bore down on Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on Feb. 25, carrying the New York Philharmonic orchestra and 80 journalists, that ennui pretty much went out the window. Television cameramen and photographers jostled for position in window seats to capture images of the brown, frozen landscape as it came into view below. Reporters brought out their small digital cameras to try to get the same photos for their scrapbooks, even as flight attendants frantically tried to shoo everyone back to their seats.

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Timeline: North Korea

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Overtures in Kim's Cold Capital

For many of us, if there is a dark side of the moon here on earth, North Korea is it. On and off for the better part of 20 years, from postings in Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing and now Shanghai, I have been covering North Korea — to the extent that a journalist can cover a place he has actually never been to. Three times previously, I had applied for an official journalist's visa to do reporting in the North — to no avail. Partly, I've always assumed, that's because I'm a U.S. citizen, and we have been technically at war with the North since a 1953 armistice. Partly it may be because some of the things I've written over the years haven't exactly been flattering to the family dynasty that runs the place: the late Kim Il Sung (the "Great Leader") and now his son, "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il. But mostly it's because the North Koreans, in their bull-necked isolation, pretty much don't give a damn what the outside world thinks of them.

Even from afar, North Korea is rarely dull. In the course of writing about the place, I have interviewed government spooks who track the country's illicit arms trade, as well as its counterfeiting and drug-running businesses. I have also written about legitimate South Korean businessmen who have invested there, hoping it's a low-wage alternative to China. And I have followed the seemingly endless permutations of Washington's fitful efforts to convince Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. When, defiantly, North Korea set off a nuclear device in October 2006, I wrote a cover story for TIME on the pre-eminent security threat of the 21st century: nukes getting into the hands of guys like the Dear Leader and the terrorist groups and other rogue nations he does business with.

The most gripping — and painful — North Korea story that I have followed over the years is the plight of the country's refugees, who escape by the thousands to neighboring China, hoping desperately for a better life, and for a chance to get into South Korea. Only a very lucky few do. At safe houses run by Christian missionaries in northeastern China, in refugee camps in Thailand and in the jungles of Vietnam and Laos, I have heard tales of bloodcurdling anguish — stories that defy belief, except that there's simply no way in hell these people could be making them up. A young woman who became pregnant in China is captured by Beijing's security services and returned to North Korea. She is sent to prison and allowed to carry her pregnancy for a few more months. Then her sister is arrested and brought into the same prison, for one purpose: to watch as guards kick and beat her sister in the abdomen until the unborn child is dead. The guards then stomp off, braying that it's what you get for marrying a dirty Chinese dog. Journalists, I know, are supposed to be objective. Here's objectivity for you: North Korea is the most barbaric regime on the planet.

Now, thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel — Monday's money shot for the cameramen among us — so as one they surged forward to surround the two men, leaving the spot where we all had been instructed to wait. We'd been on North Korean soil for all of 20 minutes, and already the handlers were frantic. "Please, we are all your friends here," one beseeched the mob, "but you must move back behind the yellow line." Ignored and increasingly flustered, the poor guy then blurted out one of the other foreign words he knew — one that might have betrayed what he was really thinking. "Au revoir!" he bellowed.

On the Empty Streets
We boarded eight buses for an approximately 15-mile (25 km) journey into town, and some of the North Korea I'd read about, and talked to diplomats and refugees and defectors about, started to become real. In the late-afternoon gloom, we passed apartment buildings and office buildings, row after row, that were unlit. Outside town, people either trudged along the side of the road or rode bikes — many stopping to stare at our convoy. And every kilometer or so, there stood in the middle of the road a female traffic cop. Each wore an aqua-blue uniform and a fur-lined hat, stood ramrod straight and wielded a baton to point the way to drivers; all of them seemed tall, young and attractive — "a James Bond fantasy come to life," cracked one colleague on our bus. Whoever they were, they had one of the world's easiest jobs, because there was no traffic to direct.

The entire group was deposited in a 47-story hotel that sits on Pyongyang's Daedong River. It is one of two hotels in Pyongyang that foreigners stay in. The other one is on a central street, with plenty of pedestrian traffic outside and even some vehicular traffic. It's possible to walk out the front door, see people and try to talk to them. Not from our hotel. It's isolated and difficult to walk to or from. And that was the point. There hadn't been this many Americans on North Korean soil since the Korean War, and our hosts plainly didn't want us mingling. When I later groused about it to a colleague posted to Pyongyang for the Russian wire service Itar-Tass, he chuckled: "Do you know what foreigners here call your hotel? Alcatraz. It's difficult to get into — and even harder to leave."