Last updated at 07:48 08 October 2007

a member of the "Axis of Evil" with plans to develop nuclear weapons.







But, as Peter Hitchens found when he evaded the Marxist state's ban on foreign journalists, it is a nation to be pitied rather than feared...

If this is a showcase, then what can it be like in the parts they do not want us to see? North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, is closed to all but the most favoured citizens. Only friends of the regime may live here.

Yet in this citadel of privilege, every face I see is thin, every belt tight, every garment worn and faded, every child and adult under-sized, most windows unlit.

For the ordinary poor, who cannot even leave their towns without a permit,

Pyongyang is almost as inaccessible as New York or Paris.

How thin and ragged are they?

Those considered unreliable must live out their chilly, pinched lives amid the dreary spoil-heaps and miserable townships of the coalfields. How wretched can they possibly be?

As for those who offend the regime, a chain of labour camps, stretching from Yongchon on the west coast to Onsong in the far north east, is hidden in the northern mountains, where no foreigner penetrates and where people die of hunger and despair, unrecorded.

I am not sure how we can live our prosperous lives, knowing these wretches exist.

Here in the alleged paradise city of Pyongyang, the buildings are blistered and stained, the paint faded and cracked. Except for a few main processional ways – and even here there are signs of decay – the shabbiness and gloom are overwhelming.

At dusk, when a normal city would begin to sparkle, an almost total darkness falls in the long interval before the first lights come on.

Later, when the government considers bedtime has arrived, the power is cut off from a million homes, whose occupants will be wakened at 5am by plonky music leaking from loudspeakers, and ordered to work by a siren at 7am, every day but Sunday (and sometimes even then).

Now, in the early evening, silence is almost complete. I can hear a drunken man singing from what feels like half a mile away. Yet we are at the heart of a city of perhaps three million people.

And the lights, when they do come on, are so feeble that I am suddenly reminded – poignantly – of the austere British townscapes of my own childhood in the early Fifties.

Except that even they were never as austere as this. Nor were they sinister and mad, as this place is.

If all politics is a sort of mental illness that gets worse as the politicians' power increases, then this is the locked ward where absolute power has brought absolute insanity.

Brooding over the deranged cityscape is the ugliest building in the universe, a 1,000ft pyramid, already a ruin though it has never been finished and never will be, perhaps because the money has run out, perhaps because it is so jerry-built that nobody would ever have dared stay in it.

Official guides pretend not to notice it though it is by far the tallest structure in Pyongyang.

This symbol of overweening ambition is by a strange coincidence the exact shape and size of the Ministry of Truth, the chief source of official lies in George Orwell's prophecy of just such a state, and just such a city, in 1984.

It is almost as if North Korea's rulers have taken Orwell's novel as a handbook rather than a warning.

But where Orwell's ministry was a glittering white, the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel is a dingy dun-brown, its hundreds of glassless windows like sockets gazing at what its maker, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, has wrought.

And what he has wrought is hopeless failure, a long, grim joke that has yet to reach its punchline.

Kim's city is the capital of a state that is far more of a danger to its own people than it is to the rest of the world.

It may be – I think the evidence is sketchy – that North Korea has a nuclear bomb. What is certain is that it has almost nothing else.

It cannot any longer even fake success at its very heart. Its great propaganda festival, the Arirang Games where thousands of young Koreans create vast pictures with eerily synchronised movements, is a pathetic remnant.

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It is the only show I have ever been to where the cast is far bigger than the audience. The colossal May Day Stadium was three-quarters empty the night I went.

The performance, in which Joseph Stalin meets Walt Disney, was less confidently militaristic than in past times and most of the "soldiers and sailors" were attractive young women in pert skirts, none looking very menacing.

Sometimes it descended into circus, with platoons of dancing children dressed as boiled eggs, and a motorbike on a tightrope.

Every machine in the country is close to breakdown. This even affects parts of the system that are on show.

I was there as a tourist, arriving in a Soviet-built Tupolev from the age of Yuri Gagarin, which shuddered and strained into the sky and was prudently kept clear of terminal buildings at the Chinese airport from which I began my journey.

My tour bus failed (its fuel tank sprang a leak that the driver tried to plug with chewing gum) on the way to a museum of gifts given to Kim Il Sung.

Our guide pedalled off for help on a borrowed bike but the bus that eventually rescued us also breathed its last, forcing us to walk the final few hundred yards to an unscheduled break for lunch.

We never arrived at the museum.

While the first bus was broken down, we were prevented from moving more than a few yards away from it – probably because we would then have been able to look closely at the nearby lorryload of runt-sized troops, part of the supposedly fearsome North Korean army.

The weapons they carried were ancient, probably more dangerous to their users than to their targets.

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Vehicles everywhere were decrepit, clothes shabby and faded from much washing, in the greys, browns and greens that dominated our streets in the years before cheap and colourful fabrics.

I never saw anyone in jeans or a baseball cap.

The soldiers looked universally undersized and underfed, usually with prominent cheekbones. And the 'military-first' policy means that they get better food supplies than most civilians.

How do the ordinary people fare? We cannot tell.

But here is one possibility. Some years ago, the leading American expert on North Korea, Bradley Martin, had an accidental and obviously unintended glimpse, in a remote district, of a train bearing ordinary North Koreans: "They were a ghastly sight.

"Their clothing was ragged and filthy, their faces darkened with what I presumed to be either mud or skin discolourations resulting from pellagra. There was no glass in the windows of their train."

Yet much of the country is hauntingly lovely, willow-fringed fields in which peasants stagger under heavy sheaves, villages that are picturesque from a distance but squalid at closer quarters.

This month the roads are lined with flowers growing riotously in the verges, a hint that beneath the weight of despotism, Koreans seek freedom in ordinary things.

One of my five days in the country was a public holiday, an ancient festival of ancestor worship too powerful to be suppressed, when the whole country went picnicking in hilltop country graveyards.

But on a working day, in a 200-mile drive, I saw just two tractors in operation in the fields – probably because there is no fuel for them.

In five days of travelling by road, I saw miles of electrified railway, but only four moving trains, and they were rolling slowly and hauled by diesel locomotives, suggesting the current is erratic or just switched off.

My allegedly luxury hotel in Pyongyang had its power cut off each morning as soon as the tour parties had set off on their various pilgrimages to the many shrines of the Great Leader.

Sometimes it was if we were witnessing a sort of Truman Show, in which even the casual passers-by might easily have been rehearsed actors pretending to be real people.

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A promised visit to Pyongyang's underground railway consisted of a trip between two stations, during which ordinary travellers were cleared from our carriage.

Many passengers stared at us with shock that we were there at all. Even in Pyongyang, a foreigner is an event.

As we descended the immensely deep escalators, a party of women on the upward staircase were singing a song about how they couldn't manage without their Dear Leader.

A similar hymn drifted from the loudspeakers.

Genuine? Accidental? Or staged?

But not everything could be arranged or controlled. A number of incidents lifted the veil without meaning to.

Richard Jones, the intrepid photographer who accompanied me, raised his camera towards an ancient, 5ft gentleman in a Mao cap, trimming the grass on a Pyongyang boulevard.

The old man, possibly a veteran of the Korean War, snarled and raised his sickle as if to strike.

Having been taught from childhood that Westerners are wolves in human form, he intended to defend the fatherland against the imperialist spy.

On another occasion, we arrived at our pre-booked restaurant to find a drunk – or possibly a corpse – sprawled outside.

Seeing us approaching, loyal citizens immediately formed a human barrier to shield the sight from alien eyes.

The trouble is, even if everything we saw was what we were meant to see, the impression given is of a society in an advanced stage of decomposition, held together by a fragile web of lies.

The cult of the Great Leader is much like that of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito before 1945.

In fact it is probably modelled on it, since all Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945 and the people were compelled to worship the emperor as a god.

But it has other elements, too. Confucianism demands respect for ancestors, perhaps the origin of the red-and-white obelisks in every town proclaiming that the Great Leader is "always with us".

But there may be other roots for this. Kim Il Sung as a teenager played the organ in his father's Protestant church and seems to have liked it. When American soldiers captured his offices in the Korean War, they found a sizeable organ, of all things, installed there.

Kim was bored by Christianity, preferring (by his own account) to go fishing than to church. But he was paying attention, and many have wondered if the worship of father and son – Kim Il Sung and present leader Kim Jong Il – is a blasphemous copy of Christianity.

In any case, it seems to work. As we barrelled down the long, straight, empty motorway that leads to the closed border with South Korea, our guide asked merrily if we knew how the Korean War had started.

I said, cautiously, that our imperialist history books said that it had been started by the North.

The poor man's face fell as if I had wounded him. It is an essential part of North Korea's founding myth that the war was started by the Americans and the South.

Even a mention of any other version of history upset him, an intelligent person with a sense of humour, judging by his behaviour the rest of the time.

He took it as a British person of my generation might take a claim that Britain was the aggressor in 1939.

It was to avoid upsetting or scandalising him that I later made a shameful obeisance to the Kim Il Sung image, laying flowers and offering a perfunctory bow.

I feared that if I didn't, I would be treading on a real, living personal faith, not just showing disrespect to a cold, dead cult.

And I think I was correct in this judgment. For this really is – as Eastern Europe and Russia never were – a wholly closed country where a large majority more or less believe the state propaganda.

East Germany tried to stop its people watching West German TV, but abandoned the effort because it was just too difficult.

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Powerful transmitters – the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe – broadcast to Russia and her empire so successfully that in Prague in the Seventies people would come up to me in trams to pass on their thanks for the existence of the BBC Czech service.

But not here. Every radio and television has its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only North Korean signals.

Inspectors visit frequently to check that nobody has tampered with this mental barricade. And, while a few brave souls defy this (resoldering the dials when an inspection is due), most are too frightened, or so loyal, that it would never occur to them to do so.

In Cold War days South Korea used to float radios across the border on balloons, but few dared use them even when they got through.

There is no internet access here for ordinary beings. On a trip round a vast "people's study centre", we were shown North Koreans supposedly working at computers.

But when one of us tried to reach the Google search site, he could get nowhere. The screens had no link to the outside world.

A librarian boasted of her stock of English-language books but, asked if she had a copy of 1984, had plainly never heard of it.

A supposed economics expert, likewise, did not seem to have heard of the free-market economist Milton Friedman – and there was much consternation among the guides when I asked about these things.

North Koreans live under a thick blanket of darkness, with a hopelessly distorted or restricted picture of the outside world.

They have never seen pictures of the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Centre.

They are vaguely aware of The Beatles (I was proudly offered the chance to listen to a rare tape of Ob La Di, Ob La Da in the People's Study Hall).

One of my guides claimed to have heard of The Rolling Stones, but couldn't name any of their songs.

It is easy to understand why North Korea does not want "I can't get no satisfaction" echoing round its darkened avenues.

But this skewed, half-blind view of the world has its serious side. It is a judicious mix of truth and outrageous lies.

Heaven knows what is taught in schools (we were not allowed near any) but the authorities have produced an English-language version of a propaganda pamphlet called US – The Empire Of Terrorism, which is the local answer to American accusations that North Korea sponsors terrorist groups, and to George W. Bush's accusation that North Korea belonged to an 'Axis of Evil'.

Some of its charges against America are truthful. But these are mingled with unhinged fantasies and lies.

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After a relatively factual attack on the United States' treatment of the Native Americans, and on seizure of Mexican territory, the pamphlet declares: "In April 1968, the US administration organised the assassination of Martin Luther King, a black Baptist leader who advocated freedom and equality of the blacks.

"Enraged by this, the blacks rose in a revolt that swept across 46 cities simultaneously. It was an act in self-defence. However, the administration retaliated by going on a spree of white terror...

"Black survivors of white hooliganism and terror are now confined to Detroit, Appalachia and the delta of southern Mississippi, where they live a dispirited life. For fear of racist terrorism, the 22million black population hesitate to go to schools, theatres, restaurants and even public lavatories..."

I am not making up this rubbish, nor did anyone try to conceal it from me.

The bookstall attendant, in a pleasant mountain resort, who sold it to me (for $1) was delighted by my purchase.

One of Pyongyang's unexpected treasures is an American warship, the spy vessel USS Pueblo, which is moored as a trophy on the Taedong River, and is perhaps the last place on Earth where the Cold War is kept alive.

It is extraordinary to walk into the most secret rooms of this ship, where the ultimate espionage technology of 40 years ago is on open display (including decoding machines marked 'NOFORN', which means that their products could not be shared with the British MI6).

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It still looks surprisingly modern.

An angry propaganda video records the ship's capture in January 1968, and the dismal humiliation of her captain and crew in an incident rather similar to (but much nastier than) Britain's recent experience in the Persian Gulf.

If only, the North Korean government must wish, the Cold War could be brought back. As a Soviet ally, Pyongyang received the aid that allowed it to build this concrete show city and sustain its unyielding regime with food for the loyal and brute force for the rebellious.

Now the concrete crumbles and there is no money for food or bullets. North Korea, desperate and destitute, is accused of everything from drug-running and money-laundering to forging dollar bills to stay alive.

It reluctantly seeks food aid from the outside (and gives most of it to friends of the regime).

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Last October's supposed nuclear blast (which experts still dispute) may well have been the leadership's infuriated response to the freezing of its accounts in a Macau bank, accounts allegedly used to buy luxuries for the loyal elite who dwell behind police barriers in tree-shaded Changgwang Street near the old Soviet Embassy, venturing out in black 4x4s with tinted windows.

Certainly the unfreezing of these accounts has been a key part of the talks that reopened after the bomb went off.

Here, too, is "office Building No 15", headquarters of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who took over from his father in 1994.

The younger Kim, short, podgy and unimpressive, has spoken in public only once and has been careful not to usurp too much of his father's prestige.

The old man was, after all, a guerrilla leader in the war against the Japanese and is revered by older citizens who remember their country rising out of the flattened ruins of the Korean War before it was surpassed economically by the capitalist south.

Much effort was devoted to keeping him alive, for fear that his successors would fail to maintain his magical hold over the people.

Doctors at the Kim Il Sung Institute of Health and Longevity prescribed a special diet of extra-long dog penises (minimum length 2.8in) to keep the Great Leader well.

Maybe it was this regime that kept him going until he was 82, perhaps helped by the "Happy Corps" and the "Satisfaction Corps" of attractive young women recruited to serve in the chain of secret palaces and mansions inhabited by Kim Il Sung and his far-less-impressive son and heir, Kim Jong Il.

Female beauty is a passport to preferment in North Korea.

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The Dear Leader is still rumoured to choose Pyongyang's famously attractive traffic policewomen who, clad in fetching uniforms, control the sparse traffic with strangely provocative robotic gestures.

But the succession, a laughable breach of Marxist dogma, surely cannot go any further. The Younger Kim was 65 in February and is said to suffer from diabetes and to have recently undergone unnamed major surgery.

He looked unwell when he appeared in public for Tuesday's summit with the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun.

His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, is an unlikely heir, though he is already 36 and was educated in Switzerland and China.

Inconveniently, he was caught in 2001 travelling to Japan on a false Dominican Republic passport, with two women (neither of them his wife) and a suitcase full of cash.

The passport was in the name Pang Xiong, Chinese for "fat bear", a name that rather suits him.

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The world needs to work out – quickly – how this murderous black comedy can be brought to an end that is not too painful. The obvious answer would be reunification with South Korea.

But South Korea and North Korea alike are terrified by the example of Germany, where unity devastated the East and nearly bankrupted the West.

It also left the old East German elite jobless and humiliated, and pursued by the courts.

Economic experts believe a merger of the two Koreas would ruin the South. As for the Dear Leader, he presumably thinks it safer to cling on than risk being strung up like Saddam, locked up like Slobodan Milosevic or hounded to death like Augusto Pinochet.

North Korea's new version of nuclear blackmail is just that, crude extortion by people who have no honest way of supporting themselves.

Give us aid and money, they demand, or we may do something terrible. If they do fulfil their threats, it is hard to know who will be most badly hurt.

Pyongyang's Taepodong rockets are wildly unreliable and as likely to fall into the sea or strike the wrong country as to hit their intended targets.

Their nuclear technology is crude and possibly faked.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of emaciated North Koreans are fleeing across the Chinese border or working abroad.

The long-hidden truth about the outside world filters back from them to their friends and families.

And the Dear Leader and his loyalists have no idea how they can secure the succession of the world's first Marxist-Leninist hereditary monarchy, a problem that looks rather urgent.

Quite soon, it will have to be admitted that neither Kim Il Sung nor Kim Jong Il are the godlike beings they are made out to be.

Quite soon, the entombed, defrauded North Koreans will realise their fatherland is not a great power and that it is bankrupt and backward.

It will be a hard moment for them and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It is our responsibility to try to see that there is nothing worse.

Pretending that North Korea is a terrifying great power, when it is in truth a crippled nation stranded between two worlds by the end of the Cold War, and made increasingly irrational by poverty and pain, will not help.

It is a country to be pitied rather than feared.