North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

by John Sweeney

Overview

An authoritative and, at times, frightening investigation into the dark side of North Korean society.

North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation on earth. Big Brother is always watching: It is Orwell's 1984 made reality.


Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the country undercover, posing as a university professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics.


Huge factories with no staff or electricity; hospitals with no patients; uniformed child soldiers; and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ—the DeMilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins—all framed by the relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line and the gulag awaits. State spies are everywhere, ready to punish disloyalty and the slightest sign of discontent.


Drawing on his own experiences and his extensive interviews with defectors and other key witnesses, Sweeney's North Korea Undercover pulls back the curtain, providing a rare insight into life there today, examining the country's troubled history and addressing important questions about its uncertain future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605988030
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/15/2015
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	841 KB

About the Author

John Sweeney is a reporter for BBC Panorama. Before joining the BBC in 2001, Sweeney worked for twelve years at The Observer. He has helped free seven innocent people falsely convicted for killing their babies and given evidence against six war criminals in The Hague. Over the course of his career John has won one Emmy, two Royal Television Society prizes, one Sony Gold award, the What The Papers Say Journalist of The Year Prize, an Amnesty International prize and the Paul Foot Award. He is the author of eight books.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text xix

Introduction 1

1 In the Land of the Plastic Toad 21

2 Zombie Gods Seep Goo 34

3 God the Waxwork Father 59

4 'No photos, no photos' 73

5 Jimmy the Gold-Smuggler 82

6 Pyongyang Zoo 94

7 The Scariest Place on Earth 102

8 Facing the Final Curtain 118

9 Cruel Christs of Pus 128

10 Pissing on Marble 140

11 'Would the Dear Leader not be offended by such a gift?' 145

12 The Man Who Went to North Korea and Came Back Mad 149

13 The Washing of Brains 158

14 God the Bad Elvis Son 182

15 Fifty Shades of Green 201

16 Empty Bellies 227

17 The American Who Went to North Korea and Stayed 248

18 The Hospital that Has Patients, but Only in the Morning 265

19 The Gulag Circus 275

20 God the Fat Boy Kim 282

Acknowledgements 295

Picture Acknowledgements 297

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

Sweeney's book is a spark in the dark of North Korea.

The Times

Harrowing...creepy and poignant; and, in turn, tragic and obscene. North Korea Undercover asserts that the West should be more concerned about labour camps than nuclear weapons.

Sunday Business Post

An explosive and entertaining inside look at North Korea. Sweeney spins off from the physical places into zany yet tragic stories about North Korea’s rulers and the bizarre complacency of the country’s people. An investigative must-read.

Booklist

This is a chilling book, but a timely one, written with both humour and compassion. Buy it, read it, and discuss it.

Solidarity

The recent UN report on North Korea underlined the importance of Sweeney's book. There is much to learn from North Korea Undercover.

Literary Review

An explosive and entertaining inside look at North Korea. Sweeney spins off from the physical places into zany yet tragic stories about North Korea’s rulers and the bizarre complacency of the country’s people. An investigative must-read.

Booklist

Sweeney's book is a spark in the dark of North Korea.

The Times

06/01/2015
Award-winning author, journalist, and BBC documentarian Sweeney reports on his eight-day trip to North Korea while posing as a London School of Economics student. This is the print account of Sweeney's 2013 documentary, which aired on the BBC show Panorama. His impressions of the country—an oppressive, extremely isolated, and very poor nation controlled by the evil, dictatorial Kim dynasty—will be no surprise to anyone at all familiar with it. He argues that the regime could collapse "in forty months." Sweeney finds North Korea's seclusion, its stratified social structure, and its dominance by the successive Kim family dictators the natural product of Korea's mountainous geography, its Confucian past, and its historical development. Based on short visits to the region, research, and interviews with a few North Korean defectors (all several years in the past), this book is neither a scholarly study, nor one that reveals the country's latest developments. VERDICT Of interest only to those looking to add to their shelves another account of North Korea.—Mark Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati

Library Journal

2015-04-01
The mocking account of an English investigative journalist's undercover visit to North Korea underscores the fact that the dire state is no laughing matter. Embedded with a group of London School of Economics students in 2013 on an official guided tour to Pyongyang, the author was fired from the BBC after the dust-up over his subsequent documentary for BBC Panorama, North Korea Undercover. Sweeney has previously taken on some of the evil forces of corruption and power without flinching (The Church of Fear: The Weird World of Scientology, 2013, etc.). In this account of his strange and troubling visit inside North Korea, on and off the tourist bus, minded at every step by Mr. Hyun and the more sunny Miss Jun, Sweeney doesn't even have to try too hard for laughs—e.g., his chronicle of the first day's stop at the mausoleum housing the open viewing of the country's first two tyrants, Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. ("How can you satirize this?" Sweeney muses.) Most glaring for the author was the enormous chasm between the very few elite—they had electricity, cars, Chinese roller skates, foreign delicacies, the ability to take trips to the zoo or circus—and the rest of the 23 million oppressed masses struggling to survive with inadequate food and appalling living conditions. The "robotization" of the totalitarian message has been relentless and all-encompassing. There are statues of the dictators everywhere, widespread denial that the North was the instigator of the Korean War, and a complete lack of acknowledgement of the horrific famine of the late 1990s. Within the frame of the visit, Sweeney delves into reports of those who visited and witnessed the dictatorships before him, from Ceausescu's translator to IRA bomb-makers to gulag prisoners to defectors. In a carefully footnoted and documented work, Sweeney has done his homework, though the snide tone grates.

Kirkus Reviews