Behind the veil: A rare look at life in North Korea

As my train from Beijing slowly traversed over an old iron bridge, I looked at the murky river below. A man stood waist-deep in the water casting a net. On one side of the river, China. On the other, the world's most isolated country -- North Korea. Soon, the first North Korean buildings appeared along with a small, abandoned fairground hidden in the shadow of some houses. The train made a sudden stop. People flooded a station platform. We'd stopped at Shinuju Cheongnyeon Station across the bridge that links Shinuju with the Chinese border city of Dandong. A group of North Korean border officials in neat uniforms boarded the train, collecting passports from passengers. Three hours later, the train got moving again. Green fields surrounded by hills (mountains make up more than 70% of North Korea) appeared on both sides of the track. An enchanting landscape unfolded. Valleys and flat areas were filled endless fields of rich crops. It made me think about the country's reported chronic food shortages. Finally, 24 hours after leaving Beijing, the train arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital and home to more than 3 million people. A group of North Korean guards and minders were waiting -- all foreign visitors and tour groups must be accompanied by guards, who are referred to as "guides" or "officials." I was given a brief introduction on how to behave, and informed of other restrictions and guidelines. The North Koreans impose strict rules on what visitors are allowed to photograph, who they can talk to and where they can walk. For instance, it's seen as an insult to crop out hands, feet or head when taking photos of statues or pictures of government leaders or officials. The guards also act as human shields between foreign visitors and the North Korean people. They followed me almost everywhere I went. It was under these restrictions that I visited the country for a total of nine days in the summer of 2012. While there, I found that capturing mundane scenes from people's daily lives on camera suddenly become extraordinary. I'm told that candid pictures of normal people are usually restricted by the government. I photographed all sorts of scenes: pedestrians in Pyongyang, topless men playing volleyball, a group of women who sweep the streets and commuters riding on the back of a truck. This was often as close as I got to the locals -- any direct contact with the North Korean people is virtually impossible. As well as fear and reservation, and the intimidating scrutiny of the guides, most North Koreans cannot understand English.

Chatty guards
The guards were a different story. One of them, Mr. Kim, talked. A lot. He told me about his years in the North Korean Army, where he became a major. For his loyalty, he said was rewarded with trips to Eastern Europe. Once, while on a stopover in then East Berlin, he told me he'd visited the city's famed Alexanderplatz. For some North Koreans, the most exotic vacation possible is closer to home -- the coastal town of Wonsan, about 200 kilometers to the east of the capital. Here, North Koreans looked to be enjoying a laid back summer holiday at the beach. Minus a few obvious differences, it could have been a scene from another part of Asia. Everyone looked relaxed and happy. People were swimming, sunbathing and playing ball games. Small sail boats that had the North Korean flag printed on their sails were available for hire. The stretch of beach I visited was fenced in and Westerners were allowed to walk around freely within that perimeter. This was the closest I could get to ordinary North Korean people and it was in sharp contrast to the poorer, harsher views of rural life I got during the trip east. Back in Pyongyang, before my departure, there were signs of outside influences slowly emerging. There was the city's first hamburger shop, which the locals refer to as McDonald's. Two Italian restaurants had also recently opened. One of those, a pizza restaurant, was the venue for my last night in the country. Inside, a woman with a microphone stood engulfed in cigarette smoke. She sang one Italian classic hit after another -- with almost no accent. As in other parts of Asia, karaoke is a way of life in North Korea, usually existing hand in hand with cigarettes and alcohol. Three young women in tight skirts were running the kitchen, sweating while working with a brand new pizza oven. Most customers were tourists like me, business people or embassy staff -- the price for a pizza is too high for most North Koreans. Like other North Koreans I'd met or photographed, I felt from the staff a distinctive curiosity, tinged with a shyness of not knowing how to react to the increasing numbers of visiting foreigners. They all seemed genuinely friendly, polite and well educated. For me, North Koreans seem to be no different than any other people.

N. Korea endgame: 3 scenarios

(CNN) -- Hyperbolic North Korean threats of war are not new. What is new is the intensity and persistence of those threats this time around. Add to that an untested 29-year-old leader who is suddenly a four-star general with lots to prove. How does this end? Consider these three possibilities: 1. What Kim Jong Un hopes: North Korean threats continue to escalate. Pyongyang renews earlier threats to transfer its "nuclear deterrent capability" to third parties in the Middle East and declares South Korean waters west of the peninsula an open fire zone. The South Korean stock market plummets. Chinese leaders begin to panic about instability on their border. Washington is desperate to set aside the North Korea problem while dealing with a parallel crisis in Iran. The North proposes negotiations on a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, but only if international sanctions imposed on the regime after their previous nuclear and missile tests are suspended. Washington, Seoul and Tokyo reluctantly agree to the North's terms to avoid further escalation. Meanwhile, the North continues miniaturizing uranium-based nuclear weapons in underground facilities. One year later, they test a more sophisticated warhead design and improved missiles payload. The North then demands the end of remaining international sanctions, recognition as a legitimate nuclear weapons state and a summit meeting in Pyongyang between Kim and President Barack Obama. To back up its threat, the North shells several South Korean islands and threatens to use its newly enhanced nuclear capability if the South retaliates. The crisis resumes, but with the North more dangerous. This has more or less been the pattern thus far. 2. What Washington, Seoul and Tokyo hope: Kim's unpredictability finally turns the North's erstwhile ally, China, firmly against the regime. Intensifying U.S.-Japan-South Korean defense cooperation demonstrates how North Korean actions are isolating China within the region. Beijing vows to step up pressure on the regime and stops all inbound North Korean ships and planes for inspections based on U.N. Security Council resolutions. When Kim tries to escalate again, Beijing cuts oil shipments to the North by 50% (China's food and fuel shipments keep the small North Korean economy afloat). The North agrees to a moratorium on testing of missiles and nuclear weapons and to resume earlier negotiations on denuclearization. Those talks move at a glacial pace because the North sees nuclear weapons as its only means of regime survival. But Kim's obvious mismanagement of the confrontation has discredited him in front of his generals. Fissures open, and the regime begins slowly to unravel. Careful U.S. and South Korean coordination with China throughout the crisis lays the basis for a managed unification of the peninsula, removal of the North's nuclear and WMD arsenal, and freedom for millions of North Koreans.

3. What everyone fears most: Kim's escalation strategy fails to cause the other powers to recognize the North as a legitimate nuclear weapons state or to ease sanctions. The young leader and his advisers continue searching for threats that will terrify the South and cause China to provide further bribes for good behavior, but without provoking a massive U.S. attack on the North. The exuberant but inexperienced Kim approves live artillery fire on uninhabited mountains just outside the South Korean capital of Seoul. The South responds with limited counterbattery fire against the North Korean artillery units. Aware that it cannot surrender or win, the North opens broader and deadlier artillery and missile broadsides against the South. Knowing that these forward deployed artillery and missile forces pose the greatest threat to the South if not taken out, U.S. and South Korean forces hammer North Korean emplacements north of the DMZ. The conflict ends with defeat of North Korean forces and decapitation of the North Korean leadership through massive airstrikes, but the damage to South Korea and Japan, which is within missile range, is appalling. How does this end? Right now we are somewhere between the first two scenarios -- and could remain ambiguously so for some time. The third scenario remains highly unlikely, though not impossible. The first scenario is tempting for some, because it would temporarily ease tensions, but in the long run it makes the third scenario more likely and much more lethal. That means that U.S. policy has to focus on realizing scenario two. The North's brazen actions make that more possible than ever. But it means not blinking.

North Korea is far from suicidal

(CNN) -- North Korea is no laggard when it comes to bluster and vituperation. For decades, the regime has issued threats of turning South Korea into a "sea of fire" or used choice words such as "human scum" or "political idiot" when denouncing South Korean and U.S. leaders. But even measured against such standards, North Korea's barrage over the past month, from threatening to launch an "all-out war" to "diversified precision nuclear strike" against Washington, "wipe out" a South Korean island, or hurling a sexist insult against Park Geun-hye, South Korea's first female elected leader, to, most recently, warning of an imminent "moment of explosion," is quite unusual.

And now, after saying that plans for merciless operation has been "finally examined and ratified," Pyongyang is hinting at another long-range missile launch. What's going on? First, we must assume the North Korean leadership is not crazy or suicidal in spite of bizarre things it says and does.

Cruel, totalitarian and solipsistic the Kim dynasty surely is. But the fact that it has managed to preserve itself for more 60 years and, in the post-Cold War era, in spite of the everyday existential threat of facing an immeasurably more successful Korean state across the border, the impoverished North has shown itself to be, if nothing else, calculating and resilient.

Opinion: Kim Jong Un is not crazy

What is Pyongyang calculating? The same it has since the end of the Korean War 60 years ago. The two constants in North Korea's foreign policy are its continual calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and blaming "U.S. hostile policy" for the tension enveloping the Korean Peninsula.

Pyongyang sees the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea, as powerfully symbolized by the presence of American troops in the South, as the greatest impediment to its highest state task. As North Korea states in the charter to its communist party, that task is to "(en)sure the complete victory of socialism in the northern half of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the accomplishment of the revolutionary goals of national liberation and the people's democracy on the entire area of the country." In plain language, that means dissolving the South Korean government and communizing the entire Korean Peninsula by force.

North Korea's frequent threats are a means to a long-term end. The first step is to impregnate the South Korean public with war hysteria and the illusion that the withdrawal of U.S. troops would lead to peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas. The second is to instill fear in the American public by one day demonstrating its capability to marry a nuclear warhead with an intercontinental ballistic missile with the range to hit the U.S. West Coast. When that day comes, Washington may have second thoughts about its treaty commitment to the defense of South Korea, Pyongyang calculates. So far, timing seems to be in Pyongyang's favor. Over the past year, all the major powers in North Korea's neck of the woods have undergone a leadership transition. Moreover, in Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo, leadership transitions have occurred only in recent months. That creates a particularly appeasement-prone environment, as no newly elected leader wishes to spend political capital on a foreign policy crisis created by North Korea when many other pressing domestic issues beckon. So Pyongyang reckons that after ratcheting up tension as high as it can and then simply take a little step back, it can lure its richer interlocutors into returning to talks and the kind of concessionary aid worth billions of dollars we have seen in the past. This means the risk of North Korea starting an all-out war is quite small, although there is always the possibility of miscalculation. It also means that Pyongyang will most likely not just go quietly into the night after having thumped its chest for so long. We should expect some kind of deadly, although limited, attack to come soon. How should Seoul and Washington respond? For starters, they could clamp down on the North's multifaceted criminal activities and put psychological pressure on the elites. Second, they could raise awareness on North Korea's systematic and widespread human rights violations so that democratic countries come to view the regime as a threat to humanity instead of some abstract amalgamation of the dreadful and the bizarre. This approach may not yield immediate changes in regime behavior. But at the very least it will finally put the "stick" in the proverbial carrot-and-stick metaphor for taming Pyongyang.