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The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage

By Doug Bock Clark

This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss GQ story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

On a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony. They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea. One of their last glimpses of him had been from a televised news conference in Pyongyang, during which their boy—a sweet, brainy 21-year-old scholarship student at the University of Virginia—confessed to undermining the regime at the behest of the unlikely triumvirate of an Ohio church, a university secret society, and the American government by stealing a propaganda poster. He sobbed to his captors, “I have made the single worst decision of my life. But I am only human.… I beg that you find it in your hearts to give me forgiveness and allow me to return home to my family.” Despite his pleas, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and vanished into the dictatorship's prison system.

Fred and Cindy had so despaired during their long vigil that at one point they allegedly told friends that Otto had probably been killed. On her son's 22nd birthday, Cindy lit Chinese-style lanterns and let the winter winds loft the flame-buoyed balloons toward North Korea, dreaming they might bear her message to her son. “I love you, Otto,” she said, then sang “Happy Birthday.”

But on that June morning, the Warmbiers were anticipating news of a secret State Department mission to free Otto. Upon learning that Otto was apparently unconscious, President Trump had directed an American team to fly into North Korea, and now progress of the mission was being monitored at the highest level of the government. No assurances had been made that the young man would actually be released, and so the officials were on tenterhooks as well. According to an official, at 8:35 A.M., Secretary of State Rex Tillerson telephoned the president to announce that Otto was airborne. The president reportedly signed off by saying, “Take care of Otto.” Then Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who helped oversee efforts to repatriate Otto, called to inform the Warmbiers that the air ambulance had just entered Japanese airspace: Otto would be home that night.

Still, Cindy knew her son was not through danger yet. In advance of the rescue, Portman had informed her that Otto had been unconscious for months, according to the North Koreans, though no one knew the exact extent of the injury. “Can you tell me how Otto's brain is functioning?” she asked.

Portman answered that Otto appeared to have severe brain damage.

Cindy told news outlets that she imagined that might mean Otto was asleep or in a medically induced coma. The Warmbiers were optimistic, up-by-their-bootstraps patriots, and they hoped that with American health care and their love, their son might again become the vivacious person he'd been when he left.

Otto Warmbier was transferred to an ambulance upon his return home to Cincinnati in June 2017.

Now Portman and his staff scrambled to prepare the homecoming, rerouting the plane from Cincinnati's international airport to a smaller municipal one, which would be more private. As the sun went down, a crowd waved handmade signs welcoming Otto home, and TV crews pushed their cameras against the bars of the perimeter fence. The sleek luxury plane taxied to some hangars, where the Warmbiers waited nearby.

Halfway up the airplane's stairs, over the whine of the still-cycling engines, Fred later said, he heard a guttural “inhuman” howling and wondered what it was. But when he stepped into the cabin cluttered with medical equipment, he found its source: Otto, strapped to a stretcher, jerking violently against his restraints and wailing.

Cindy was prepared for her son to be changed, but she had not expected this. Otto's arms and legs were “totally deformed,” according to his parents. His wavy brown locks had been buzzed off. A feeding tube infiltrated his nostrils. “It looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and re-arranged his bottom teeth,” as Fred would say. According to Cindy, Otto's sister fled the plane, screaming, and Cindy ran after her.

Fred approached his son and hugged him. Otto's eyes remained wide open and blank. Fred told Otto that he had missed him and was overjoyed to have him home. But Otto's alien keening only continued, impossible to comfort.

By the time paramedics carried Otto out of the plane by his legs and armpits and loaded him into an ambulance, Cindy had recovered somewhat. She forced herself to join him in the emergency vehicle, though seeing him in such torment had almost made her pass out.

At the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, the family camped at Otto's bedside while speculation blazed around the world about what had rendered him vegetative. But Otto would never recover to tell his side of the story. And despite exhaustive examinations by doctors, no definitive medical evidence explaining how his injury came to be would ever emerge.

Instead, in the vacuum of fact, North Korea and the U.S. competed to provide a story. North Korea blamed Otto's condition on a combination of botulism and an unexpected reaction to a sleeping pill, an explanation that many American doctors said was unlikely. A senior American official asserted that, according to intelligence reports, Otto had been repeatedly beaten. Fred and Cindy declared on TV that their son had been physically tortured, in order to spotlight the dictatorship's evil. The president pushed this narrative. Meanwhile, the American military made preparations for a possible conflict. Otto became a symbol used to build “a case for war on emotional grounds,” the New York Times editorial board wrote.

As the Trump administration and North Korea spun Otto's story for their own ends, I spent six months reporting—from Washington, D.C., to Seoul—trying to figure out what had actually happened to him. What made an American college student go to Pyongyang? What kind of nightmare did he endure while in captivity? How did his brain damage occur? And how did his eventual death help push America closer toward war with North Korea and then, in a surprising reversal, help lead to Trump's peace summit with Kim Jong-un? The story I uncovered was stranger and sadder than anyone had known. In fact, I discovered that the manner of Otto's injury was not as black-and-white as people were encouraged to believe. But before he became a rallying cry in the administration's campaign against North Korea, he was just a kid. His name was Otto Warmbier.

Local residents held signs of support at the airport. They were likely unaware of Otto’s condition.

In a white two-story home flying the Stars and Stripes, Otto grew up the eldest child of a Republican family. He was one of those special young people we praise as all-American. At a top-ranked Ohio high school, he boasted the second-best grades. He was also a math whiz and a gifted soccer player and swimmer. And as if it weren't enough that he was prom king, his peers also anointed him with the plastic crown at homecoming.

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But despite running in the “popular circle given his athletic prowess, classic good looks and unending charisma,” a classmate later wrote in a local newspaper , he “still felt like everyone's friend.” Though his family was well-off, he had a passion for “memorabilia investing,” as he called thrift-store shopping, and sometimes dressed in secondhand Hawaiian shirts. When the time came for him to give a speech at his high school graduation, instead of orating grandiosely, he admitted to struggling to find words. He took as his theme a quote from The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days,” he told his peers, “before you've actually left them.”

Of course, Otto's best days seemed ahead: He attended the University of Virginia with a scholarship, intent on becoming a banker. A meticulous planner, he filled a calendar hung on his dorm wall with handwritten commitments: from assignments to dates to bringing differently abled friends to basketball games. He joined a fraternity known for its “kind of nerdy dudes,” and one of his college friends said that academics and family always took precedence over everything else, from partying to tailgating at football games. When he won a finance internship the fall of his junior year, there was no disputing that he was a man fully in charge of his destiny.

Knowing that he would soon be laboring over spreadsheets, he decided he wanted an adventure over his winter break. He had long been curious about other cultures and had previously visited intrepid destinations like Cuba. And since he would already be traveling to Hong Kong to study abroad, he decided he wanted to witness the world's most repressive nation: North Korea. Even though the state imprisons and sometimes executes citizens trying to flee it, it permits thousands of foreigners to visit every year on tightly controlled tours—one of the few ways its sanction-crippled economy makes cash. If Otto had Googled “tour North Korea,” the top link would have been for the company he chose, Young Pioneer Tours, an operator specializing in budget excursions to “destinations your mother would rather you stay away from.” The trips have a reputation of being like spring break in a geopolitical hot spot. After putting down a deposit for a $1,200 five-day, four-night “New Year's Party Tour,” Otto learned from the confirmation e-mail that his visa would be arranged by the company and presented to him when he met the tour group at the Beijing airport. The State Department had an advisory in place against traveling to North Korea, where he'd be beyond the American government's power to directly help him. Otto's parents weren't thrilled by the trip, but as his mother later explained, “Why would you say no to a kid like this?”

So, shortly after Christmas 2015, Otto met the other Young Pioneers in China and boarded an old Soviet jet to Pyongyang. In North Korea's capital, border police confiscated cameras and flicked through each file on smartphones to make sure no outsider was smuggling in subversive materials. Then Otto stepped through passport control—and just like that, left the free world.

Early on in Pyongyang, Otto and the other Young Pioneers were led aboard the U.S.S. Pueblo, an American Navy spy ship that had been seized by the North Koreans in 1968 and today serves as an odd tourist attraction. While they toured the ship, the Young Pioneers were regaled by a North Korean who told the foreign visitors about capturing the ship from the “imperial enemy.” The 82 American sailors captured on the Pueblo were beaten and starved for 11 months before finally being released. For Otto, the story made clear what he had perhaps overlooked before: that he was in enemy territory. Even though the Korean War had stalemated in 1953, the lack of a peace agreement meant that the North was technically still at war with the South and its ally, the U.S. Stepping from the boat, Otto “was a little bit shocked,” said Danny Gratton, an impish British 40-something greeting-card salesman who was his roommate for the tour.

But Gratton and the other tourists, a mix of Canadians, Australians, Europeans, and at least one other American, helped Otto laugh off that dark knowledge, nicknaming him “Imperial Enemy”—as in, “Hey, Imperial Enemy, want another beer?” Soon enough Otto was having fun again, for even though propaganda billboards showed North Korean missiles blasting the White House, the tour felt more like a bizarre charade than a visit to a hostile nation. The Young Pioneers visited the 70-foot bronze statues of the first two generations of the country's dictators, and they could never be sure if the citizens they saw spontaneously hailing the Great Leader were sincere or put up to it. Of course, everyone knew that outside the stage-managed capital lay starving villages and concentration camps. But Otto succeeded in bridging the cultural divide, laughing and throwing snowballs with North Korean children.

On New Year's Eve, the Young Pioneers went drinking at a fancy bar, though according to Gratton, no one got belligerently drunk, as some reports would later suggest. After the bar, Gratton says, they celebrated the final hours of New Year's Eve with thousands of North Koreans in Pyongyang's main square. The group then returned to their hotel, known as the “Alcatraz of Fun” because of its island location. To keep foreigners entertained, the 47-story tower is furnished with five restaurants (one of which revolves), a bar, a sauna, a massage parlor, and its own bowling alley. Some Young Pioneers headed to the bar. Gratton went bowling, and lost track of Otto. It was only later that he would wonder about “the two-hour window that none of us can account for [Otto].”

The restricted area in the Pyongyang hotel from which Otto allegedly removed a framed propaganda poster.

North Korea would later release grainy CCTV camera footage of an unidentifiable figure removing a framed propaganda poster from a wall in a restricted area of the hotel, claiming it was Otto. During the televised confession, Otto would read from a handwritten script that he had put on his “quietest boots, the best for sneaking” and attempted the theft at the prompting of a local Methodist church, a university secret society, and the American administration, “to harm the work ethic and motivation of the Korean people” and bring home a “trophy.” Many of the confession's details didn't square—for one, Otto was Jewish, not affiliated with a Methodist church—making experts suspect the words weren't originally Otto's. Whatever happened during those lost hours, when Gratton returned to his and Otto's room, around 4:30 A.M. on January 1, Otto was already snoozing.

The following morning at the airport, the two tired friends were the last Young Pioneers to present their passports, side by side at a single desk. After an uncomfortably long time, Gratton noticed that the officers were intently scrutinizing the documents. Then two soldiers marched up, and one tapped Otto on the shoulder. Gratton thought the authorities just wanted to give the Imperial Enemy a hard time, and jested, “Well, that's the last we'll ever see of you.”

Otto laughed, and then let himself be led away from Gratton through a wooden door beside the check-in area. Otto's control of his carefully planned life had just been wrenched from him.

Otto, escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, where he was sentenced to 15 years of prison with hard labor.

When Robert King went to work at the State Department on January 2, 2016, during the Obama administration, he was expecting a boring day churning through e-mails accumulated over the holidays. Instead, a red-alert situation confronted him. King's first thought was Oh no, not another American. During his seven years as the special envoy for North Korean human-rights issues, King had helped oversee the safe release of more than a dozen imprisoned Americans, so he knew what would happen. First, Otto would be forced to confess to undermining the regime, and tapes of that speech would be used as domestic propaganda to convince North Koreans that America sought to destroy them. Next, Otto was likely to be imprisoned and his freedom used as a bargaining chip by the North Koreans to extract a visit from a high-level American dignitary or concessions in nuclear or sanctions negotiations.

In meetings with the family, King warned the Warmbiers to expect “a marathon, not a sprint.” He also recommended they keep quiet to avoid antagonizing the unpredictable regime. He could offer them few reassurances, explaining, “We weren't 100 percent sure where [Otto] was or what had happened to him,” as America has scant intelligence assets in North Korea. The Warmbiers grew frustrated that the world's most powerful nation could not take more direct, immediate action to help their son.

But King had no leverage over Pyongyang. He couldn't even directly interface with North Korean officials because the two countries have never had a formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, the Swedish ambassador stands in as Washington's liaison for American citizens in Pyongyang. All King could do was wait for weeks while the Swedes' e-mails and calls were stonewalled.

But even if the official State Department response was stymied, that didn't mean that a back channel couldn't be employed. Shortly after Otto was arrested, Ohio governor John Kasich connected the Warmbiers with Bill Richardson, the affable former governor of New Mexico and ambassador to the United Nations, who was leading a foundation that specializes in under-the-radar “fringe diplomacy” to release hostages from hostile regimes or criminal organizations. Richardson had previously helped free several Americans from North Korea and consequently had a strong relationship with what is commonly called the New York Channel, the North Korean representatives at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, who often serve as unofficial go-betweens for Washington and Pyongyang.

Every few weeks from February 2016 to August 2016, Richardson or Mickey Bergman, his senior adviser, traveled to the city to meet the New York Channel. In restaurants, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops near the United Nations, they would hold polite negotiations with the regime's representatives. But shortly after Otto's conviction in Pyongyang, Richardson sensed that the previously communicative foreign ministry was having its information cut off by Kim Jong-un's obstinate inner circle—a transition, his team would later realize, that probably dated from Otto's injury. “They made it clear they could only convey our offers,” Richardson recalled. “They were not decision makers at all.”

Otto signed a document with a thumbprint during his appearance at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang in March 2016.*

To get real answers, someone would have to go to Pyongyang. So with the Obama White House's blessing, Richardson and Bergman negotiated a visit by promising to discuss private humanitarian aid for North Korean flood victims along with Otto's release. Bergman, a former Israeli paratrooper with a therapist's sensitive demeanor, was chosen as the emissary, as Richardson would draw too much attention.

In September, Bergman achieved what he described as the first face-to-face meeting between American and North Korean representatives in Pyongyang in nearly two years. Diplomatic missions to North Korea are different from those to other countries, in which meetings take place across oak tables. In Pyongyang, rather, Bergman was squired around for four days to many of the same sites that Otto had touristed—from the U.S.S. Pueblo to restaurants. But as he chatted with his guides, he knew his informal offers were being conveyed up the chain. By the time Bergman sat down with a vice minister on his last day, he was expecting a positive outcome because of the excitement of his minders. But Bergman was told he wouldn't even get to see Otto. Still, afterward, his handlers reminded him, “It takes 100 hacks to take down a tree.”

Bergman said he hoped he would not have to travel to Pyongyang 99 more times.

Bergman left with the impression that the North Koreans were considering ways that Otto could be released, but first they wanted to see what happened with the climaxing 2016 presidential campaign.

When Trump won, Bergman and Richardson recognized a golden opportunity to free Otto à la the release of American hostages in Iran at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's inaugural presidential term. The two fringe diplomats put together a photo-op-worthy proposal for the Trump plane to pick Otto up in advance of the inauguration, before bureaucracy hemmed in the new president. They didn't receive a no from North Korea, which they knew from past diplomacy with them was often a signal of positive interest. “The challenge that we had was that we could not get Donald Trump,” Bergman said. “We tried to go through Giuliani, Pence, Ivanka. Nothing during the transition. I'm assuming they were in chaos over there. I don't think it ever crossed his desk, because I think he would have actually liked it.”

Vice President Mike Pence and Fred Warmbier drew attention to Otto’s death at the Winter Olympics in South Korea.

After the election, as Robert King transitioned into retirement, Otto's case was taken up by the newly appointed U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun. When Yun came in, Pyongyang was still refusing to speak to the Obama administration, but shortly after the day of Trump's inauguration, the mild-mannered but steely former ambassador established contact with the New York Channel about releasing Otto. By February 2017, a delegation of North Koreans was set to visit the States, but then Kim Jong-un orchestrated the assassination of his half brother with a chemical weapon in an international airport, which drew condemnation from America, scuttling the talks.

“Listening to [Trump] deliberate on this,” said a State Department official, “he sounded to me a lot more like a dad.”

By April, however, relations had thawed to the point that Yun was able to persuade Secretary Tillerson to let him discuss freeing Otto face-to-face with senior North Korean officials, as long as no broader diplomacy was done. So Yun traveled to Norway to meet several high-level North Korean officials on the sidelines of secret nuclear negotiations, conducted by retired diplomats to get around the lack of official contact. Yun and the North Koreans agreed that the Swedish ambassador could visit Otto and the three other Americans who were detained in North Korea. In the end, the proxy was reportedly allowed to see only one detainee—but not Otto.

Yun continued to demand access to Otto, and one day in early June he was surprised by a call urgently requesting him to meet with the New York Channel. In Manhattan, the North Koreans informed Yun that Otto was unconscious. “I was completely shocked,” Yun said. He argued that given the young man's health, Pyongyang had to free him promptly on humanitarian grounds. “I came back immediately, and I told Secretary Tillerson,” Yun said. “And we determined at the time that we needed to get him and the other prisoners out as soon as possible, and I should contact Pyongyang and say I wanted to come right away.”

When Trump learned of Otto's condition, he doubled down on the order for Yun to rush to Pyongyang and bring Otto home. The North Koreans were unilaterally informed that an American plane would soon land in Pyongyang and that United States diplomats and doctors would get off. “The president was very invested in bringing Otto home,” said a State Department official who was involved in the case and who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Listening to him deliberate on this, he sounded to me a lot more like a dad.” But, the official said, “we were very scared,” for though the North Koreans eventually said the plane would be able to land, no one knew what kind of welcome the Americans would receive on the ground. Yun explained, “The North Koreans said we could send a delegation to see Otto, but that we would have to discuss some of the conditions of getting him out once we got there.” And so Yun raced to assemble a diplomatic and medical team to save Otto.

Michael Flueckiger was used to calmly fixing horrifying situations, having previously saved countless patients from gunshot wounds and car crashes during 31 years as a trauma-center doctor. He was also no stranger to dangerous overseas situations, for in his current position as medical director for an elite air-ambulance service, Phoenix Air, he had evacuated Americans stricken with Ebola from Africa. When his boss called to ask if he would help rescue Otto from North Korea, he briefly hesitated from fear, but he decided he couldn't ask any of his employees to go in his stead. Once committed, the challenge-seeking, mountain-biking 67-year-old began excitedly awaiting the mission.

The final go-ahead from the State Department arrived during an inconspicuous Friday lunch. Phoenix Air immediately rerouted its best aircraft—a luxury Gulfstream G-III jet upgraded into a flying E.R.—from Senegal to its headquarters, outside Atlanta, where Flueckiger and his team got it loaded and airborne again in less than two hours on Saturday. Then they picked up Yun and two other members of the State Department in Washington, D.C., and flew to Japan. There they off-loaded everyone but Yun, one other diplomat, and Flueckiger—for only those three had been authorized to enter North Korea. The next day, as the Gulfstream rocketed toward the edge of North Korean airspace, all the Japanese air-traffic controllers could do was aim the plane at Pyongyang and tell the pilot to proceed straight for 20 miles, as there is no official flight path between the countries. Then the radio chatter faded out, and only static filled the airwaves for ten minutes. Finally, a voice speaking perfect English guided the plane's landing in Pyongyang. A busload of soldiers escorted the Americans off the tarmac, and the aircraft returned to Japan.

The Americans were chauffeured through the farmland outside Pyongyang to an opulent guesthouse complete with marble staircases, chandeliers, and a full staff, even though they appeared to be the only guests. That day, Yun engaged in several rounds of intense negotiations with North Korean officials, trying to win Otto's freedom. However, Yun kept butting his head against the North Koreans' argument: Otto committed this crime, so why should he escape due process? In North Korea, disrespecting one of the ubiquitous propaganda posters is actually a serious breach of the law. The research organization Database Center for North Korean Human Rights confirmed a case of a factory janitor being prosecuted for bumping such a picture off the wall so that it fell and broke. As Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group, said, if a North Korean did what Otto did, “they would be dead or definitely tortured.”

Finally, Yun persuaded the North Koreans to let him see Otto. Flueckiger and Yun were shuttled to Friendship Hospital, a private facility that often treats foreign diplomats living in Pyongyang. In an isolated second-floor ICU room, Flueckiger was presented with a pale, inert man with a feeding tube threaded through his nostrils. Could this really be Otto? Flueckiger wondered, for the body looked so different from the pictures he had seen of the homecoming king.

Flueckiger clapped beside Otto's ear. No meaningful response. Sadness flooded him. He had two children and struggled to imagine one in such a state. Yun, too, couldn't help but think of his own son, around Otto's age, and about how the Warmbiers would feel when they saw their boy.

Two North Korean doctors explained that Otto had arrived at the hospital this way more than a year before and showed as proof thick handwritten charts and several brain scans that revealed Otto had suffered extensive brain damage. Flueckiger spent about an hour examining Otto, but the truth had been evident at first sight: The Otto of old was already gone. Though he had obviously improved since coming into the hospital (he had a tracheotomy scar where machines had once breathed for him), he was in a state of unresponsive wakefulness, meaning he still possessed basic reflexes but no longer showed signs of awareness.

The North Koreans asked Flueckiger to sign a report testifying that Otto had been well cared for in the hospital. “I would have been willing to fudge that report if I thought it would get Otto released,” Flueckiger said. “But as it turned out,” despite the most basic facilities (the room's sink did not even work), “he got good care, and I didn't have to lie.” Otto was well nourished and had no bedsores, an accomplishment even Western hospitals struggle to achieve with comatose patients. But the North Koreans were still not ready to release Otto.

Negotiations continued into the night. Then, the next morning, Flueckiger and Yun were driven to a hotel in downtown Pyongyang, where the three other American prisoners were marched into a conference room one by one. The three Korean-Americans, all detained on charges of espionage or “hostile acts against the state,” had had almost no contact with the outside world since being arrested, and they all cried as they dictated messages for their families to Yun. After only 15 minutes, though, each prisoner was escorted away. “I was, frankly, disappointed we didn't get the others out,” Yun said. “It was very hard to leave them behind.”

Once they got back to the guesthouse, Yun found himself once more arguing with North Korean officials for Otto's freedom. Then Yun played his last card: “I called my guys to bring the plane from Japan. I told the North Koreans we would leave with or without Otto. I felt there was no point in dragging on. I was 90 percent sure they would release him, and that this call would bring an action forcing them to do so.”

Shortly before the plane was to land, a North Korean official announced to Yun that they had decided to release Otto. The Americans returned to the hospital, and a North Korean judge in a black suit commuted Otto's sentence. Then the U.S. motorcade and the ambulance raced directly to the airport, through open security gates, and onto the tarmac where the Gulfstream waited. When the plane cleared North Korean airspace, the celebration was muted. The team knew they would soon have to face the heartbreak of turning Otto over to his parents. In the meantime, Flueckiger cradled Otto, changed his diaper, and whispered to him that he was free, like a father soothing his baby.

Two days after the return, Fred Warmbier took the stage at Otto's high school. He was draped in the linen blazer that his son had worn during his forced confession. Tears spangled his eyes as he said to the assembled reporters, “Otto, I love you, and I'm so crazy about you, and I'm so glad you're home.” He blamed the Obama administration for failing to win Otto's release sooner, and thanked Trump. When asked about his son's health, he said grimly, “We're trying to make him comfortable.” Sometimes he slipped into the past tense when talking about him.

From the start, Fred had striven relentlessly for Otto's freedom with the same streetwise entrepreneurism he had used to eventually build a major metal-finishing business after going to work straight out of high school. He traveled to Washington more than a dozen times in 2016 to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry and other high-level politicians. But after a fruitless year of bowing to the Obama administration's admonitions to work behind the scenes, he decided that “the era of strategic patience for the Warmbier family [was] over.” Early in Trump's presidency, Fred appeared on Fox News, reportedly because he knew that the president obsessively watched the network, to complain that the State Department wasn't doing enough for his son. “President Trump, I ask you: Bring my son home,” he said. “You can make a difference here.” Soon the administration had raised Otto's case into a signature issue.

When Otto was returned in a vegetative state, Fred refocused his zeal on getting justice for him. To Fred, the evidence of torture seemed clear. The once vital young man was severely brain-damaged. His formerly straight teeth were misaligned, and a large scar marred his foot. Doctors detected no signs of botulism, North Korea's explanation. And The New York Times had written that the government had “obtained intelligence reports in recent weeks indicating that Mr. Warmbier had been repeatedly beaten while in North Korean custody,” citing an anonymous senior American official.

Within 48 hours of his return, Otto had a fever that had risen to 104 degrees. After doctors confirmed to Fred and Cindy that their son would never be cognizant again, they directed that his feeding tube be removed. They lived at his bedside until, six days after returning home, Otto died.

Hundreds of people lined the streets to witness Otto's hearse, and many made the W hand gesture representing his high school. Wearing an American-flag tie, Fred watched his son “complete his journey home” with a haggard stare.

After a mourning period, Fred and Cindy appeared on Fox & Friends in September 2017, once more reportedly seeking to catch the president's eye, and called the North Koreans “terrorists” who had “intentionally injured” Otto. Fred graphically described damage to Otto's teeth and foot as the result of torture and demanded that the administration punish the dictatorship. Shortly afterward, the president showed his approval by tweeting “great interview” and noting that Otto was “tortured beyond belief by North Korea.” To lobby for the United States to take legal action against North Korea, Fred hired the lawyer who represents Vice President Mike Pence in the special counsel's Russia investigation. In early November, Congress backed banking restrictions against North Korea that were named for Otto. And later that month, Trump designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, which would allow harsher future sanctions, stating, “As we take this action today, our thoughts turn to Otto Warmbier.”

“Being imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating,” Kenneth Bae, an American who’d been detained in North Korea, told me. “I was on trial for all of America.”

Around the same time as Otto's death, U.S. hostilities with North Korea were growing heated. This was the period of “fire and fury,” and of Trump and Kim comparing who had the “bigger & more powerful” nuclear buttons. Behind the scenes in Washington, dovish diplomats, like Joseph Yun, were replaced by hawks, like John Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq war. The likelihood of conflict grew so real that an American diplomat warned a Seoul-dwelling friend in confidence to move his assets out of South Korea.

On TV and social media, and in official speeches, Republican officials cited Otto's death as a reason Kim Jong-un needed to be confronted. When making a case for a forceful response against North Korea to the South Korean National Assembly, in November 2017, Trump said their common enemy had “tortured Otto Warmbier, ultimately leading to that fine young man's death.” In his January 2018 State of the Union address, Trump pledged to keep “maximum pressure” on North Korea and to “honor Otto's memory with total American resolve,” while the Warmbiers wept in the gallery. Meanwhile, Fred and Cindy traveled the country reinforcing the narrative that Otto was tortured. As Cindy told the United Nations in New York City, “I can't let Otto die in vain.” In April 2018, the Warmbiers, seeking damages, filed a lawsuit alleging that North Korea “brutally tortured and murdered” their son.

Despite how Trump and his administration boosted the narrative that Otto was physically tortured, however, the evidence was not clear-cut. The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been “systematically tortured and intentionally injured,” a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn't previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers' assertions.

Fred had described Otto's teeth as having been “re-arranged” with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that “the teeth [were] natural and in good repair.” She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto's brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma. “His body was in excellent condition,” Sammarco said. “I'm sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.” When asked about the Warmbiers' claims, Sammarco answered, “They're grieving parents. I can't really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.” Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.

The origin of Otto's injury remained a mystery. “We're never going to know,” Sammarco said, “unless the people who were there at the time it happened would come forward and say, ‘This is what happened.’ ”

Discovering the truth of events that happen in North Korea is a task that even American intelligence agencies struggle with. But Otto's experience after his arrest is not a black hole, as it has often been portrayed. Through intelligence sources, government officials, and senior-level North Korean defectors, and drawing on the experiences of the 15 other Americans who since 1996 have been imprisoned in North Korea—some in the same places as Otto—it is possible to describe Otto's probable day-to-day life there.

Within the electrified fences of many of North Korea's notorious prison camps dwell up to 120,000 souls, condemned for infractions as minor as watching banned South Korean soap operas. The human-rights abuses within have been extensively documented, creating a compelling case that they are among the worst places in the world. The lucky survive on starvation rations while enduring routine beatings and dangerous enforced labor, like coal mining. The unlucky are tortured to death. In Seoul, one North Korean, who had endured three years at a low-level camp for trying to flee the country, wept as she told me: “North Korean prisons are actually hell. We had less rights than a dog. They often beat us, and we were so hungry we would catch mice in our cells to eat.” She saw six to eight fellow prisoners die every day.

But American detainees escape that fate. When Otto finally opened his eyes again, he likely found himself at a guesthouse, which is where the State Department believed he was probably kept. At least five previous American detainees have been imprisoned in a two-story building with a green-tiled roof in a gated alleyway behind a restaurant in downtown Pyongyang, which is run by the State Security Department, the North Korean secret police. (Others have been kept at a different guesthouse, and at least three have stayed at a hotel.) The most used guesthouse is luxurious by local standards—detainees can hear guards using its karaoke machine into the wee hours—but Otto would have likely found its two-room suites roughly equivalent to those in a basic hotel. And no matter how nice his suite, it was also a cell, for he would have been allowed out only for an occasional escorted walk.

For the next two months, until his forced confession, Otto would probably have been relentlessly interrogated; American missionary Kenneth Bae said he was questioned up to 15 hours a day. The goal wasn't to extract the truth but to construct the fabulation that Otto read off handwritten notes at his news conference. In the past, North Korea has spun false confessions from small truths, and in this case they may have construed a conspiracy from a souvenir propaganda poster that Otto had bought, according to Danny Gratton, Otto's tour roommate. No previous American detainee has accused North Korea of using physical force to extract a confession, but if Otto protested his innocence, he probably received a warning similar to the one given to Ohioan Jeffrey Fowle, who was detained two years before him: “If you don't start cooperating, things are going to become less pleasant.” As the journalist Laura Ling wrote of her five months in detention, “I told [the prosecutor] what he wanted to hear—and kept telling him until he was satisfied.”

Ever since the sailors of the U.S.S. Pueblo were beaten in 1968, there have been no clear-cut cases of North Korea physically torturing American prisoners. When Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee sneaked over the North Korean border, Ling was struck as soldiers detained them. But once their nationalities were established, they were sent to the green-roofed guesthouse. American media, including The New York Times, have widely repeated the claims that missionary Robert Park was physically tortured, but Park himself has reportedly said that the story that he was stripped naked by female guards and clubbed in the genitals was fabricated by a journalist. On the contrary, the North Koreans have carefully tended to the health of Americans they have captured, caring for them, if needed, in the Friendship Hospital where Otto was kept; 85-year-old detainee Merrill Newman was reportedly visited by a doctor and nurse four times a day. As a high-level North Korean defector who now works for a South Korean intelligence agency said, “North Korea treats its foreign prisoners especially well. They know someday they will have to send them back.”

But that doesn't mean that North Korea doesn't psychologically torture detained Americans—in fact, it has always tried to bludgeon them into mental submission. Bae, Ling, and other prisoners were repeatedly told that their government had “forgotten” them and were given so little hope that they only learned of their impending freedom an hour before being released. When I met former detainee Bae in the Seoul office of his NGO dedicated to helping North Korean defectors, he told me, “Being imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating. I was on trial for all of America, so I had to accept that I had no control and there was no way I could get out of the impending punishment.” While some previous detainees were allowed letters from home, it seems that North Korea denied Otto any contact with the outside world. His only break from the interrogations was likely watching North Korean propaganda films. The psychic trauma of all this has sent previous detainees into crushing depressions, and even driven some to attempt suicide.

In the footage of his news-conference confession, Otto looked physically healthy, but as he sobbed for his freedom, he was obviously in extreme mental distress. Two weeks later, in mid-March, as Otto was filmed after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, his body still looked whole, but his expression was vacant and he had to be supported by two guards as he was dragged out of the courthouse—as if the life had drained out of him.

Until now, the next assumption about Otto's fate was that he had suffered severe brain damage by “April,” as the first brain scan sent back with his body was time-stamped. Speculation suggested that the tragedy might have occurred at a special labor camp for foreigners, where at least three Americans have performed their hard-labor sentences. There they were forced to plant soybeans or make bricks while living in spartan conditions, though, as Bae wrote, “Compared to the average North Korean serving time in a labor camp, I was in a four-star resort.” Certainly, it would have been more likely for any type of tragedy—over-exertion under a furnace sun, a work accident, or even directed beatings—to occur in that barbed-wire-enclosed valley a few miles outside Pyongyang. But Otto almost certainly never made it to the labor camp.

“The staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,” Dr. Flueckiger told me. “They had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.” As Yun, the negotiator who helped free Otto, said, “The doctors were clear that he had been brought to the hospital within a day of his trial, and that he had been in that same room until I saw him.”

The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto's body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.

It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto's death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don't believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”

Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts' doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten.

However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God's sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.

Another senior government official told me, “I can tell you that I've been in a lot of classified meetings about Otto, before and after his return. Beforehand, I heard some reporting that he was beaten, but it wasn't from State or Intel, who never corroborated that, before or after the fact. But it's possible that there was intel I did not see.”

A congressional staffer familiar with the intelligence reports said, “Before we had Otto back in the United States, we just didn't know what was going on there. In the end, there was no definitive evidence whether or not he was beaten.” The staffer claimed that the government never got further intelligence reports indicating Otto was beaten.

Three days after the Times published its claims, The Washington Post also cited an anonymous senior American official rejecting reports that Otto had been beaten in custody. South Korean intelligence, generally considered the spy agency with the best sources in North Korea, found no confirmation that Otto was beaten.

But if Otto was almost certainly not “repeatedly beaten,” then what put him in a state of non-responsive wakefulness? And why would the Trump administration allow these unverified rumors to flourish?

Without knowing about the revised time line of Otto's injury, experts I spoke to overwhelmingly identified some kind of accident—for example, an allergic reaction—as the most likely cause for Otto's unconsciousness. The likelihood that his brain damage happened immediately after the sentencing, however, raises the possibility that he may have attempted suicide.

Imagine what Otto must have been feeling after hearing that he would spend the next 15 years laboring in what he probably imagined to be a gulag. After two months of being constantly reminded that the American government couldn't help him, he probably felt that his family, his beautiful girlfriend (who called him her “soul mate”), and his Wall Street future were all lost. What else could he look forward to but physical and mental suffering?

At least two Americans imprisoned in North Korea have attempted suicide. After failing to cut his wrists, Aijalon Gomes chewed open a thermometer and drank its mercury, later explaining that he had given up on America's ability to free him. Despite eventually having his release won by Jimmy Carter, Gomes was unable to escape his post-traumatic stress disorder, and seven years later burned himself to death. An American official said that Evan Hunziker tried to kill himself while being held, and less than a month after returning home, he shattered his own skull with a bullet in a run-down hotel. Robert Park reportedly tried to take his own life on returning.

Even if North Korea didn't beat Otto, that doesn't mean that he wasn't tortured, as the mental suffering the regime inflicted on him constitutes torture under the U.N. definition. As Tomás Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea, said, “Otto's rights were violated on every level.”

The first that Governor Richardson, the back-channel negotiator, heard of Otto's injury was upon the young man's release, and he was furious at having been deceived by Pyongyang. But a North Korean ambassador soon contacted Richardson to explain that he had not meant to lead him astray in negotiations and that he too had been kept in the dark. “I believed him,” Richardson told me. “In the 15 years I've been negotiating with him, he's always been honest.” Senator Portman and sources working inside North Korea at the time also stressed that the foreign ministry didn't know. The minister who was responsible for Otto was demoted and eventually disappeared, according to Michael Madden, a North Korea analyst who tracks its leadership. Even the guards on whose watch Otto was injured were likely sent to prison. All of which means that the full truth of what transpired is likely hoarded only by Kim Jong-un and his most trusted lieutenants, and that it may never get out.

For all the unknowns, one certainty is that the Trump administration allowed the narrative that Otto was repeatedly beaten to spread, long after it was clear those intelligence reports were almost certainly wrong. That the reports suggested that he was beaten repeatedly when there was not time for that showed they were unreliable. The lack of physical evidence of beatings was widely publicized. The administration was informed of the correct time line, and it was well known among government officials who worked on the case. And both the senior-level American officials and the congressional staffer confirmed that the government never shared with them definitive evidence that Otto was beaten.

Now, that's not to fault the Trump administration for applying maximum pressure on North Korea for an American citizen ending up brain-damaged in its custody: Such behavior warrants punishment. Nor is it to imply that the senior government official lied to The New York Times about the intelligence reports, as some analysts suggested to me; that person seems to have correctly described them. But if the maverick boldness that the administration displayed in rescuing Otto represents the best of Trumpism, what followed once it was clear the reports were flawed encapsulates its troubling disregard for facts when a dubious narrative supports its interests.

It's impossible to say whether or not Trump had seen or parsed the nuances of the intelligence reports before he tweeted about Fred Warmbier's Fox interview, supporting that Otto had been physically tortured. Or when he declared, before the South Korean National Assembly, that Otto had been “tortured.” Perhaps those were just two more of the 3,001 false or misleading claims he advanced in his first 466 days in office, according to The Washington Post 's Fact Checker database. Or maybe it was a conscious strategy. Whatever it was, the misrepresentation helped push the U.S. closer to war with North Korea than it had ever been. Though soon, of course, the administration would choose a different path.

When Fred hugged Otto that first night in the air ambulance, he felt that he couldn't get through to him and that his son was “very uncomfortable—almost anguished.” But “within a day, the countenance of his face changed,” the Warmbiers said. Though there was no way that Otto could communicate with them, they wrote, “he was home, and we believe he could sense that.” Otto, they said, was finally “at peace.”

We tell stories so that we can make sense of irresolvable unknowns and then act. While no one can prove what happened to Otto in those final few hours, as Trump encouraged the narrative that Otto was beaten and the White House allowed speculation about possible beatings to spread, the administration gave people license to indulge their worst fears about Otto's fate and act accordingly.

In doing so, the Trump administration may have fostered misperceptions in the Warmbier family itself. During the year after highlighting the story that Otto was physically tortured, Trump praised Fred and Cindy as “good friends” and invited them to high-profile events. But Fred indicated on national television in September 2017 that he had no more knowledge of his son's case than that put out by the news media. In the lawsuit the Warmbiers filed in April against North Korea for Otto's death, they continued to assert evidence that he was repeatedly beaten. If they entertain the belief that their son's last conscious moments were spent in fear and physical agony as he was assaulted, that may be the result of the administration's unwillingness to acknowledge a different version of events, one that the facts support. But whatever they believe, what is clear is that they are loving parents, dealing with an unimaginably tragic loss, who have been striving to honor Otto's legacy.

When presented with the findings of this article, the Trump administration declined to comment.

Upon learning that this article did not support claims that Otto was beaten, and included the theory that he may have attempted suicide—a possibility that the family, through their lawyer, dismissed categorically—the Warmbiers withdrew a statement that they had previously provided. Ultimately, they declined to comment for this story.

In the absence of proof, we all have to choose what we want to believe about Otto's tragedy. And in this political age, where truth seems enslaved to the agendas of the powerful, it is important to consider what story we believe and why. After all, the stories we tell ourselves and others shape our own fates, and those of nations, the world, and other people's children.

In the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto's death and the grief of those he left behind.

Fred Warmbier came face-to-face with those responsible for Otto's death at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Since the beginning of 2018, North Korea, hamstrung by sanctions and spooked by full-on preparations for war in Otto's name, had been trying to reset relations with the outside world. The centerpiece of this diplomacy was a “charm offensive” at the February Games—deploying squads of cherubic cheerleaders singing folk songs about re-unification, and Kim Jong-un's smiley sister shaking hands with world leaders. The North Koreans even reportedly reached out to ask if Vice President Pence wanted to meet her, while warning him not to highlight Otto's story. Instead, Pence invited Fred Warmbier to sit with him in the VIP box at the opening ceremony, not ten feet from Kim's sister. Fred barely even looked at her as he sat in grieving dignity, his sorrow rebuking her serene ambassadorial smirk.

His personal life is in shambles, Robert Mueller looms large, and it's never been trickier to be the president's son.

By Julia Ioffe

In March, two top-level South Korean officials traveled to Pyongyang, where they feasted and drank traditional Korean liquor for four hours with Kim Jong-un, after which they were given a special message to deliver to Trump. The South Koreans rushed to Washington. On hearing the offer, and before consulting any of his advisers, the president accepted. Then one of the South Koreans informed the world from the White House driveway that the two leaders would try to resolve their nations' never-ended war in person.

From that point on, the White House no longer focused on Otto's tragedy. In fact, it swung so far in the opposite direction that civil-rights groups complained about human-rights issues not being on the agenda for the summit in Singapore. When the three remaining American detainees were released in May, Trump welcomed them home by saying, “We want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people.”

The story of Otto being brutally beaten had outlived its usefulness.

In early June, Trump and Kim shook hands in front of the red, white, and blue of both nations' flags. In a private meeting, Trump showed Kim a Hollywood-trailer-like video that laid out the choice between economic prosperity, if he gave up his nukes, or war. Then they signed a largely symbolic document after North Korea promised to denuclearize and America swore to not invade, though there were no enforcement mechanisms in the document.

At Trump's post-summit news conference, the first question a reporter asked was why the president had been praising Kim, as the dictator had been responsible for Otto's death.

“Otto Warmbier is a very special person,” Trump answered. “I think, without Otto, this would not have happened.” Then he said twice, as if it was doubly true or he was trying to convince himself: “Otto did not die in vain.”

Doug Bock Clark wrote about the assassination of Kim Jong-un's brother in the October 2017 issue. His first book, ‘The Last Whalers,’ comes out next year.

This story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the title "American Hostage: The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier."

* A previous version of the caption misidentified the action being taken by Otto Warmbier. He is signing a document with a thumbprint, not having his fingerprints taken.

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Opinion: An 85-year-old American tourist’s run-in with North Korea’s interrogators

Editor’s Note: Mike Chinoy  is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute and a former Beijing Bureau Chief and Senior Asia Correspondent for CNN. He has visited North Korea 17 times. This article is largely drawn from his book  “The Last POW.”  The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more CNN opinion  here.   

In October 2013, an 85-year-old American tourist, Korean War veteran  Merrill Newman , was taken off his Air Koryo plane as he waited to leave Pyongyang after a week-long tourist trip to North Korea and detained. No one — his family, the State Department, the media — had any idea why, and the North Koreans initially said nothing.

Eventually, it emerged that the detention was connected to Newman’s role during the Korean War, when he ran a group of anti-Communist Korean agents operating behind North Korean lines known as the “Kuwol Comrades,” a reference to the Mt. Kuwol area south of Pyongyang, which was their key base.

A casual reference by Newman to one of his North Korean guides about having served with people in the Mt. Kuwol area convinced the always-suspicious North Korean security apparatus that he was some kind of secret agent returning to activate what they suspected — completely contrary to reality — was a geriatric network of spies.

However fanciful, the result was a weeks-long ordeal for the retired Palo Alto California businessman,  who died last year.  The details of Newman’s 42-day detention, which he recounted to me for my book about his experience,  “The Last POW,”  provide fascinating insights into how the North Korean security services operate — and may shed some light on what  Travis King , the young American serviceman now in North Korean hands, might be facing.

The 23-year-old King darted across the demarcation line separating North and South Korea while on a group tour of the Joint Security Area in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone on Tuesday, an eyewitness on the same tour and US officials familiar with the case  told CNN.  His motives remain unclear, although he had faced  legal trouble in South Korea  and the prospect of being discharged from the military upon returning to the US. North Korea has so far said nothing about the incident, which comes amid a spike in tensions between Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul.

In Newman’s case almost a decade ago, the first thing he was ordered to do in the room where he was confined at Pyongyang’s Yanggankdo Hotel, was write a complete account of his life.

An interpreter translated the document into Korean, often asking Newman for explanations of some of the terms he used. The final draft came to 14 pages.

This was followed by numerous interrogation sessions. Each one lasted several hours, with an “investigator” — who always sat in front of a window so he would remain in silhouette, ensuring Newman could not make out his face — focusing on Newman’s involvement with the Kuwol fighters.

“They were looking for information,” Newman told me. “They wanted to know about the organization. They asked about the guerrillas. They were trying to get me to tell them names. I said we never used names; I told them there was a commander, a platoon leader, a boat captain.”

“What did the platoon leader look like?” the investigator asked.

Making it up as he went along, Newman replied, “Tall and skinny.”

“Long face or round face?”

“Long face,” Newman answered. “And the same with the commander — he was tall and long-faced.”

The investigator erupted. “You’re lying! We all know all about Lt. Newman. We have evidence. If you don’t tell us the truth, you will not be able to go to your home country.”

The interrogator wanted details. How many attacks did the Kuwol Comrades stage? Newman had no idea, so he said 10. How many people did the guerrillas kill? Newman arbitrarily picked a number: 50.

“If they want casualties,” he said, “I’ll give them casualties. It was just pure made-­up.”

After a month in detention, Newman was told that he committed “major crimes” and that he must make a formal “confession.”

“The statement used words they dictated,” Newman said. “I did not try to tidy the language. I wanted it clearly understood [by those outside North Korea] that these were not my words, though in my handwriting.”

On November 9, Newman was taken to a large room on the ground floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel to read his “confession.” With video cameras rolling and his hands shaking, Newman began.

“During the Korean War, I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK government and Korean people,” he said, adding that he “killed so many civilians and KPA [Korean People’s Army] soldiers and destroyed strategic objects.”

“I committed indelible offensive acts against the DPRK government and Korean people. Although 60 years have gone by, I came to DPRK on the excuse of the tour… Shamelessly, I had a plan to meet any surviving soldiers,” continued Newman.

“I also brought the e-­book criticizing the Socialist DPRK and criticizing DPRK… I realize that I cannot be forgiven for any offensives, but I beg for pardon on my knees,” he said. “Please forgive me…  If I go back to USA, I will tell the true features of the DPRK.”

At the end of the statement, Newman bowed to the camera, then signed it and stamped the paper with his thumbprint.

“You make a confession because you don’t have any choice,” Newman told me. “They have the key. And there isn’t any duplicate.”

Newman now thought the North Koreans would move to release him. But nothing happened. Confined in his hotel room, in moments of depression, he began to wonder if he would ever be released.

Apart from the “investigator,” his only other human contact came from his guards, the interpreter and a doctor and nurse. The North Koreans appeared to realize how much trouble they would face if something happened to him, so, four times a day, the doctor and nurse arrived to take his blood pressure, check his pulse and measure his heart rate.

“The interrogations were stressful. The investigator was saying, ‘The most important thing is for you to be healthy.’ I would say, ‘The most important thing is for me to be able to be home. Then I’ll be healthy.’ I was saying, ‘My wife is an old lady. She needs me.’ I talked to the doctors. I talked to the guards. I talked to the interpreter. Finally, the investigator said, ‘Stop. You sound like a three-­year-­old. It’s just going to make you stay here longer.’ So I stopped.”

But the “investigator” did urge Newman get some exercise, so after about a month in detention, he was taken out of the hotel for several walks on the island where the Yanggakdo was located.

“There were 81 steps down to the river,” Newman said. “Going up and down the steps, the nurse and doctor each held  one arm to be sure I wouldn’t fall.”

But days would go by when the “investigator” did not appear. There was no explanation. Some days, even the interpreter was absent.

“I’d get really low when nobody came. They were just feeding me and checking my blood pressure. The rest of the time I was just sitting. What in the world is going on? They’ve got all the information they’re ever going to get. Why are they just ignoring me? I thought, ‘Are they holding me here as trading material?’”

On Friday, November 29, the North Koreans told Newman he would have a meeting with Swedish ambassador Karl-Olof Andersson the following day. The “investigator” and the interpreter instructed Merrill as to how to explain why he was being held.

Newman made notes and was then forced to rehearse, five times on Friday, and three more times on Saturday. But he was having trouble, because it was their English, not his, and they wanted him to do it without notes.

“I told them, I can’t. You are going to have to let me say it in my words, not yours. If you let me use my words, I can manage. If you want me to use your words, I have a real problem.”

“Indelible” — a word that was used repeatedly in the videotaped confession two weeks earlier — was one to which Newman had particular objections. Eventually, the North Koreans agreed to let him sound more like himself, but a senior official of higher rank than the “investigator” came by to listen and make sure Newman said only what he was supposed to.

“It was all choreographed. They didn’t want me to say another word,” Newman told me.

Andersson arrived and gave Newman some snacks, two bottles of beer and a Coca-­Cola. He also brought letters from his family, which the North Koreans, presumably wanting to read them first, did not give to Newman until the middle of the following week.

Sitting across from Andersson, Newman awkwardly recited his lines. As he finished, the “investigator” walked behind the ambassador, looked at Merrill, and flashed a broad smile.

“It was a human gesture. It was completely out of character.”

Yet in the days that followed, nothing happened.

“I kept thinking, ‘How many other steps are there? How high does it have to go? Does it have to go to Kim Jong Un?’”

Later that same day, however, KCNA, the official North Korean news agency, released the text of Newman’s confession, and put the video of him reading the statement online. The Kuwol connection was a bombshell, and suddenly added a whole new dimension to the situation.

Newman’s family was immensely relieved to see him alive, but found the televised confession profoundly disturbing.

“It was a very hard thing to observe,” said his wife, Lee. “We didn’t know what the circumstances were. His hand was shaking. His handwriting was not what we were accustomed to seeing. So we knew he was under stress.”

At 6 a.m. on Saturday, December 7, Newman’s interpreter knocked on the door and told him to get dressed. An hour later, another “investigator”— higher-ranking than the one Newman had been dealing with — arrived, along with a new interpreter.

The official had stunning news. He told Merrill he was being released, but then went through a series of specific points he wanted Newman to say after he left North Korea.

“I was supposed to say, I apologize for this, this, and this, and thank the government for releasing me.” The new “investigator” warned him again how close he had come to being sentenced to a long prison term in North Korea.

At the airport, his interpreter told him “I don’t know why they are letting you go.” But after six harrowing weeks, Merrill Newman was heading home. It appears that the North Koreans, having recognized their notion of Newman as an 85-year-old master spy had no basis in reality, concluded that, once face was saved through his “confession,” there was no benefit to holding him.

In the case of Travis King, much will depend on how he is viewed in Pyongyang. Over the decades, a handful of serving American soldiers have defected and been allowed to live in North Korea. But others who have entered the country without permission have faced legal charges and imprisonment.

The critical calculation is likely to be how North Korea believes it can best make use of the episode at a time of growing tension with the US.

In early 2014, a month after his return, Newman got a call from the State Department. The North Koreans had given a document to the Swedish ambassador to send to him. Newman wondered: What on earth could it be?

In a gesture of astonishing chutzpah, the North Koreans were submitting a bill of $3,241 for his enforced stay at the Yanggakdo Hotel. They’d even added a $3 fee for “a lost plate.”

Newman asked the State Department whether paying might help the other Americans detained in North Korea, and was told no.

The bill remained unpaid.

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North Korea sentences American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor

North Korea sentences US tourist 15 years in prison

Otto Warmbier is charged with subversion

PYONGYANG, North Korea – North Korea's highest court sentenced an American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion on Wednesday, weeks after authorities presented him to media and he tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda banner. 

Otto Warmbier, 21, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea's Supreme Court. 

He was charged with subversion under Article 60 of North Korea's criminal code. The court held that he had committed a crime "pursuant to the U.S. government's hostile policy toward (the North), in a bid to impair the unity of its people after entering it as a tourist." 

North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the U.S.-backed South Korean government to take control of the Korean Peninsula. 

Tensions are particularly high following North Korea's recent nuclear test and rocket launch, and massive joint military exercises now underway between the U.S. and South Korea that the North sees as a dress rehearsal for invasion. 

The University of Virginia said it was aware of news reports about Warmbier and remained in touch with his family, but would have no additional comment at this time. 

A message seeking comment from Warmbier's family was left at a Wyoming, Ohio, telephone listing for his father, Fred Warmbier. Susanna Max, a spokeswoman for Wyoming City Schools, said last month that the district, where Otto Warmbier attended school, had been in touch with the family. She said Wednesday that the district continues "to respect their privacy" and declines to comment. 

Before the trial, Warmbier had said he tried to steal a propaganda banner as a trophy for an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. That would be grounds in North Korea for a subversion charge. He identified the church as Friendship United Methodist Church. Meshach Kanyion, pastor of the church in Wyoming, declined to comment Wednesday. 

Ohio Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich issued a statement Wednesday calling on North Korea to immediately release Warmbier and let him return to his family. "His detention was completely unjustified and the sentence North Korea imposed on him is an affront to concepts of justice," Kasich said. 

Trials for foreigners facing similar charges in North Korea are generally short and punishments severe. Warmbier was arrested as he tried to leave the country in early January. He was in North Korea with a New Year's tour group. 

U.S. tourism to North Korea is legal. Arrests of tourists are rare but the U.S. State Department strongly advises against such travel.

Further complicating matters, Washington and Pyongyang do not have diplomatic relations. The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang acts as a go-between in consular issues when U.S. citizens run afoul of North Korean authorities. 

North Korea announced Warmbier's arrest in late January, saying he committed an anti-state crime with "the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation." It remains unclear how the U.S. government was allegedly connected to Warmbier's actions. 

Warmbier had been staying at the Yanggakdo International Hotel. It is common for sections of tourist hotels to be reserved for North Korean staff and off-limits to foreigners. 

In a tearful statement made before his trial, Warmbier told a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang he was offered a used car worth $10,000 if he could get a propaganda banner and was also told that if he was detained and didn't return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.

Warmbier said he accepted the offer because his family was "suffering from very severe financial difficulties." 

Warmbier also said he had been encouraged by the university's "Z Society," which he said he was trying to join. The magazine of the university's alumni association describes the Z Society as a "semi-secret ring society" founded in 1892 that conducts philanthropy, puts on honorary dinners and grants academic awards. 

In previous cases, people who have been detained in North Korea and made a public confession often recant those statements after their release. 

In the past, North Korea has held out until senior U.S. officials or statesmen came to personally bail out detainees, all the way up to former President Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. 

In November 2014, U.S. spy chief James Clapper went to Pyongyang to bring home Matthew Miller, who had ripped up his visa when entering the country and was serving a six-year sentence on an espionage charge, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been sentenced to 15 years for alleged anti-government activities. 

Jeffrey Fowle, another U.S. tourist from Ohio detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a U.S. government plane. Fowle left a Bible in a local club hoping a North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offense in North Korea.

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• North Korea

Otto Warmbier’s Death May Spell the End of American Tourism to North Korea. Sadly, That’s About It

I t was supposed to be sassy, hinting at danger while assuring security. Though the promise of Young Pioneer Tours to offer “budget travel to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from” today appears crass in the extreme.

The death on Monday of Otto Warmbier, who was detained in Pyongyang 17 months ago while on a group tour organized by Young Pioneer, has once again laid bare the dangers of voluntarily relinquishing your liberty — even temporarily — to a tyrannical regime with no diplomatic ties to Washington. And it has augmented existing calls for a blanket travel ban on U.S. citizens visiting the regime of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, which still has three Americans — Kim Dong-chul, Kim Sang-duk and Kim Hak-song — in detention.

“Otto’s fate deepens my Administration’s determination to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency,” said President Donald Trump in a statement . “The United States once again condemns the brutality of the North Korean regime as we mourn its latest victim.”

Warmbier, 22, had been serving a 15-year prison sentence with hard labor following his arrest on Jan. 2, 2016, for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel in Pyongyang — deemed “a hostile act.” North Korean officials said he fell into a coma soon after his conviction upon being given a sleeping pill after contracting botulism, a potentially fatal bacterial illness. He was finally returned to the U.S. last week; however, American doctors said he suffered “severe injury to all regions of the brain.” Warmbier’s family said in a statement Monday that his condition was due to “awful torturous mistreatment” during detention.

“There is no excuse for any civilized nation to have kept his condition secret and denied him top notch medical care for so long,” Warmbier’s father, Fred, told a press conference.

Read More: Why Otto Warmbier Was Released From North Korea

Warmbier’s treatment and death has served as a wake-up call to both those who join and organize tours to North Korea. In an emotional statement, Young Pioneers Tours said : “The way his detention was handled was appalling, and a tragedy like this must never be repeated … Considering these facts and this tragic outcome we will no longer be organizing tours for U.S. citizens to North Korea.” Uri Tours, a U.S.-based tour company also offering trips to North Korea, said it was “reviewing its position on [North Korea] travel for American citizens.”

They may not have a choice. Although the State Department already warns in strong terms against North Korean travel, last month Republican and Democratic U.S. congressmen introduced a bill that would ban American tourists from traveling to North Korea as tourists and require special permission for other visits, citing at least 17 Americans detained by the regime over the last decade. “With increased tensions in North Korea, the danger that Americans will be detained for political reasons is greater than ever,” Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Joe Wilson said in a statement.

Since taking office, Trump has turned the screws on the Kim regime, persuading China — the source of nearly all North Korean trade — to cut off revenue and in April dispatching the Carl Vinson U.S. Navy strike group to the Korean peninsular in a show of force. Trump has warned of a “major, major conflict” with North Korea should it continue its nuclear program. The regime has conducted five nuclear tests to date and 16 missile tests this year alone.

Amid the heightening tensions, there was clearly a political aspect to Otto’s continued detention, as the regime has previously managed to wrangle visits from top U.S. figures — most recently former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — to secure the release of Americans detained. The Obama administration’s tactic of “strategic patience” — refusing to engage with the regime while squeezing it financially through sanctions — has by and large been kept in place by Trump, despite his administration’s declaration that it would break with the policy. This meant no diplomatic thawing was on the cards for Warmbier; that is, until diplomats finally learned about his failing health.

Speaking to journalists upon his son’s return, Fred Warmbier thanked the Trump administration and laid blame on the Obama White House for not doing enough to secure his son’s freedom.

“Earlier this year Cindy and I decided the time for ‘strategic patience’ was over,” he said, praising new State Department Special Representative for North Korea Policy Joseph Yun, who traveled to Pyongyang June 12 to secure Warmbier’s release, for his “aggressively pursued resolution of the situation.” Asked whether the Obama administration could have done more, Fred Warmbier replied, “I think the results speak for themselves.”

The fact remains that Warmbier may still be alive today if, as may now happen, Americans had been prohibited from traveling to North Korea. But it is also true that stronger diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang would have aided in securing an earlier release.

“It’s just very sad,” says Prof. Stephan Haggard, a Korea expert at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. “One channel is to shut down the tourism. But I’m not sure it will have much effect in terms of the larger strategy.”

Read More: Moon Jae In, the Man Who Wants to Negotiate With North Korea

Other than implementing a travel ban, which would close off a not insignificant income stream for Pyongyang, it’s unclear what more the U.S. could do to gain some sense of justice for the Warmbier family. North Korea is already one the world’s most heavily sanctioned countries, and any new economic measures would be symbolic rather than substantive. A more fitting tribute would be to secure the release of the three other Americans held by the regime before a similar tragedy befalls them, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson demanded in a statement Monday.

Washington could impose secondary sanctions on individuals and companies organizing tours to North Korea, many of which are based in China, the U.K. and U.S., though that would be a legal minefield. Such a move would also contradict recent developments indicating a move toward engagement with the North, especially after last month’s election of liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

“What can the U.S. and its allies do after Otto’s death?” asked one top Korea-watcher, who requested anonymity out of respect for the Warmbier family. “The brutal reality is nothing.”

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Write to Charlie Campbell / Beijing at [email protected]

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Otto Warmbier death: What killed the US student who stole a poster in North Korea?

• Otto Warmbier was in North Korea as a tourist with a travelling group early last year
• The US student was accused of stealing a propaganda poster hanging from the hotel he was staying in
• Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour in a North Korean prison
• The youth came back to the US in a coma after 17 months of detention in North Korea and died on Monday

Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old college student who returned to the United States last week after 17 months of detention in North Korea, died on Monday.

Warmbier had suffered severe brain damage during his captivity and spent more than a year in coma. He was convicted of stealing a propaganda banner and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour in a North Korean prison, after a trial held in March 2016.

North Korean authorities said he fell ill from botulism soon after his trial and went into a coma after taking a sleeping pill. But doctors in the USA, who treated him following his arrival from North Korea, have dismissed the claim.

Politicians and celebrities in the US, including President Donald Trump, have accused North Korea of torturing and "murdering" Warmbier.

The 'serious' crime

Warmbier, who had been in North Korea as a tourist with a travelling group organised by Chinese company early last year, was accused of stealing a propaganda poster hanging from the wall of the hotel he was staying in.

In a confession made at a news conference in February 2016, Warmbier said a friend of his mother offered him a used car to steal the poster. However, the youth's father Fred Warmbier said the story was nonsensical and the confession was a forced one.

In most countries in a world, stealing a poster from your hotel doesn't even count as a crime. But as we have painfully learned, in a totalitarian regime it could get you 15 years of imprisonment. And in this case, it cost a bright young student his life.

What caused the death?

During his confession in February, Warmbier had showed no signs of injury or illness but by March, he slipped into a coma. Doctors in the US have denied North Korea's claim that thecoma was induced by botulism and sleeping pills, as tests did not reveal any evidence of this.

Neurologists found out that the youth had suffered extensive loss of brain tissue but the cause for this condition remains unknown. However, the pattern of the brain damage suggests a cardiopulmonary arrest.

The most common theory is that Warmbier was repeatedly beaten and torutured while in custody till he suffered a cardiopulmonary seizure. But his body displayed no obvious evidence physical trauma or bone fractures. Another possible explanation is that Warmbier was heavily medicated, causing irreversible brain damage.

Either way, the incident throws light on the brutal and inhuman abuse and torture methods put into use in North Korean prisons. The youth's father has accused North Korea of abusing his son. In a statement released this week, the Warmbier family said the North Korean government subjected their son to "awful torturous mistreatment" which led to his death.

We have already learned about the unimaginable torture methods deployed in North Korean prisons from some of the survivors. By sending Warmbier back to the US in a vegetative state, Kim Jong-un has proved that not only the leaders of countries that oppose him but also its ordinary citizens can expect no mercy from his regime.

• Otto Warmbier

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• PHOTOGRAPHY

These Are the Last Americans to Visit North Korea

Before the United States banned travelers from visiting the closed nation, a small group rushed to get there for one last tour.

For all of its restrictive laws, its harsh ruler, and its reputation as the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea has long been open to visitors. For years, Chinese tour companies have brought foreigners into the country—including roughly 1,000 Americans per year—for a curated tour of daily North Korean life. Americans have been able to spend time at North Korean amusement parks, schools, and subway stations. Almost all left without incident.

But that changed after the June 19 death of Otto Warmbier, the American student detained in Pyongyang for stealing a poster from a hotel. Citing Warmbier’s inhumane treatment––and amid the country’s deteriorating relationship with Washington over the regime’s nuclear weapons ambitions––the U.S. State Department restricted all U.S. passports from being used to travel to North Korea. (The regime called the ban a “vile measure.”)

Before the new travel ban took effect on September 1, photojournalist David Guttenfelder joined a group of six American tourists eager to see inside the world’s most secretive nation. For almost 20 years, Guttenfelder has been one of the few western journalists allowed inside North Korea, making nearly 50 trips, some while on assignment for National Geographic, to document its political and military situation.

All of the travelers said they were motivated by intense curiosity. Brad Yoon, an Uber driver from California, had never traveled abroad before; he told his parents he was going to China so they wouldn’t worry. Amy Kang, a Korean-American, went with her husband in hopes of learning about her heritage. “It was completely different from anything I was expecting,” Kang said. After all the horror stories she had heard about the repressive regime and the widespread lack of freedoms, she was surprised to find in Pyongyang an element of normality: people who had jobs, families, and who could name their favorite American movies.

Of course, being a tourist meant staying in a bubble of predictability and calm. There were no sudden movements, no surprises.

There were planned visits to a grocery store, a bowling alley, a brewery, and a circus. No one mentioned the country’s nuclear threats, or Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un’s war of words with U.S. President Donald Trump. When the North Korean military launched a missile over Japan in late August that drew international rebuke, Guttenfelder learned of it on Twitter via his cell phone’s limited wireless coverage. No one else around him, including his handlers, had any idea.

One could, however, sense the tension of potential military conflict. Guttenfelder, who has visited North Korea during four presidential administrations, observed that in the Trump era, the people seemed to be tense, but not as tense as he'd seen in the past. On the roads there were more propaganda billboards than usual bashing the United States. At a children's play place in the airport, an old piece of art showing children building missiles out of blocks seemed to fit the current tensions.

The tour included a visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the area straddling the 38th Parallel where North and South Korean soldiers traditionally stare stone-faced at each other across a courtyard bisecting North and South.

The threat of war at any moment has always kept the two militaries prepared to fight. But to the American tourists, the impending travel ban also brought an urgency to buy keepsakes. At various stores selling trinkets, the Americans and other foreign tourists clamored over stamps, art, ginseng products, and North Korean alcohol. One especially popular souvenir: anti-American propaganda posters.

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Americans Can't Visit North Korea. Some Who Have Family There Hope Biden Changes That

Anthony Kuhn

North Korean Kang Ho-Rye (second from left), 89, hugs her South Korean relative at a resort at Mount Kumgang, North Korea, in August 2018. Almost 100 South Koreans crossed the armed border to the North to meet their separated families. The U.S. bars citizens from entering North Korea, but some Korean Americans hope the Biden administration will lift the ban and let them visit again. Lee Su-Kil/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

North Korean Kang Ho-Rye (second from left), 89, hugs her South Korean relative at a resort at Mount Kumgang, North Korea, in August 2018. Almost 100 South Koreans crossed the armed border to the North to meet their separated families. The U.S. bars citizens from entering North Korea, but some Korean Americans hope the Biden administration will lift the ban and let them visit again.

SEOUL — The Biden administration has to decide by the end of the month whether to renew a ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea, and Americans with relatives in North Korea are eagerly awaiting the decision.

They include Kate Shim, who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in the 1970s. After the Korean War, her uncle was missing and her family believed he was in North Korea.

Shim says her great-grandmother told her father: "You need to find your brother because I know he's alive."

Shim's brother managed to track down their missing uncle in North Korea in the 1980s, finally reuniting him with his mother after more than 30 years.

In 1989, Shim started visiting relatives in North Korea, too.

"They were alive, and I was so happy to see my cousins," says Shim, 62. "We didn't care about, like, what politics, what kind of government we are under. We're just happy to see them."

In the 1940s and 50s, the division of Korea into two countries and the Korean War left as many as 10 million Koreans separated from their families. U.S. officials estimated in 2001 that the figure included 100,000 Korean Americans, but the number has dwindled as their communities age.

For many of the remaining members of that divided generation, time is running out to reunite with their relatives separated by geography and clashing governments.

Travel was banned after Otto Warmbier

In this Feb. 29, 2016, photo, American student Otto Warmbier cries while speaking in Pyongyang, North Korea. Warmbier died in June 2017 days after being released from detention in North Korea in a coma. Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP hide caption

In this Feb. 29, 2016, photo, American student Otto Warmbier cries while speaking in Pyongyang, North Korea. Warmbier died in June 2017 days after being released from detention in North Korea in a coma.

The U.S. has barred the use of an American passport to enter North Korea since 2017, making limited, one-time exceptions for some citizens such as aid workers and journalists.

101 Ways To Thwart A Reporter In Pyongyang

The Trump administration enacted the ban following the June 2017 death of American college student Otto Warmbier after his release from detention in Pyongyang.

The Two-Way

Otto warmbier's parents sue north korea, alleging torture of their son.

North Korean authorities arrested Warmbier in January 2016 and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor for taking a propaganda poster in a hotel in Pyongyang. After being in custody for more than a year, the 22-year-old was flown home in a coma and died shortly after. North Korea has denied accusations of torture.

Last year, when Biden was a candidate, he said in an op-ed that as president he would work "to reunite Korean Americans separated from loved ones in North Korea for decades."

The administration has not commented on what it will do about the travel policy.

In a statement to NPR, the State Department said it renewed the restriction in September 2020 "due to continuing concerns over the serious risk of arrest and long-term detention in North Korea." The ban will expire on Sept. 1 unless the secretary of state extends or revokes it.

(The government's travel advisory also says not to visit North Korea now because of COVID-19 .)

Detention risk or dialogue opportunity

Some experts on North Korea believe the threat of detention remains, and so should the restriction.

North Korea Says Detained American Had Intended To 'Subvert The Country'

"At this moment, there's no reason to get rid of the travel ban," argues Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council director for North Korea. He says Pyongyang has not abandoned its practice of detaining Americans as it hopes to secure political leverage over Washington.

Former President Bill Clinton claps as former Vice President Al Gore hugs Laura Ling and Euna Lee smiles with joy. Clinton and the two California journalists whose freedom he helped secure from prison in North Korea arrived at what's now called Hollywood Burbank Airport on Aug. 5, 2009. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Bill Clinton claps as former Vice President Al Gore hugs Laura Ling and Euna Lee smiles with joy. Clinton and the two California journalists whose freedom he helped secure from prison in North Korea arrived at what's now called Hollywood Burbank Airport on Aug. 5, 2009.

Some previous detentions have required former presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton , to travel to North Korea to secure their release and bring them home.

The ban should only be lifted "when North Korea is more of a normal country, that doesn't kidnap people," says Ruggiero, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a research group in Washington that has advocated for a hard line against North Korea.

Ruggiero doesn't think allowing people-to-people exchanges will help persuade the government of Kim Jong Un to give up its nuclear weapons and missiles programs.

Other observers argue that reopening travel could be a start.

"The U.S. is saying we want the North Koreans to come to the table," notes Daniel Jasper, the Asia public education and advocacy coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee, a Philadelphia-based peace advocacy group. "In order to do that," he says, "we have to get back to baseline level of engagement, or North Koreans will continue to understand that to mean that the U.S. is not really sincere in their attempts to engage."

Jasper attended a meeting recently where several civic groups tried to persuade administration officials to lift the ban.

The White House has said it's taking a " calibrated practical approach " toward potential diplomacy with North Korea. This week, Biden's envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, said he discussed with South Korean officials possible ways to address humanitarian cooperation with North Korea.

Meanwhile, advocates and lawmakers have pushed for help reuniting divided Korean families. A bill is now before the Senate that would require U.S. officials to consult with Korean Americans on progress on these efforts.

North Koreans on a bus hold hands of their South Korean relatives to bid farewell after the separated family reunion meeting at the Mount Kumgang resort on Aug. 26, 2018, in Mount Kumgang, North Korea. Lee Su-Kil/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

North Koreans on a bus hold hands of their South Korean relatives to bid farewell after the separated family reunion meeting at the Mount Kumgang resort on Aug. 26, 2018, in Mount Kumgang, North Korea.

Opening up helps to seek closure

Although official visitor figures for North Korea are hard to find, one tour operator estimated as many as 1,000 Americans went annually, according to news reports before the ban took effect.

One of the lucky ones who made it was Choon Lim. He was born in Nampo, North Korea, and fled to South Korea during the war. He later settled in Chicago.

In 1998, he visited North Korea hoping to find his father, but discovered he had died six years before.

When it came time for Lim to pour an offering of liquor before his father's ashes, he froze for an instant, that felt like an eternity.

"All those 47 years, what I have experienced, how I lived, how we lived in the South, all those things came down through my head. And I collapsed. I couldn't do it," remembers Lim, who is 75.

Lim later returned to North Korea several times with other Korean American families.

"I worked for helping separated family members visiting North Korea," he says, "because every one of the separated families should have the same kind of a closure that I had."

Waiting for a peaceful resolution

Ed Kang is also in favor of ending the travel ban. Born in 1934, he grew up in a Christian family in Pyongyang. He fled to avoid persecution under the communist regime, walking with his father the roughly 120 miles to Seoul in the winter of 1950.

"Many times, I was almost killed, but I survived," Kang recalls. "I saw the hand of God, protecting me and guiding me." Kang became a Presbyterian minister in the U.S., and returned to North Korea several times to visit his mother and younger brother, after being separated for more than 30 years.

He says the travel ban is causing unnecessary suffering, and removing it would be "making a contribution to a kind of peaceful resolution between the U.S. and North Korea."

Even if the ban is lifted, though, North Korea remains closed to the outside world, due to the pandemic. It has stopped answering hotline connecting it with South Korea, and says it is "not even considering " negotiations with the U.S.

Se Eun Gong contributed to this story from Seoul and Michele Kelemen from Washington, D.C.

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US extends ban on American passports for travel to NKorea

FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2019, file photo a woman holds American and North Korean flags as she walks along Sword Lake in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Biden administration has extended for one year a Trump-era ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea. The ban had first been imposed by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017 after the death of American student Otto Warmbier who suffered grievous injuries while in North Korean custody. It has been extended annually ever since. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has extended for one year a Trump-era ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea.

The ban had first been imposed by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017 after the death of American student Otto Warmbier , who suffered grievous injuries while in North Korean custody. It has been extended annually ever since.

The State Department announced the extension of the ban until Aug. 31, 2022, in a Federal Register notice to be published on Thursday. Humanitarian groups have expressed concern about the impact the initial ban and its extensions have had on providing relief to isolated North Korea, which is one of the world’s neediest countries.

The ban makes it illegal to use a U.S. passport for travel to, from or through North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or the DPRK, unless the document has been specially validated. Such validations are granted by the State Department only in the case of compelling national interest.

“The Department of State has determined there continues to be serious risk to U.S. citizens and nationals of arrest and long-term detention constituting imminent danger to their physical safety,” the department said in the notice. “Accordingly, all U.S. passports shall remain invalid for travel to, in, or through the DPRK unless specially validated for such travel under the authority of the secretary of state.”

Warmbier was part of a group tour of North Korea and was leaving the country in January 2016 when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. He was later convicted of subversion and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In June 2017, North Korean authorities reported to U.S. officials that Warmbier had suffered extensive injuries while in custody, and President Donald Trump’s administration sent a delegation to repatriate him.

Comatose, Warmbier died in a Cincinnati hospital six days after his return to the U.S. Shortly thereafter, Tillerson imposed the ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea.

Americans Can't Visit North Korea. Some Who Have Family There Hope Biden Changes That

Updated August 27, 2021 at 1:04 PM ET

SEOUL — The Biden administration has to decide by the end of the month whether to renew a ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea, and Americans with relatives in North Korea are eagerly awaiting the decision.

They include Kate Shim, who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in the 1970s. After the Korean War, her uncle was missing and her family believed he was in North Korea.

Shim says her great-grandmother told her father: "You need to find your brother because I know he's alive."

Shim's brother managed to track down their missing uncle in North Korea in the 1980s, finally reuniting him with his mother after more than 30 years.

In 1989, Shim started visiting relatives in North Korea, too.

"They were alive, and I was so happy to see my cousins," says Shim, 62. "We didn't care about, like, what politics, what kind of government we are under. We're just happy to see them."

In the 1940s and 50s, the division of Korea into two countries and the Korean War left as many as 10 million Koreans separated from their families. U.S. officials estimated in 2001 that the figure included 100,000 Korean Americans, but the number has dwindled as their communities age.

For many of the remaining members of that divided generation, time is running out to reunite with their relatives separated by geography and clashing governments.

Travel was banned after Otto Warmbier

The U.S. has barred the use of an American passport to enter North Korea since 2017, making limited, one-time exceptions for some citizens such as aid workers and journalists.

The Trump administration enacted the ban following the June 2017 death of American college student Otto Warmbier after his release from detention in Pyongyang.

North Korean authorities arrested Warmbier in January 2016 and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor for taking a propaganda poster in a hotel in Pyongyang. After being in custody for more than a year, the 22-year-old was flown home in a coma and died shortly after. North Korea has denied accusations of torture.

Last year, when Biden was a candidate, he said in an op-ed that as president he would work "to reunite Korean Americans separated from loved ones in North Korea for decades."

The administration has not commented on what it will do about the travel policy.

In a statement to NPR, the State Department said it renewed the restriction in September 2020 "due to continuing concerns over the serious risk of arrest and long-term detention in North Korea." The ban will expire on Sept. 1 unless the secretary of state extends or revokes it.

(The government's travel advisory also says not to visit North Korea now because of COVID-19 .)

Detention risk or dialogue opportunity

Some experts on North Korea believe the threat of detention remains, and so should the restriction.

"At this moment, there's no reason to get rid of the travel ban," argues Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council director for North Korea. He says Pyongyang has not abandoned its practice of detaining Americans as it hopes to secure political leverage over Washington.

Some previous detentions have required former presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton , to travel to North Korea to secure their release and bring them home.

The ban should only be lifted "when North Korea is more of a normal country, that doesn't kidnap people," says Ruggiero, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a research group in Washington that has advocated for a hard line against North Korea.

Ruggiero doesn't think allowing people-to-people exchanges will help persuade the government of Kim Jong Un to give up its nuclear weapons and missiles programs.

Other observers argue that reopening travel could be a start.

"The U.S. is saying we want the North Koreans to come to the table," notes Daniel Jasper, the Asia public education and advocacy coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee, a Philadelphia-based peace advocacy group. "In order to do that," he says, "we have to get back to baseline level of engagement, or North Koreans will continue to understand that to mean that the U.S. is not really sincere in their attempts to engage."

Jasper attended a meeting recently where several civic groups tried to persuade administration officials to lift the ban.

The White House has said it's taking a " calibrated practical approach " toward potential diplomacy with North Korea. This week, Biden's envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, said he discussed with South Korean officials possible ways to address humanitarian cooperation with North Korea.

Meanwhile, advocates and lawmakers have pushed for help reuniting divided Korean families. A bill is now before the Senate that would require U.S. officials to consult with Korean Americans on progress on these efforts.

Opening up helps to seek closure

Although official visitor figures for North Korea are hard to find, one tour operator estimated as many as 1,000 Americans went annually, according to news reports before the ban took effect.

One of the lucky ones who made it was Choon Lim. He was born in Nampo, North Korea, and fled to South Korea during the war. He later settled in Chicago.

In 1998, he visited North Korea hoping to find his father, but discovered he had died six years before.

When it came time for Lim to pour an offering of liquor before his father's ashes, he froze for an instant, that felt like an eternity.

"All those 47 years, what I have experienced, how I lived, how we lived in the South, all those things came down through my head. And I collapsed. I couldn't do it," remembers Lim, who is 75.

Lim later returned to North Korea several times with other Korean American families.

"I worked for helping separated family members visiting North Korea," he says, "because every one of the separated families should have the same kind of a closure that I had."

Waiting for a peaceful resolution

Ed Kang is also in favor of ending the travel ban. Born in 1934, he grew up in a Christian family in Pyongyang. He fled to avoid persecution under the communist regime, walking with his father the roughly 120 miles to Seoul in the winter of 1950.

"Many times, I was almost killed, but I survived," Kang recalls. "I saw the hand of God, protecting me and guiding me." Kang became a Presbyterian minister in the U.S., and returned to North Korea several times to visit his mother and younger brother, after being separated for more than 30 years.

He says the travel ban is causing unnecessary suffering, and removing it would be "making a contribution to a kind of peaceful resolution between the U.S. and North Korea."

Even if the ban is lifted, though, North Korea remains closed to the outside world, due to the pandemic. It has stopped answering hotline connecting it with South Korea, and says it is "not even considering " negotiations with the U.S.

Se Eun Gong contributed to this story from Seoul and Michele Kelemen from Washington, D.C.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A US tourist crossed the border into North Korea, UN says. South Korean media reports he's a US soldier.

• A US national crossed the border from South Korea into North Korea on Tuesday, the UN said.
• South Korean media is reporting that he was a US soldier. It is unclear if this was a defection. 
• The man is currently believed to be held in North Korean custody, the UN said.

A US tourist crossed the heavily fortified border from South Korea to North Korea on Tuesday, according to the United Nations.

The United Nations Command, which runs the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Joint Security Area (JSA), said in a statement  that the American was on a JSA orientation tour when he crossed the border without authorization.

Related stories

"We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident," the UN said.

—United Nations Command 유엔군사령부/유엔사 (@UN_Command) July 18, 2023

The DMZ is a buffer zone between North and South Korea, which is filled with landmines, surrounded by barbed wire and electric fencing, and is heavily guarded.

South Korean media has described it as a defection, though it is currently unclear if this is the case.

According to The Korea Herald , an English-language newspaper based in Seoul, the man was a US soldier, although the newspaper was unable to confirm if he was stationed in South Korea or visiting the country as a tourist.

South Korea's Dong-a Ilbo newspaper identified him as Travis King, a US Army soldier with the rank of private second class, citing South Korean army sources, but Insider was unable to verify this information.

Insider contacted the US Department of State for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Cases of Americans or South Koreans defecting to North Korea are extremely rare, while North Koreans crossing into South Korea are more common.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled south since the 1950-1953 Korean War, according to the Associated Press.

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Tourism to North Korea: Unethical or an opportunity for engagement?

Subscribe to the center for asia policy studies bulletin, jean h. lee jean h. lee global fellow - woodrow wilson international center for scholars @newsjean.

June 9, 2015

• 13 min read

“What is it like inside an American nightclub?” The question from a young North Korean woman startled me. 

For so long, curiosity about the outside world was not just taboo for North Koreans, but also dangerous. North Korea strictly regulates interaction between North Koreans and foreigners, limiting travel overseas to official business and forbidding spontaneous, unmonitored visits between locals and visitors. With the “imperialist Yankees” remaining Enemy No. 1 for the North Koreans, travel to the United States is not an option for all but a few North Koreans. And slipping away to such a forbidden den of sin without approval would put any North Korean under grave suspicion of courting outside influence. 

“I would love to take you to an American nightclub,” I said, both of us laughing at what seemed like a farfetched idea. She was dressed in a tailored black pantsuit, with the ubiquitous red Kim badge pinned over her heart. It was hard to picture her in a sweaty Williamsburg, Brooklyn, club with hip-hop pulsating in the background.

But I didn’t need to take her to Brooklyn to show her an American nightclub. Later that year, a foreign tour agency organized what was billed as the “first rave in Pyongyang” — a DJ night in the karaoke bar of the Koryo Hotel in the North Korean capital. It promised to be the best and only chance for me to show her what an American nightclub is like.

Tourism amid tensions 

While most North Koreans are not free to travel to the United States, it is possible for Americans to visit North Korea. But tourism to North Korea is a tricky issue — morally, politically, financially.

Now that North Korea has lifted a harsh Ebola quarantine that blocked tourism to the country for nearly five months, foreign tour agencies are scrambling to lure visitors back with ads that promise “ big celebrations, dances and parades ” and golf greens so empty that “ it’s like having your own private course .”

But the environment for tourism to North Korea isn’t the same in 2015 as it was a decade ago. After a relatively conciliatory period in North Korea’s foreign policy, the past six years have been defined by tension: nuclear tests, missile launches, deadly maritime clashes, cyberattacks, threats of thermonuclear war, the arrests of tourists, executions of purged officials and growing scrutiny of the human rights situation in a country with sprawling prison camps. We should remember that North Korea has been undergoing a change of leadership from 17 years of rule under Kim Jong Il to a new era under his young son, Kim Jong Un, who took power following his father’s death in December 2011. And with the purges purportedly continuing as the younger Kim seeks to solidify his leadership, the climate of uncertainty promises to persist.

To go, or not to go?

As an American journalist who has traveled to North Korea dozens of times since 2008, living and working in the country as the first  Associated Press (AP) bureau chief in Pyongyang , I often am asked whether I think tourism to North Korea is a good idea.

The questioner may be asking whether it’s a good idea for them, as a Westerner, to make the costly and potentially risky trip to North Korea as a tourist. But I also weigh the question of whether it’s good for the North Koreans, living in one of the world’s most isolated nations, to have foreign tourists visiting their country.

As tour agencies gear up to promote two big events this year, the 70th anniversary of the end of Japan’s occupation of Korea on Aug. 15 and the 70th anniversary of the Oct. 10 founding of the Korean Workers’ Party, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the issues framing the question of whether tourism to North Korea is a good idea.

Critics say foreigners who visit impoverished North Korea at prices comparable to travel to Switzerland are funneling hard currency to a regime that diverts the money to the elite, the military and to propaganda while the millions of North Koreans who go hungry every day do not benefit.

Advocates say tourism facilitates much-needed cross-cultural learning, with foreigners experiencing that North Koreans are as human as anyone else, and North Koreans getting information about life outside their borders through their visitors from abroad.  The Obama administration has made very clear its stance on tourism to North Korea: Don’t go.

In April, the U.S. State Department issued its toughest  travel advisory  so far for North Korea, warning that tourists risk being “arrested, detained, or expelled for activities that would not be considered criminal outside North Korea.” Britain, which has an embassy in Pyongyang, in April warned its travelers that “the level of tension on the Korean peninsula can change with little notice.” And while “most visits are trouble-free,”  the advisory  noted the recent arrests of Americans.

Speaking with locals, exchanging currency, taking candid photos, shopping locally — these are all routine tourist behavior anywhere but in North Korea, where such basic activities are largely illegal for North Koreans In the DPRK, these are not casual actions and the state can easily declare them as espionage. Sentences for such crimes can mean “years of detention in hard labor camps or death,” according to the State Department advisory.

Don’t be naive about surveillance, the advisory warns. “Please keep in mind that you have no right to privacy in North Korea and should assume your communications are monitored.” Should you be detained, Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang and cannot directly provide consular services, the advisory reminds travelers. And don’t count on the tour agencies to protect you. “Efforts by private tour operators to prevent or resolve past detentions of U.S. citizens … have not succeeded in gaining their release,” the warning says.

Indeed, arrests of Americans complicate the sensitive diplomatic dance between Washington and Pyongyang. In March 2009, two American journalists working for former Vice President Al Gore’s media company slipped across a frozen river border from China into North Korea and were swiftly arrested. They were convicted and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor on anti-state charges. It took a high-profile campaign and a private visit by former President Bill Clinton to secure their release later that year.  A group photo  of Clinton seated next to Kim Jong Il released by North Korea’s state news agency makes clear that the North Koreans treated the visit as a diplomatic victory. 

It was a dangerous precedent to set. Since then, at least 10 Americans have been detained in North Korea, some sneaking in illegally like the two journalists but most entering the country with legitimate visas. Two were regular visitors to North Korea; most arrived on tourist visas. North Korea eventually released all the Americans, but not before dangling them as diplomatic bait.

The roles of tour operators

The two leading Western tour operators, Beijing-based British-operated Koryo Tours and the American-owned Uri Tours, both have had  American tourists detained  and held by the North Koreans over the past two years.  An American traveling with Britain’s Juche Travel also was detained .

Koryo Tours, proud of its previous 20 years without any tourist arrests, has remained tight-lipped about the incident while Uri Tours has chosen to go public about its  efforts to try to help secure the release  of its detained American traveler. But in the process, the agency revealed how helpless it and its North Korean tourism partners are in preventing tourists from breaking the law and in protecting them from North Korea’s tightening security mechanism. And the circumstances of the arrest of 85-year-old Korean War veteran Merrill Newman underlined the perils of traveling with an outfit inexperienced in dealing with North Korea. 

On top of the high-profile arrests, the agencies have had to deal with fiery threats from North Korea to wage “thermo-nuclear war” on South Korea, and with an Ebola quarantine that shut down tourism to North Korea starting last fall by requiring anyone arriving in the country from abroad to remain sequestered for 21 days.

Though visibly frustrated, the agencies kept up an incongruous chirpiness about tourism to North Korea as they refunded deposits and waited with practiced patience for yet another seemingly arbitrary North Korean rule to lift.

The arrests, war threats and the entry ban didn’t deter a trade fair in Britain from  featuring a booth marketing travel to North Korea , and they did not slow North Korea’s own state media from trumpeting the regime’s campaign to promote tourism even as tourists weren’t allowed into the country.

Improving the economic situation is high on the regime’s agenda, and tourism is seen as one way to bring in hard currency and foreign investment.

Last year, North Korea unveiled a five-star ski resort that rises like the city of Oz in the vast, underdeveloped countryside. Workers commenced construction on turning the nearby port city of Wonsan into what North Korea envisions as a “world-famous tourist city.” A new university devoted to tourism, Pyongyang Tourism College, took in its first students. Tour operators from China and Europe were brought in to discuss investing in North Korea’s infrastructure.

Boots on the ground

There are, indeed, some stunning sights in North Korea. The white sand beaches off the coast of Hamhung are the most pristine I’ve seen on the Korean Peninsula. The hiking in this mountainous country, particularly in autumn when the leaves turn all shades of gold and red, is spectacular.

But let’s not pretend these trips are relaxing. During one visit to Mount Myohyang northwest of Pyongyang, a colleague and I went for a walk on the grounds of our hotel. We didn’t go far, but were sternly ushered back into the hotel by a security guard. Only then did I remember that in 2008, a South Korean tourist who went for a walk was shot to death by a soldier for wandering into a military site. Ties between North Korea and South Korea soured after that incident, with all cross-border tourism coming to a halt by the end of that year.

Who travels to North Korea, aside from the neighboring Chinese, Russians and ethnic Koreans from Japan? About 5,000 to 6,000 Westerners per year, according to Uri Tours. There are the adventure seekers who have North Korea at the top of a bucket list of bizarre destinations and are looking for tall tales to tell at dinner parties (“When I was in Pyongyang last summer” never fails to turn heads). There are those nostalgic for a Cold War time past who turn up wearing retro communist gear and return home with their own custom-made Mao suits. And there are many who are sincerely curious about life inside North Korea, for professional or personal reasons. (Full disclosure: Uri Tours booked my flights on North Korean carrier Air Koryo when I was AP bureau chief, and I traveled with the agency as a tourist after completing my Pyongyang post.)

Tourists pay luxury travel prices — Koryo Tours’  summer group trip  is advertised for 1850 euros — for package tours to a country with an  estimated GDP per capita of $1,800 in 2013  that puts North Korean on par with Uganda and Haiti. The prices are set by the North Koreans, with the foreign tour operators determining the markup. Nearly every aspect of the tour, from the hotels to the souvenir shops to the meals, is chosen from a list of venues approved for foreigners; i.e., where interaction with locals can be controlled. The tour agencies, particularly Koryo Tours, pushes hard to get its visitors into places typically off limits to foreigners, but the trips are still incredibly restrictive: No going for a wander, no stopping by into a local shop to buy souvenirs, no chatting up the locals without the guides present.

Most of the American tourists’ interaction with North Koreans is with their guides. Tour guides assigned to a group of foreign tourists are fluent in English. The tourists discover that North Koreans are as human as anyone else, despite what you might see in comedic portrayals such as “The Interview”: they smile, they laugh, they crack jokes. The Americans begin to think the North Koreans aren’t so bad after all. They fall a little bit in love. By expecting so little, they leave overwhelmed.

For the North Korean guides, the tourists provide a valuable glimpse of life abroad. They learn their travelers’ slang, hear their music and drink up tales about love and life in a world they likely will never visit. They see every manner of fashion and individualism: piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks and that evil American emblem, blue jeans. In their own way, they become experts in the world outside, even if they never step foot beyond their country’s borders. And that is no doubt valuable currency as North Korea embarks on the slow but inevitable road to opening up to the outside world.

Risks and rewards

We cannot, and should not, stop Americans from visiting North Korea. But both tour operators and tourists should be mindful of the changed, and charged, environment for Americans traveling in enemy territory:

• Tour operators should be transparent and forthcoming about the security situation in North Korea, including the extensive nature of North Korea’s penal code and surveillance apparatus, the risk of arrest and the consequences of prosecution. They need to do their due diligence in protecting tourists by preparing them for the reality of life in North Korea, for visiting foreigners as well as locals.
• American tourists should give careful and considered thought to the ethics and dangers of traveling to North Korea. They should keep in mind that much of the fee they pay goes to the state-run tourism agency, not directly to the people, and may want to consider tour operators that find a way to give back to the local population. They should remember that North Korea remains in a technical state of war with the United States, and should arrive having read both the State Department’s travel advisory and any travel advice laid out by their tour operator. While being open-minded, travelers to North Korea should also be mindful of the severity of local laws. Leave the Bibles behind. 

If it weren’t for tourism, I would not have been able to give that young North Korean woman a taste of American nightlife. For one night in August 2012, the basement bar of the Koryo Hotel — a 1970s-kitsch lounge decorated with plastic plants and purple neon lighting that typically plays host to impassioned, drunken karaoke while a hostess in traditional Korean dress sings along — was transformed into a nightclub. There was no bouncer and no velvet rope. But there was a DJ in the corner, bobbing to the beat, and a tangle of tourists gyrating on the dance floor: American ultimate frisbee players, Chinese journalists and “middle-aged Romanian diplomats requesting obscure Romanian disco,”  according to the DJ . On the playlist: Little Richard, Janet Jackson, The Village People. 

The North Koreans, mostly guides and interpreters, watched with amusement and perhaps a little shock at the frenetic, disorganized, rowdy scene before them. In North Korea, each song has a prescribed set of dance steps, so the chaos that was unfolding, with each person caught up in his or her own private dance, was entirely foreign. And yet it was so perfectly Western: individualistic, energetic, spontaneous. It wasn’t long before some of the more adventurous North Koreans jumped in.

The verdict from my North Korean friend: “Too noisy.” 

It was the safest answer for a North Korean to give when confronted with such an American pastime as “disco dancing.” But her shining eyes, and the smile on her face, said otherwise.

Foreign Policy

Asia & the Pacific North Korea Northeast Asia

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Harry J. Holzer

April 16, 2024

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April 3, 2024

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

9:00 am - 11:15 am EDT

North Korea Revealed Shocking Truth About Tourist Traps

S ince February, North Korea has welcomed tourists, starting with Russian nationals. This comes as a surprise as North Korea has reopened tourism post-COVID-19. Citizens of all countries, excluding the U.S. and South Korea, can visit North Korea. However, strict regulations apply to tourists in North Korea. Even a slight deviation from these regulations could lead to detention, imprisonment, or even the death penalty.

One of the dangerous behaviors in North Korea is expressing one’s political views. Anyone raising objections to the regime or system can be immediately sent to a forced labor camp for ideological education or even publicly executed. This applies to tourists visiting North Korea as well.

You can be detained or arrested in North Korea for criticizing the North Korean system. As the number of foreigners arrested in North Korea increases, governments around the world have issued travel guidelines for North Korea for the safety of their citizens. These guidelines emphasize that you should not criticize North Korea’s supreme leaders. They warned to stay clear of insulting North Korean leaders like Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un, as severe punishment follows.

The most important thing is to be careful not to insult the dignity of North Korean leaders with words or actions. You should not damage publications such as books, magazines, newspapers, or banknotes that contain their images.

When taking pictures of places where portraits or photos of the Kim family are hung, you must ensure that the images are not cut off. The principle is to include everyone in the photo.

If you behave disrespectfully in front of a statue, you could end up in jail. It would be best not to damage propaganda posters or slogans on buildings or streets. Drinking is also prohibited on the memorial days of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In North Korea, anyone drinking or laughing these days can be punished for not showing respect and courtesy to the supreme leaders.

North Korea’s constitution and laws explicitly state that freedom of religion is guaranteed. However, in reality, they suppress individual religious beliefs. According to testimonies of defectors, possessing religious texts itself is illegal, and if caught, you could be punished or even executed. Also, religious proselytizing activities are considered a threat to regime stability and anti-republic hostile acts.

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There have been foreigners who were punished for religious activities in North Korea. In 2014, American Jeffrey Fowle was arrested on suspicion of leaving a Bible in a nightclub while traveling in Chongjin, Hamgyong Province. He was released after five months of detention.

During a trip to North Korea, tourists cannot travel freely. Tourists must travel in groups to approved destinations with a guide. You can’t even take pictures at will. You can only take photos at designated places with the guide’s permission. Moreover, it is completely forbidden to photograph soldiers, workers, or construction sites.

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You are also not allowed to take pictures showing the impoverished state of North Korea, like empty store shelves. If you take photos without permission for any reason, you could be fined or arrested according to North Korean law.

During a trip to North Korea, customs thoroughly inspect USB flash drives, laptops, computers, and other devices. Suppose these electronic devices contain content criticizing the North Korean regime or its leaders. In that case, it is considered a criminal act punishable by long-term re-education through labor and heavy fines.

Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American, was sentenced to 15 years of re-education through labor after unintentionally bringing a computer hard drive into North Korea and getting caught. There’s also a risk of confiscation if the contents are deemed obscene.

You should not carry books or documents written in Korean, particularly during a trip to North Korea. Additionally, you must be careful when bringing items like mobile phones.

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Reports: American tourist detained in North Korea

SEOUL -- An American tourist who visited North Korea last month for what was to have been a five-day trip has been detained by police there, associates of his family and activists in Seoul said.

Kenneth Bae, 44, was in a group of five tourists who visited the northeast city of Rajin, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, citing a report by the Kookmin Ilbo newspaper. Bae, who is Korean-American, entered North Korea on Nov. 3.

PhotoBlog: Thousands rally to celebrate North Korea rocket launch

"What we know is that he is a person who wants to help poor children, kotjebis (homeless children), and he took pictures of them to support them later," said Do Hee-youn, a North Korean human rights activist and head of the Citizens' Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees.

'Fluttering swallows'

There are said to be thousands of homeless, starving children in the North after a famine in the 1990s. Kotjebis translates into English as "fluttering swallows."

It was impossible for NBC News to confirm Bae's arrest in one of the world's most secretive states and there has been no formal announcement on North Korean media.

N. Korean progress on nuclear arms, long-range missiles rattle U.S. and allies

The Swedish Embassy in Seoul did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether it was aware of the arrest. Similarly, the press officer at the Swedish Embassy in Beijing declined comment when contacted by NBC News.

Sweden handles the affairs of U.S. citizens in North Korea because Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang.

Kookmin Ilbo, owned by an evangelical church in Seoul, reported it was expected Bae could be released in two or three weeks. The paper cited an unidentified source and it was not possible to confirm the report.

It cited sources as saying Bae had been arrested for carrying a computer hard disk which contained footage of North Korea executing defectors and dissidents. This was also impossible to verify.

More North Korea coverage from NBC News

History of trouble

U.S. citizens of Korean descent have previously run into trouble in the North. Robert Park, a missionary, was detained after entering the country in late 2009 and says he was tortured for protesting against the country's human rights record.

Earlier that year, former President Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to secure the release of two American journalists who had entered North Korea illegally.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the reports.

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"I don't have anything for you on that one way or the other, for privacy reasons," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told a news briefing.

A pastor at a Korean church in Washington state, who said Bae's mother attended services there, said the mother, Myung Bae, had prayed for her son's release Wednesday morning after learning of his detention from news reports.

"She just learned that he had been detained," pastor Chan Song of the Korean Emmanuel Church in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood told Reuters. "She's scared. ... She doesn't know how he was detained."

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Bae's mother has attended a morning prayer group at the church for several years, the pastor said, but her son was not a member of the church. Efforts to contact the mother at her Washington state home were unsuccessful.

The office of state Senator Paull Shin, a Korean-American whose district includes parts of Lynnwood, was trying to find out more but was not in contact with the family, legislative assistant Jeff King told Reuters.

On Wednesday, North Korea sparked calls for sanctions from Washington and others when it fired a long-range rocket that put a satellite into space .

Critics say the North is breaching U.N. Security Council resolutions that prohibit it from activities linked to nuclear development or missile technology.

NBC News' Ed Flanagan in Beijing and Reuters contributed to this report.

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What happened to Americans held previously in North Korea?

SEOUL — An American soldier was detained in North Korea on Tuesday after he crossed from South Korea, sparking a fresh diplomatic imbroglio between Pyongyang and Washington.

The soldier, identified as Private 2nd Class Travis T. King, a cavalry scout, was due to be sent home to the United States following misconduct while serving in South Korea; but he did not board a scheduled flight to the United States, The Washington Post reported .

At the time, King was on a tour to the Joint Security Area on the heavily fortified “demilitarized zone” between North and South Korea.

Travel to North Korea for Americans is limited by a 2017 U.S. State Department order imposed over security concerns. King is the first American known to be detained in North Korea in nearly five years. Not much is known about his current state, or what sort of consequences he might face in North Korea.

“Americans who are detained by North Korea generally get out eventually, whereas South Koreans who are detained generally don’t,” Peter Ward, a senior researcher on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, said by telephone.

Ward said that captive Americans have been used as bargaining tools at times, but that North Korean officials “haven’t been engaging with the outside world really” in the last few years.

Here are other prominent instances of Americans who had been caught in the isolated nuclear-armed nation in recent years.

Bruce Byron Lowrance

Bruce Byron Lowrance was detained in North Korea on Oct. 16, 2018, after crossing into the country via the border with China, the North Korean state-run Korean Central News Agency claimed.

Lowrance was unusually swiftly deported to the United States in November 2018 following a historic meeting in Singapore earlier that year between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, although talks had later stalled. The State Department thanked Pyongyang and the embassy of Sweden for facilitating the release.

A man with the same name as Lowrance had been deported from South Korea in 2017 after being caught just south of the border with the North, South Korean semiofficial news agency Yonhap reported.

Kim Dong-chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song

North Korea freed three other American detainees in May 2018. The men — Kim Dong-chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song — had been imprisoned for more than a year in North Korea on charges of espionage, which the United States had dismissed. They were given a hero’s welcome by President Trump, who received them at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.

Kim Dong-chul, a former Virginia resident, told reporters he had been forced to do labor, but received treatment when he fell sick. In his 60s, Dong-chul had been living in China and working in a special economic zone in the North for a hotel services company when was detained in October 2015.

Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song had been affiliated with the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology and were detained after Trump took office.

Trump offers hero’s welcome to three Americans freed by North Korea

Otto Warmbier

Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia student, was on his way to a study-abroad program in Hong Kong in late 2015 when he took a trip to Pyongyang with a tour group company. He was arrested at the airport as he tried to leave North Korea. Weeks later, Warmbier appeared in an orchestrated news conference on North Korean state TV and tearfully confessed to attempting to steal a hotel propaganda poster.

In March 2016 , he reportedly fell into a coma on the same night that he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

North Korea issued $2 million bill for comatose Otto Warmbier’s care

The cause of Warmbier’s coma is unknown; his parents have accused North Korea of severely beating him while in their custody, although reports citing a coroner in his home state of Ohio suggested there were no signs of physical abuse or torture. North Korea claimed Warmbier fell ill from a food-borne illness and an allergic reaction to sedatives.

Warmbier was released to the United States while comatose in June 2017. He died six days later in a Cincinnati hospital. His parents have since been awarded $240,000 in seized North Korean assets.

Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller, a 24-year-old from Bakersfield, Calif., had traveled to North Korea in April 2014 with a U.S.-based tour group. The Korean Central News Agency claimed that Miller had torn up his tourist visa and said he wished to seek asylum. Later, he was sentenced to six years of hard labor in a 90-minute trial in which he was accused of committing “hostile acts” against the government.

He was released in November 2014 and allowed to return to the United States.

Jeffrey Fowle

Jeffrey Fowle, an American from Ohio, was arrested in May 2014 for leaving a Bible in a public place in North Korea, where Christian evangelism is considered a crime. The father of three was released in October the same year.

In an interview with the Atavist magazine, Fowle said that he was detained at first on the 36th floor of Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang, where he could only access three state-run TV channels, and later at a guesthouse where his movement was restricted. He was served meals of rice, broth and kimchi, he recalled.

Fowle, along with two other American detainees, had given interviews to international media outlets during captivity. In an interview with CNN , monitored and recorded by local officials, Fowle said he did not have complaints about how he had been treated since his arrest.

Merrill Newman

Merrill Newman, an 85-year-old Korean War veteran, traveled to North Korea on a private tour in October 2013. But the North Korean authorities removed him from the plane when he tried to return to the United States, and accused him of “indelible crimes” from decades ago. He was released in December 2013.

Kenneth Bae

Kenneth Bae, a 46-year-old Korean American missionary from Lynnwood, Wash., was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor, which involved agricultural work for eight hours a day, six days a week. Bae was freed and returned to the United States in November 2014, along with Miller.

In his memoir, Not Forgotten , Bae wrote that he was driven to help the North Korean people, leading him to hold guided tours to the country for six years before he was caught.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling

American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling of Current TV, a cable and digital network, were detained by North Korea in March 2009 while they were reporting a story on the desperate journeys made by North Koreans fleeing the country for a chance at freedom. They were later sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp following a five-day trial.

“My biggest fear was nobody knowing where I was or what had happened to me. The strained relations between the United States and North Korea only increased my despair,” Lee wrote in an op-ed in 2011 for The Washington Post .

The two were released after five months in captivity, returning home in August 2009. They were pardoned by North Korea after President Bill Clinton’s meeting with Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un.

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House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away from Americans

A measure passed by the House seeks to block Americans from traveling to Iran on U.S. passports.

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Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a bill making its way through Congress that applies pressure for a ban on travel to Iran for Americans using U.S. passports. The rights groups see the bill as part of a growing attempt to control the travel of American citizens and bar Iranian Americans in particular from maintaining connections with friends and loved ones inside Iran.

“If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

“This bill is very concerning because it’s the beginning of a process of criminalizing something that is very normal for many people, which is traveling to Iran,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

Along with a flurry of other sanctions bills targeting Iran, the bill calling for the travel restrictions passed the U.S. House last week. The bill is now slated to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Introduced last fall, the No Paydays for Hostage-Takers Act languished until tensions between Iran and Israel escalated into a series of reciprocal attacks earlier this month.

Among other provisions, the bill seeks to bar U.S. passport holders from traveling to Iran by rendering their passports invalid for such travel. Though the prohibition would need to be enacted by the State Department, the legislative proposal effectively encourages the move and, as with other sanctions against Iran, waiving the authority to enact the ban could incur political costs.

If Donald Trump wins a second White House term, a distinct possibility according to polls, the invocation of the travel ban would be likely. In his first term, Trump imposed the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the U.S. for Iranians, among other nationalities, and has promised to reimpose it if elected again .

The idea of banning travel to Iran on American passports was raised last September by former Trump State Department official Elliott Abrams, a right-wing hawk with a controversial history that includes covering up a Central American massacre and involvement in the Iran–Contra scandal.

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In practice, many Iranian Americans tend to travel to Iran on Iranian passports, but Americans of Iranian extraction who do not hold Islamic Republic travel documents would be unable to travel there under the ban. The measure is viewed as a potential signal of deeper isolation for the Iranian people and severing of people-to-people ties between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and North Korea?

The bill, originally proposed last October by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., was promoted as a measure to restrict the Iranian government’s ability to take U.S. citizens hostage as bargaining chips for bilateral negotiations. Some dual-nationals have been arrested in Iran in the past amid tensions between the two countries.

Yet hundreds of thousands of dual-nationals are believed to travel regularly to Iran from across the West. Measures barring their ability to do so would represent an unprecedented step, making it difficult or impossible for people with ties in both countries to visit family or maintain personal and professional connections.

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Invalidating U.S. passports for travel to Iran would put it on par with North Korea, which had a similar ban put in place in 2017 — during Trump’s first term — when an American citizen died after 17 months of detention there.

Despite being heavily sanctioned over foreign policy and human rights issues, Iran still has relations with much of the international community and large number of Iranians live throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

“North Korea and Iran are very different countries.”

“North Korea is really the model for this policy, as it is the only country where there is such a strict prohibition for travel on the books,” said Costello. “But North Korea and Iran are very different countries. The level of isolation of North Korea is far greater, and it doesn’t have the same diaspora that Iran does.”

This week, a delegation from North Korea traveled to Iran, with reported hopes of breaking North Korea’s total diplomatic isolation as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine forge new geopolitics.

Costello said that NIAC is still hoping that the Senate will not approve the bill when it comes to its consideration. Still, the implications of it coming under consideration, alongside Trump’s promises to revive his “Muslim ban” policy, bode poorly for the future of U.S.–Iran relations.

“You are talking,” he said, “about a policy that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.”

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Glitz, glamour and 'American Pie': Memorable moments from South Korean President Yoon's state visit

WASHINGTON – Any 70-year anniversary merits a big celebration.

And when you’re observing a decadeslong friendship between two nations, an ordinary fête just won’t do.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcomed South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and first lady Kim Keon Hee to the White House for an official state visit on Wednesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the alliance between the two countries.

The bond between the United States and the Republic of Korea was formed at the end of the Korean War, a conflict that cost more than 54,000 American lives.

“It’s an unbreakable bond, forged in bravery and the sacrifice of our people,” Biden said during a pageantry-filled ceremony on the White House South Lawn.

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Yoon said he traveled to Washington to celebrate “with pride, with joy – and with the American people.”

Here are some memorable moments from the South Korean leader’s visit:

A 21-gun salute and Korean tunes for ‘great friends’

State visits by foreign leaders always begin with pomp and circumstance.

On a crisp but sunny morning, the Bidens welcomed the South Korean leader and his spouse to the White House with a formal arrival ceremony in front of nearly 7,000 guests on the South Lawn.

A military band played “Hail to the Chief” as the Bidens walked out of the White House and stood on a red carpet. A few seconds later, a black SUV carrying the guests of honor pulled up the White House driveway.

There was a 21-gun salute, a formal inspection of the troops, and the playing of each country's national anthems. Young children from the Korean-American Children’s Choir in New Jersey performed a traditional South Korean song. A fife and drum corps decked out in long red coats and white pants paraded in front of the stage.

“What a beautiful day to invite great friends back to the White House,” Biden said, celebrating what he called “the ironclad alliance” between the two countries.

That alliance may have been “forged in blood,” Yoon said, speaking through an English translator, but it’s a “just” one that stands for “freedom, peace and prosperity around the world.”

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Honoring American sacrifices in the Korean War

The night before the state visit officially began, the Bidens and their South Korean guests made a quiet pilgrimage to the Korean War Veterans’ Memorial on the National Mall.

The memorial, not far from the Lincoln Memorial, commemorates the sacrifices of the 5.8 million Americans who served in the U.S. armed services during the three-year Korean War. Some 54,246 Americans were killed in the conflict.

The Bidens and their guests strolled quietly through the memorial, which features 7-foot stainless steel statues of soldiers standing in patches of juniper bushes and polished granite strips symbolizing the rice paddies of Korea. They made no public remarks, but Yoon spoke of the visit during the White House arrival ceremony the next day.

“Why did they sacrifice their lives for this faraway country and for the people they never met?” he asked of the Americans killed in the war. “That was for one noble cause: to defend freedom.”

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Gifts for the South Korean guests

When there’s a state visit, there are usually gifts.

The Bidens presented the South Koreans with a small, handcrafted table by an American furniture maker. Made of mahogany wood and inlaid with historical White House wood, the table was inspired by traditional Korean soban tables. The gift included a vase filled with handmade paper hibiscus and rose flowers by a Korean American artist and a brass plaque to commemorate the state visit.

Biden also gave Yoon a shadow box set with custom and vintage baseball memorabilia. Jill Biden presented Kim with a pendant necklace with a trio of blue sapphires designed by a Korean American designer.

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Nukes, cybersecurity and other serious business

Amid the glitz and the glamour, Biden and Yoon conducted serious business, with bilateral meetings at the White House between the two leaders and other top officials from their delegations.

Biden announced that he is increasing demonstrations of military might in the Indo-Pacific and expanding collaboration with South Korea in hopes of deterring an attack by North Korea. In exchange, Yoon reaffirmed his nation's commitment that it would not develop its own nuclear weapons.

The so-called Washington Declaration is the centerpiece of the new initiatives on cybersecurity, economic investments and more that the leaders rolled out during Yoon’s visit.

A State Dinner with South Korean flair

The main event for every state visit is the dinner, the most coveted diplomatic honor – and one reserved for the U.S.'s closest allies.

Naturally, this one had a decidedly Korean flair .

Some 200 invited guests walked by a screen evoking traditional Korean ink brush painting. Dining tables were decked out with 6-foot-tall centerpieces of blossoming cherry tree boughs intended to suggest Washington's Tidal Basin in the springtime or the streets of Jeju. The menu featured braised beef short ribs – an American take on galbi-jjim – served with butter bean grits, sorghum-glazed carrots and pine nuts.

At the start of the soirée, Biden and Yoon toasted each other. Biden raised a glass "to our partnership, to our people, to possibilities" and added, "May we do it together for another 170 years."

Yoon brought a smile to Biden's face by paying homage to his Irish roots. Speaking through an interpreter, Yoon quoted an old Irish saying that goes: "A good friend is like a four-leaf clover. Hard to find and lucky to have."

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Broadway tunes and 'American Pie'

Broadway performers provided the evening’s entertainment, but Yoon stole the show with an impromptu rendition of “American Pie.”

Singers Lea Salonga, Jessica Vosk and Norm Lewis closed out the dinner with a selection of numbers from Broadway hit shows, including “Funny Girl” and “Les Misérables." For their encore, they chose the Don McLean classic “American Pie” especially for Yoon.

When they finished, Jill Biden pushed Yoon onto the stage. “We know this is one of your favorite songs,” Joe Biden said.

Yoon, still speaking through a translator, confirmed that the song was one of his favorites when he was in school. After a bit of coaxing from Biden, Yoon took the microphone and belted out the first few stanzas – in English. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Biden, who said he had no idea Yoon could sing, joked that he was going to tap the South Korean crooner to provide the entertainment for the next state dinner. Then, he surprised Yoon with another gift: A guitar signed by McLean.

Who scored a coveted dinner invitation?

The Bidens and the guests of honor weren’t the evening's only big names. Prominent figures from the world of politics, business and entertainment scored an invitation to the state dinner.

Actress Angelina Jolie, decked out in a white dress, brought her son Maddox. Broadway performer Salonga, one of the night’s entertainers, admitted to being nervous but said the experience “feels like being in a fairytale."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre twirled for the photographers as she made her entrance. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York showed up in a navy suit instead of the usual formal attire. "This is as tux-ey as I get," he said.

Snowboarder Chloe Kim, an Olympic gold medalist, didn’t wear her medal. “I don’t know where it is,” she admitted. She was nervous, she said, but was looking forward to the dinner. "The food's gonna be really good,” she predicted.

The dinner came a day after Biden announced his reelection bid, adding to the buzz around the dinner for his Democratic guests.

Michael Purzycki, the mayor of Biden's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, offered to assist with campaigning, "Any way he wants me to."

Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.

Contributing: Maureen Groppe, Joey Garrison and Francesca Chambers

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