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Dangerous Exploits: Otto Warmbier and the Risks of Travel to North Korea

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights from The New York Times. In this piece, Craig S. Smith a correspondent for The Times, who raised his family in Shanghai, Paris and Hong Kong, writes about an April 2015 trip he took to North Korea with his son, True.

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Entrance to the Pyongyang subway with a propaganda sign in the background.
Credit...Craig S. Smith

My heart breaks for Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old American student who died Monday after returning home from North Korea in a vegetative state. His crime: He was young and curious, possibly mischievous and certainly naïve.

Mr. Warmbier’s ordeal makes me shudder, not only for his tragic fate but also because less than a year before Mr. Warmbier’s arrest, I had traveled to North Korea. And I had taken my teenage son.

It has become fashionable to treat North Korea as a kitschy joke. Vice, the millennial-focused media company, has made entertaining, snarky videos there. They accompanied Dennis Rodman to see Kim Jong-un, but Mr. Rodman didn’t seem to understand that the trip was a stunt and not Ping-Pong diplomacy. North Korea is not a joke, as Mr. Warmbier’s experience has shown.

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Propaganda, Pyongyang Style

On a visit to North Korea with his family in 2015, Craig S. Smith, a Times correspondent, experienced firsthand the communist regime’s dissemination of anti-American rhetoric.

This has been copyedited.

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On a visit to North Korea with his family in 2015, Craig S. Smith, a Times correspondent, experienced firsthand the communist regime’s dissemination of anti-American rhetoric.CreditCredit...Craig S. Smith/The New York Times

Most tourists to North Korea are Chinese, for whom the country is a sort of nostalgic throwback to Maoist days. But there are a handful of companies that market North Korean tours to Westerners. They package otherwise dreary trips in cheerful and quirky wrappings, targeting young people who are looking for adventure. The Pyongyang Beer Festival is a typical offering.

But the tour companies are simply agents. Once people cross the border, a North Korean travel bureau takes over, shepherding visitors through fixed itineraries meant to show as little of the impoverished country as possible while bringing in badly needed hard currency. Most people are treated to the same things: stops at socialist-realist monuments and vast, empty squares; cavernous state-owned restaurants serving desultory meals (fried fish, mounds of shredded cabbage), and a brief ride between two stations on Pyongyang’s metro — the only real brush with North Koreans that most visitors ever get.

I had long been curious about the shuttered country. I also wanted at least one of my sons to see the Stalinist-style state before it disappears so that they can understand what China was like before they lived there.

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An electric tramline in Pyongyang. The sparsely populated city has good public transportation system. Private car ownership is rare.Credit...Craig S. Smith

I spent my 20s in China when the country was still emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Almost everyone wore blue, green or gray. There were no private cars, and bicycles still crowded the streets. Restaurants were state-owned, there was no commercial advertising and people spoke to outsiders in maddening propagandistic platitudes. I wanted my sons to understand how far China had come to be the gritty, growing consumer-driven land of malls and office towers that they know today.

I booked a private tour of North Korea through one of the agencies.

Things started off-kilter. Hours before we left Hong Kong, I put my passport through the washing machine. It came out curled like a faded denim flower and was still damp when we arrived in China to change to a Russian-built Tupolev plane. A Chinese immigration officer smelled the passport and consulted with his superior before letting me pass. The North Korean immigration officials seemed less suspicious, though the passport looked doctored.

Our North Korean guides met my son and me at the airport: a chatty woman carrying a designer handbag and a taciturn man in a suit, who rarely spoke and was clearly there to listen and observe.

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North Koreans reading the Rodong Sinmun, or Worker’s Daily, while waiting for trains In Puhung (Revival) Station of Pyongyang’s metro. The system, with 24 stations on two lines, is about 100 meters below ground and can double as a bomb shelter.Credit...Craig S. Smith

Our guides instructed us not to photograph construction sites, military objects or soldiers, which was a significant constraint in a country where about five out of every 100 people are in uniform. They also instructed us not to cut the legs or heads out of the frame when photographing statues of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il.

We were taken from the airport in a minibus directly to monumental statues of the men, referred to as “the generals,” on Mansu Hill in the center of the city. There, we were warned not to chew gum or stand with our hands in our pockets. We were instructed to buy bouquets of flowers from a kiosk, bow before the statues and lay the flowers at their feet. Only then were we taken to our hotel on an island in the Taedong River, which winds through the center of Pyongyang.

We stayed at the same run-down place as Mr. Warmbier did on his fateful journey — the hotel where most Western tourists are housed. The place was almost empty, but we were warned not to venture unaccompanied beyond the gate or it would “cause problems.” On our first night, our female guide turned back to us as she was leaving and made us promise that we wouldn’t leave.

We did not leave.

Instead, we spent evenings in the underground entertainment rooms, bowling in the poorly maintained alley (the pins often toppled of their own accord), or playing blackjack in the Chinese-operated “casino.”

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The author and his tour guide at Kumsusan Palace — the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il.Credit...True Araki Smith

We covered quite a bit of ground during our visit, from the northern mountains to the southern demilitarized zone. Though it is forbidden to photograph between cities, I took pictures surreptitiously, much to my son’s consternation. The countryside looks like a lot of places in northern Asia — dry and brown in April — with oxen pulling carts, and few motorized vehicles.

The most striking thing was how well ordered the whitewashed villages were and how every possible piece of arable land — even steep hillsides — had been plowed and planted. Of course, we were on roads open to foreigners: Who’s to say what lay unseen beyond the horizon.

I know that we passed about 10 miles from the Yongbyon nuclear complex on one side and about 25 miles from the notorious labor camp No. 14 on the other. Every request to stop and see something of North Korean life, even shops in the cities, was denied.

As we drove, our guides asked nearly as many questions of me as I did of them. They repeatedly inquired about my work. In my visa application, I said that I managed a translation company in Beijing. It was true to a point; I was the managing director of The New York Times’s Chinese-language operations there, which translates Times stories into Chinese.

Their questions were unsettling, however, and I stuck to my story as much as my smile. They talked a lot about how many spies they have in North Korea, and I realized this wasn’t a game I should be playing with my son by my side.

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Approaching the Joint Security Area on the border with South Korea at Panmunjom. Visitors are escorted by an armed guard down a heavily reinforced roadway. The large blocks along the roadside are poised so that they can be quickly toppled to slow advancing South Korean or American troops.Credit...Craig S. Smith

On the last day, my son asked if we could go back to see the monumental statues of the generals. The guides seemed puzzled, even perturbed, but acquiesced. When we got there, I lost track of our male guide, but he soon joined us. On the way back, he and I fell behind my son and our female guide.

“Why did you want to visit the generals again?” he asked. I explained that because we had begun our trip there, my son wanted to end it there. He fell silent as we approached an outbuilding. “Would you write that down?” he finally asked. I imagined being proffered a guest book where visitors wrote glowing tributes and answered yes.

A man came out of the outbuilding and they conferred. Then the guide said I only needed to tell him the reason again, and he would go inside and explain. I repeated what I had said. Curious, I followed him into the building.

There was no guest book inside, but rather a group of men in military uniforms. They seemed annoyed that I was there and motioned for me to step outside. After a moment, my guide reappeared. “They are satisfied,” he said.

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Emerging from the Pyongyang metro. The quality of construction of the apartment buildings is not as good, when viewed close up, as it appears from a distance.Credit...Craig S. Smith

It was then I realized that we had fallen under suspicion. In retrospect, given what happened to Mr. Warmbier, the entire trip was an unnecessary risk. The obfuscation about my identity, my damp and beaten passport, the surreptitiously taken photos — some of them cutting the head off Kim Il-sung — could easily have been used to construe nefarious intent.

On the plane back to China, I picked up a copy of the English-language Pyongyang Daily. “Nukes will put an end to DPRK-US Standoff,” a headline read, referring to the uneasy relationship between the U.S. and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

“The DPRK will advance the timetable for the great war.”

A lot of people say I was stupid. But it’s easy to underestimate the danger of a place like North Korea, to feel that it’s not real.

Mr. Warmbier was naïve, and so was I.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Re-evaluating a Trip to North Korea. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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