ABSTRACT
The chances of obtaining any reliable information about North Korean conditions were extremely slim. My East European colleagues liked to make out that they were well informed, but it was doubtful (to put it mildly) whether they had access to reliable facts. The Chinese and even the Russians were perhaps the exceptions that proved the rule, but they were singularly uninformative. Otherwise, the East Europeans in North Korea were, if anything, just as much at the mercy of accidental contacts and sporadic impressions as Western diplomats often were in the East European communist countries. So our colleagues’ value as sources of information depended much upon their staff and even more so upon their observational faculties and their discernment as well as, of course, upon their readiness to share their insights with a Westerner.
