North Korea Undercover Panorama

secretive nation, North Korea's supreme commander, Kim Jong Un, is

threatening thermonuclear war spends eight days undercover inside

the most rigidly controlled nation on earth.

So welcome to the real North Korea. A landscape bleak beyond words, a

regime apparently marching towards But is this talk of war for real? Or

a regime afraid for its own survival playing a shadow game? We may see a

thermonuclear war. I am sure it is not the North Korean plan to unleash

that kind of thing, but it might come to that as the result of a

We are flying into the strangest nation on earth, unstable, paranoid,

aggressive, and after its latest nuclear test in February, even

China, it's all die, voted against it in the UN. -- its old ally. No

wonder North Korea is fast running out of friends. Journalists are all

but banned, so I am going in undercover, part of a two group.

Guide Number One is the regime's to North Korea at an interesting

time. The situation is very tense, were both our guides, and also our

ever vigilant escorts. We are on an official eight-day tour, so the

guides put this up in one of the top hotels in the Democratic People's

Republic of Korea. A pity about the lights, it stinks.

And this is the view outside the hotel, they are building a bank,

night and day. Day and night. It is now four in the morning. They

never stop. I am told it is a joint venture with

a Chinese bank, a rare sign of style. Joining us today is the

trip's official cameraman. He films us, we film him, he films as filming

him. This is a controlled society, but what is the ideology behind it?

The official video they made about the trip, with their words and

music, given to us at the end, provides a clue. This is a monument

to the party. It was erected in October 1995 to mark the 15th

anniversary of the founding of the workers party of Korea. So there is

the hammer, there is the sickle, and there is the paintbrush, workers by

hand and by brain. It feels like symbols of an old religion.

The main square. Many see North Korea as a communist state. Years

ago, Mark Sanders Lenin still had pride of place, but this year, on

our trip, they have gone. -- Marx and Lenin. Now you see them, now you

don't. So what sort of system is this? North Korea has a higher share

of the population in uniform than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had

until the Second World War, so I think it is much more accurate to

look at North Korea as a far right state, and ultranationalist state.

superior. Kim Jong Il was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and

copied him quite consciously, down to details like the Nuremberg

marchers, which are staged in banned from taking cameras in. Kim

Il Sung has been dead these past 19 years, but he still calls the shots.

As far as I know, it is the only nation in the world ruled by a dead

man. The generalissimo, Kim Il Sung, is still the leader of the country.

But he is a corpse. I am sorry, you don't understand the North Korean

ideology, the religious nature of this. He is a kind of God. The lives

eternally. -- the lives eternally. As does his son, Kim Jong ill, Kim

2, who lives in his own glass box. When he died nearly two years ago,

his younger son, Kim Jong Un, then 28, took over the family firm. Kim

the Third was schooled in Switzerland, became a general at 27,

and has linked his staff firmly to the military. -- start. So North

Korea is not a match list, militaristic, and its leaders are

God. -- ultranationalist. It is a worrying combination. TRANSLATION:

In North Korea, if you say the wrong thing, you will die. You will be

sent to a political prison camp. If you know or hear something, you must

pretend to be ignorant. Disagreement is not an option. Disagreement means

The ideology may be terrifying, but does this place really work? At this

bottling plant, on the production first. -- pay homage to claim the

first. I bow, it is what expected given the godlike nature of the

Kims. It is at the entrance of what we are told is a collective farm.

You get the feeling that this is not loudspeakers all day long. So what

about the farm workers? Where do they live? They show as a model

house, with model family, model kitchen and a fridge full of food.

But this did not seem to have anything to do with farming.

Pretty much a real-life farming the regime's worthies and foreigners

like us. Breakfast, in a gilded We sneak out of the spa hotel. The

barbed wire separates us from the locals. North Korea is one of the

poorest places on earth. So welcome to the real career.

-- the real North Korea. Life is bleak year, no reliable power, no

freedoms as we know them, not even to travel to the capital without

Please don't take photos! The more we see, the worse it gets.

Our tour guides are anxious for us not to capture the poverty.

photos, no photos! Here, a woman washes clothes in an icy river.

People scavenge in mode. -- mud. And if this is a market, there was not

much on sale. No smoke from this chimney. It looks

as though it has been idle for some giant industrial complex. They make

electricity generators here, they say. There goes the electricity

again. We ask for a tour of the when things go wrong. Do they do the

same with their own people? When you talk to North Korean is about the

state of their country, a lot of them recognise that North Korea is

very backward and very poor. But they tend to blame that on outside

interference, American sanctions, and indeed if a light bulb blows in

Pyongyang, people will say, blame Dave ball, it is good morning,

Pyongyang! Until you switch on the DMZ, the demilitarised zone where

North Korea stops and South Korea the border with South Korea. Today

it does not feel like a battlefront, no movement, no manoeuvres, no big

guns. But the DMZ's history is at the root of the North's current

paranoia about America. In 1950, North Korea, supported by Stalin and

Mao, invaded the south. The Americans, the British and others

helped the South fightback. They have been effective in blasting the

Reds from a strong position. Three years later and 1 million

dead, the border was back to where it had been, the 38th parallel. The

two sites declared a ceasefire, but matters. I as if it might have been

the North. -- I ask. But is there going to be another one?

In England we are less afraid because we are further away.

bomb seven years ago. Now their latest propaganda claims their

In reality, they could hit South Korea, Japan and possibly American

bases in the Pacific. At the border, on a day when Pyongyang is boasting

its rockets are primed and ready to fire, it could not be more peaceful.

But on the far side of the blue huts, something is missing. Usually,

there are South Koreans on guard, sometimes Americans, too. Today it

is eerily quiet. At the moment this is a war of words. Will there be a

But for now, they are relaxed Next stop, a few miles North of the

border, it is that man again. Kim the first's cult of personality is

everywhere, reforming people's thoughts. It certainly would appear

that the North Koreans are brainwashed. When you talk to North

Koreans, you can have a normal conversation and think you are

really dealing with a human being, people brainwashed. Mobile phones

are very important for keeping information transmitted quickly

about what is going on inside North Korea. I expect you will find that

the chattering class in Pyongyang know very quickly about events that

happen in the North East. This is quite a big change. A night out in

Pyongyang. Our guide has a lullaby for us, the nation's reunification

As the regime talks up thermonuclear war, our other guide

sets out the Frank Sinatra doctrine. Back at the hotel, the power is off

again. Now you don't see any light, now you do. Look at this shot taken

from space. Compare the night sky. The North without a sad glowworm,

and the South blazing with light. A few miles South of the border, it

Welcome to South Korea. As you can see, it is just like North Korea...

Well, it might be a bit different. In South Korea, they have all sorts

of things they don't have in North Korea. Shops, adverts,

individuality, freedom of religion, freedom to go for a walk. There are

25,000 defectors from the North here. The question is, why are

there not more? I am here to meet a doctor from the North are now free

to speak, albeit anonymously. Koreans wonder why North Koreans do

not rebel. Brainwashing starts in the wound. It is natural to bow to

the portraits of the Kims every morning. -- in the womb. Back in

the North, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, we pass a military

And in town, they are testing the public address system. The

something is going on. We have seen loads more soldiers. It is very

difficult to film, but you can feel the tension rising. The problem is,

it is impossible for us to ask what is really happening. We don't know.

Instead there is a trip to the People's Library. I ask for one

particular book. 1984. Any English books? George Orwell predicted a

world where threat of constant walk out the masses subdued. They have

not got 1984, but they have got Discovering Food And Nutrition.

Grimly ironic, because although you would not know it in Pyongyang,

mass starvation is the regime's darkest failure. In the 1990s,

North Korea lost its old mentor, the Soviet Union. The economy

collapsed. They suffered one of the worst famines in modern times.

Maybe 1 million died. Maybe more. But images like these would never

be shown in North Korea. This man escaped seven years ago. Back then,

Ji Seong Ho was starving. While stealing coal from a train to sell

for food, he fell under the wheels of the train and lost a leg and a

hand. I think I lost my mind from dizziness, sleep deprivation and

hunger. My grandmother and my neighbours died of starvation. When

you went into the cities, train stations, markets and alleyways,

you found lots of dead bodies. I do not know the exact number, but

countless people died. Countless. Officially the famine was

downplayed, but malnutrition continues. Two years ago, the UN

estimated that 6 million people, a quarter of the population, needed

urgent food aid. We are on the road again, heading over the mountains

East. Due North of here is something our guides would never

ever show us, the North Korean gulag. These shocking images speak

of life-and-death inside the regime's concentration camps.

Panorama has tracked down a defective brave enough to go on

camera to tell his story. Jung Gwang-Il was a prisoner in Camp 15.

How did they bury the dead in the winter when the ground was cold?

We don't bury them. We leave the dead bodies in a warehouse until

April. We bury them in April. When we go to bury them, they are

already rotten and totally decomposed. So they are shovels

like rubbish and buried. -- shovel it like rubbish. How many people at

once? 72 to 80 people.Has the new leader decided to shut down the

gulag? Far from it. The cans are getting bigger not smaller. Day

seven, we have been taken out of the city. In Pyongyang they stage a

military parade. The regime is shaking his fist at the world. For

us, a ride on the Metro. There are adverts and it just so happens to

be the deepest in the world. Handy if the war ever did go nuclear.

This is the first time we bump into ordinary North Koreans. Even in the

tube, the wall of sound from the regime never let up. There are

times when it feels like we are inside a doomsday cult. The papers

are full of warmongering and But the military-first policy has a

price. On the day the regime orders its forces on standby, they take us

to one of the country's biggest hospitals. Here the doctor says

they can care for 1300 patients. In the mausoleum, it was light and

warm. And in the hospital? It is freezing. At least the power is on.

But it has gone again. They show us a series of fancy machines. A CT

scanner, UV lights, but something is missing. We have not seen a

single patient. Why are there no Normally they treat the patients in

the morning. Why are we not allowed to see them? We asked a doctor

about her experience of North Korean hospitals. If you had said

that you needed more medicine for the patients, what would have

happened to you? They would kill me, the next day or that same day. They

would kill you regardless of your ranking. Even a high-ranking

official would be killed. Everyone knows that. It is the end of our

tour, and we still have not seen any patients. Tell the doctor we

are not idiots. We have not seen any patients. Please don't treat us

in this way. The doctor explains that we cannot see patients without

their permission, but we cannot ask for that without seeing them. Catch

22. Then they take us for retreat. And who should I bump into in the

stalls? What feels like the entire North Korean officer corps. Top

billing at the Circus, soaring above a trapeze, a rocket. The

officers go wild. Do they mean it? Are they putting on a show, too?

The people are indoctrinated to believe that North Korea must

exercise mode true power. When I lived there, we used to say that it

would be better for war to break out so everyone can live together

and see the end. But what if this goes wrong? North Korea is on a

collision course with United States and South Korea. We may see a

thermonuclear war, but not because untested leader of the soldier

state must threaten war to stamp his authority, at home and abroad.

Unless China, his major ally, reins him in, there is a danger that he

could take that logic too far. Jong Un is not yet fully in control,

I think. He needs to keep showing that he is strong. He wants to be

the North Korean leader of who forces the United States to come to

the negotiating table on their terms to admit that North Korea is

a nuclear state, and preferably to that they cannot live any more. He

keeps insisting that he wants a war when the markets are closed and