2025-10-04
36 分钟The Economist.
North Korea is the world's most secretive country.
That makes reporting on it an exercise in detective work.
Journalists rely on shards of information, gradually assembling them until a clearer image emerges.
Some of those shards are visible for all to see.
Like the trip that the country's leader Kim Jong-un recently made to Beijing for a Chinese military parade.
It also showed him traveling with his daughter, Kim Jo-ae, who some think could be his successor.
Other scraps of intelligence are found in satellite images or hidden inside trove of data.
And then there are the pieces of information that come from North Korean people themselves,
ones that the state definitely does not want made public.
Can you tell me about how you escaped and what what that that process was like.
I'm Rosie Blaw and today on the weekend Intelligence, we're changing up the format a little.
For the past few months, Noah Snyder, our East Asia correspondent, has been working on a story about North Korea.
Noah is here to tell us how shard by shard he's pieced together a troubling picture,
Noah, those are huge conclusions, so I want to take you back,
what was the fragment that first led you into this and into drawing these conclusions?
So you're right, Rosie, they're big conclusions
and they're hard conclusions to draw in in part because of how hard it is to report on North Korea.
I can't travel there easily, you can't just get on a plane and go to Pyongyang as a journalist.
It is a state with almost total control of its borders and of what's happening inside the country.