Why some Americans are strangely drawn to enter North Korea

One shouted about God's love as he crossed a frozen river, clutching a Bible. Another swam, drunk and naked. Several US soldiers dashed around land mines. Time and again, Americans over the years have slipped illegally into poor, deeply suspicious, fervently anti-American North Korea, even as it has become increasingly easy to enter legally as a tourist. It's incomprehensible to many, especially since tens of thousands of desperate North Koreans have crossed in the opposite direction, at great risk. On Tuesday night, a US citizen apparently tried to swim across a river separating the Koreas, eager to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Days earlier, 24-year-old Matthew Miller, who entered as a tourist but then tore up his visa, was sentenced to six years of hard labour on charges he illegally entered the country to commit espionage. Even for North Korea, the Miller case is unusual. Initial reports said that when he arrived in Pyongyang on April 10, he tore up his tourist visa and shouted that he wanted asylum. "He came to the DPRK after choosing it as a shelter," the KCNA reported. In an interview with CNN this month, during which Miller was monitored by North Korean officials, he said he "prepared to violate the law of DPRK before coming here, and I deliberately committed my crime". During Sunday's trial, Miller said he tore up his tourist visa at Pyongyang airport because he had the "wild ambition" of experiencing prison life in North Korea so he could write about human rights in the country. The asylum stunt was just a trick by Miller to get himself into a jail, the prosecution said. It also said that he falsely claimed to have secret information about the US military in South Korea on his iPad and iPod. Sneaking into autocratic, cloistered North Korea has proven a strange and powerful temptation for some Americans. Sometimes the spur is deep religious conviction. Sometimes it's discontent with America and a belief that things will be different in a country that can seem like its polar opposite. Quite often, analysts say, it's mental or personal problems - or simply a case of a person acting upon a very, very bad idea. Whatever their reasons, Americans detained in North Korea, including three currently in custody, are major complications for Washington, which must decide whether to let a US citizen languish or to provide Pyongyang with a propaganda victory by sending a senior US envoy to negotiate a release. In the cold war, a handful of US soldiers, some of whom knew little about life in the North, fled across the demilitarised zone and later appeared in North Korean propaganda films. Charles Jenkins, of North Carolina, deserted his army post in South Korea in 1965. He was allowed to leave North Korea for Japan in 2004. Other defector soldiers had problems in their military units or issues with family at home. One was reportedly lured north by a female North Korean agent. In the decades after the Korean war, some Americans harboured "glamorous notions of North Korea as a socialist paradise", said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. "But that's just not part of the mix any more. Even in the furthest fringes of American online culture, you don't find that notion." Mental health issues had often played a part, Delury said. "It's seen as a forbidden country ... a place that's perceived in the American mind as being locked down," Delury said. "To cross the border, in some ways, could be alluring" to people looking to break social rules. Evan Hunziker had reportedly been drinking with a friend in 1996 when he decided to swim naked across the Yalu River between China and the North. Hunziker, who was released after about three months, had drug, alcohol and legal problems. He was later found dead in Washington state in what was ruled a suicide. Religion has provided a powerful impulse for some to cross. North Korea officially guarantees freedom of religion, but outside analysts and defectors describe the country as militantly anti-religious. The distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean imprisonment or execution, defectors have said. "It is one of the last frontiers to spread the Christian faith, so there are people who would take unimaginable risks" to evangelise there, Delury said. A Bible in his hand, American missionary Robert Park walked into North Korea on Christmas Day 2009 to draw attention to human rights abuses and to call for the resignation of then-leader Kim Jong-il. Park was deported from the country in February 2010. In 2010, ex-president Jimmy Carter visited North Korea to win the release of imprisoned American Aijalon Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labour for crossing illegally into the North from China. It was unclear what led Gomes, who had been teaching English in South Korea, to cross. But he may have been emulating Park, said Jo Sung-rae, a South Korean human rights advocate who met Gomes, who attended rallies in Seoul calling for Park's release before he was arrested. Park later said he didn't want others to repeat his actions. "I don't want others to do this. I just hoped that this could galvanise people to action. Because this is a society that needs change now," he told The Washington Post in February 2011. For North Korea, getting a senior US official or an ex-president to visit is a huge propaganda coup. It allowed Pyongyang to plaster its newspapers and TV screens with scenes meant to show its powerful leaders welcoming humbled American dignitaries, said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in South Korea. North Korea currently has three Americans in custody: Miller; Jeffrey Fowle, a 56-year-old from the state of Ohio who was arrested in May after leaving a Bible in a seamen's club in the northeastern city of Chongjin and who is awaiting trial; and Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary who is two years into a 15-year hardlabour sentence for "hostile acts to bring down the government". Miller and Fowle are being held separately in hotel rooms in Pyongyang - they apparently have not seen each other - while North Korea has created what amounts to a one-man prison camp for Bae, who is working eight hours a day, six days a week in the fields. Washington has repeatedly offered to send its envoy for North Korean human rights to discuss the detained Americans. Robert King, the US special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, said on Wednesday that freeing the detainees could provide a diplomatic opening in relations. So far, Pyongyang has baulked at the offers. "The North Koreans are in no hurry," Lankov said. "It's a sellers' market. They say: 'This is our price: a senior visit and some concessions. These are our goods, these Americans. If you don't want to pay, that's your problem. We can wait'." Additional reporting by The Washington Post

Why some Americans are strangely drawn to enter North Korea

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Various motives are put forward for entering illegally, including religion and personal problems; the reality is US citizens become political pawns

Various motives are put forward for entering illegally, including religion and personal problems; the reality is US citizens become political pawns