Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...illicit arms trade, as well as its counterfeiting and drug-running businesses. I have also written about legitimate South Korean businessmen who have invested there, hoping it's a low-wage alternative to China. And I have followed the seemingly endless permutations of Washington's fitful efforts to convince Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. When, defiantly, North Korea set off a nuclear device in October 2006, I wrote a cover story for TIME on the pre-eminent security threat of the 21st century: nukes getting into the hands of guys like the Dear Leader and the terrorist groups...
...Music Begin The swings between humor and pathos ended that evening at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, an ornate, three-tier orchestra hall that had been recently fitted with a new acoustic shell around the stage to make the hall worthy of the New York Philharmonic. Some 1,400 people were present - mostly North Koreans, and a few dozen foreign diplomats and businesspeople. Who the North Koreans were, exactly, was maddeningly vague. Maazel had said before the concert that he hoped "ordinary" Koreans would be among those attending, but no one from the orchestra had a clue who the tickets...
...thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel...
...entire group was deposited in a 47-story hotel that sits on Pyongyang's Daedong River. It is one of two hotels in Pyongyang that foreigners stay in. The other one is on a central street, with plenty of pedestrian traffic outside and even some vehicular traffic. It's possible to walk out the front door, see people and try to talk to them. Not from our hotel. It's isolated and difficult to walk to or from. And that was the point. There hadn't been this many Americans on North Korean soil since the Korean...
...Mind Your Minder While the orchestra rehearsed, the government minders took the 80 mostly American journalists on a whirlwind tour of Pyongyang. Kim Il Sung, the late Great Leader, is still the dominant figure in the intense cult of personality that is North Korea. His image is everywhere, most prominently on an overlook where a gigantic bronze statue stands in front of the Korean Revolution Museum. After we boarded the buses, a group of about 40 North Koreans walked up and made their way to the statue. We were just about to leave, but again there was a journalists' revolt...