The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Longmont, Colorado—In an anonymous office building in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in a part of Colorado where cattle ranches fade into strip malls, a gravel-voiced man with a Brooklyn accent is moving through the streets of Pyongyang.
Joe Bermudez is staring into a computer screen at a detailed satellite image, maneuvering his cursor past guarded checkpoints and into restricted neighborhoods where the North Korean elite live behind high concrete walls. Looking down on the city from more than 250 miles up, he lingers over what he believes is the private airport of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s young leader, pointing out a pair of VIP helicopters and a Soviet-era biplane. He moves north, jumping across the countryside and picking out hidden tunnels, walled compounds and a small flotilla of military hovercraft designed to storm South Korea’s beaches.
“Driving around,” he calls it when he follows roads in search of something new, humming absentmindedly as his eyes flick across the screen.
Bermudez is a watcher, one of the largely anonymous tribe of researchers who study North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated nations. There’s Michael Madden, a largely self-taught analyst with an encyclopedic knowledge of the government elite, and Curtis Melvin, whose research ranges from monetary policy to electricity grids and who shambles through the buttoned-down Washington think tank where he works in jeans and a frayed T-shirt. There’s Adam Cathcart at Britain’s University of Leeds, and Cheong Seong-Chang at the Sejong Institute outside Seoul. There’s the longtime US intelligence officer, a man quietly revered by many in these circles, who now writes Pyongyang crime novels under the pseudonym James Church.
They are university professors, think-tank analysts and writers for a string of North Korea-centric websites. They are collaborators and competitors. They are the Kremlinologists of Pyongyang.
And they insist North Korea is nowhere near as mysterious as you think it is. At least not always.
“North Korea is a very secretive place. But it’s not as secretive as many people believe,” says Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. “It’s much, much easier now to get information.”
The chaos that swept North Korea during a mid-1990s famine dramatically changed how information flows in and out of the country, while policy changes have eased restrictions on visitors.
Still, North Korea remains like nowhere else. It is a repressive and deeply isolated nation where the Internet is limited to a tiny elite and most outsiders are under near-constant government surveillance. It has been ruled by one family for more than six decades, with the founder worshipped as a near-deity. It has no political opposition, no free press and no freedom of movement. It has an archipelago of political prison camps that rights groups estimate hold at least 80,000 people. AP