North Korea is perhaps the only state in the world to become anathema across virtually the entire spectrum of political opinion in the 1990s, from left to right and from Washington to Beijing to Moscow. The consensus has been that the DPRK is a rogue terrorist-totalitarian nightmare, the quintessence of Oriental despotism, if not outright dementia. Our authors hate it too. Helen-Louise Hunter likens this ‘cult society’ to groups trundling behind Jim Jones or Charles Manson; Eberstadt approvingly cites the dictum that it is ‘as close to totalitarianism as a humanly operated society could come’. There is a deafening absence of any doubts or qualifications to such images—or to the seemingly universal wish that Kim Jong Il’s socialism-in-one-family would just go away, the sooner the better. In this context, what is really significant about these two books is that they represent the best analysis of North Korea that Washington has to offer. Hunter worked for two decades in the Central Intelligence Agency, where her text first appeared (if that is the right word) as a long internal memorandum. In his foreword to the book, former Congressional Cold Warrior Stephen Solarz explains that when he read this document he realized that her ‘brilliant and breathtaking analysis’ represented ‘what the Rosetta stone was to ancient Egypt’ (sic)—a feat of decipherment so rare that it took him a decade to get the CIA to declassify it. Eberstadt, who has been with the American Enterprise Institute for fifteen years, made his name by demonstrating the wretched state of health care and steep declines in life expectancy in the USSR, several years before the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For a decade he has been predicting the impending collapse of North Korea—tidings he first brought to the Wall Street Journal in June 1990. His book is an extended attempt to update and justify this perpetual forecast.

The Korea Foundation that helped fund Eberstadt’s study certainly knew what it was doing—it was headed at the time by the former deputy chief of Seoul’s intelligence agency. American taxpayers, on the other hand, often wonder what they are getting for the $28 to $30 billion they pour into Washington’s ‘intelligence community’ every year—and so did I, on having to wade up to page 68 of Hunter’s book before learning anything new (that Kim Il Sung University has a baseball team—the Japanese introduced this venerable American game to Korea, but given its popularity in the South, it comes as a mild surprise that it has survived in the North). Long-standing impressions that inside the Beltway ‘intelligence’ is a euphemism for the halt leading the blind are likely to be reinforced by her painfully weak grasp of Korean, which leads her to misspell a word as significant as sasang—‘thought’, as in ‘Kim Il Sung thought’—rendered as sangsa in its only two appearances in the book. Likewise Eberstadt, feigning knowledge of Korean, drops mangled and meaningless transliterations along the way.

This is not to say either work is worthless. On the contrary, within their cultural and ideological limits, both are instructive. Hunter’s book contains valuable information on such relatively arcane subjects as North Korean wage and price structures, the self-sufficient neighbourhood practices that have generally averted the long lines for goods that characterized Soviet-style communism, and the decade that almost every North Korean young man is required to devote to military service in this garrison state. She is able to point out many achievements of the North Korean system, which anyone outside the CIA would be labelled a sympathizer for noting—compassionate care for war orphans in particular, and children in general; ‘radical change’ in the position of women; genuinely free housing; preventive medicine to a fairly high standard; infant mortality rates comparable to the most advanced countries, until the recent famine. It is also striking that Hunter repeatedly asserts that the vast majority of North Koreans do indeed revere Kim Il Sung, as the regime claims they do, not excluding even the defectors from the system on whose information the book depends for the core of its evidence.