Apr. 18, 2003 - MOUNT KUMGANG, North Korea--Here in the idealized version of North Korea, citizens wear new, brightly colored clothes, tour guides appear happy and well-nourished, and everybody worships Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung, 91 years old this week and still president despite being dead. 

This seaside mountain resort, developed and operated by the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai Group, has for five years served as one of the few windows on this isolated totalitarian state. And after more than a half-century of isolated existence, North Korea remains a puzzle to outsiders, even when it allows visitors to peer inside. 

As American officials prepare to sit down with North Koreans for talks in Beijing next week, they know they are dealing with two North Koreas -- the one that the Pyongyang regime manufactures and allows people to glimpse, and the one that it hides from view. 

A three-day tour of Mount Kumgang resembles a trip to the zoo to see a country in captivity. Tour buses carry visitors on a paved road lined by high barbed-wire fencing. Young soldiers in crisp olive-green uniforms, pistols holstered, stand rigidly at key points along the bus routes, including the few fence openings -- as much to discourage villagers from crossing over to this alternate reality as to prevent tourists from getting out. 

Beyond the fence lies a vast, undeveloped landscape of brown earth, marshes and, fixed in the distance, mountains. A few hundred yards from the road are rows of low-slung concrete block houses, their shingled roofs peaking above fences and berms meant to keep visitors from seeing more than they are supposed to. At night, the fences become superfluous: The entire countryside disappears into a pitch black, devoid of electric lights. 

It is difficult to know whether the manufactured reality -- that of a nation of 22 million people ready to die for their leaders -- is as illusory as the one Saddam Hussein cultivated in his Iraq, a nation that now has many fallen statues. 

Here, where thousands of statues have been erected honoring Kim Il Sung, the regime has had decades more practice at the art of indoctrination. The government's not-so-invisible hand distorts what can be seen and heard. 

Villagers are provided with clean sweat pants, coats and work clothes because they might be seen by tourists, according to Chinese-born, ethnic Koreans working at the resort. The park guides -- the only locals authorized to speak with visitors -- admit they have a little more to eat than the average North Korean because of their high-visibility jobs, and they speak the political mythology of diehard loyalty to the regime. 

"The Great Leader has devoted himself to our country," said Oh Yong Jin, 46, a park ranger smartly dressed in a gray fisherman's cap and green overcoat, speaking of the late Kim Il Sung in the present tense on Tuesday, his 91st birthday. "So now is a time to remember him, to never forget. Like the sun never disappears, the Great Leader is always in our hearts." 

But miles beyond the barbed-wire fences that ring the resort, beyond the view of foreign tourists, far larger numbers of North Koreans dress in tatters, eat just a few hundred grams of food per day and, with brave gestures, show that reverence for their leaders is not monolithic. 

"I've seen graffiti against them: 'We reject Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il. The government has to come down,'" said one Chinese-Korean worker who had visited relatives in North Korea closer to the Chinese border. "There's no electricity, even in mines. All the factories are closed. ... The people can't eat, they can't live well. They're going to have a lot of resentment toward the system." 

Kim's birthday is a two-day holiday in the North, and it is one of the few times a year families receive meat -- fish this year for the coastal village where Oh and his fellow guide, a woman named Soo Hyun, live. Soo Hyun, wearing makeup and a perfect smile, acknowledged that North Koreans have little to eat, blaming American economic sanctions for her country's hardships. But she said her people will not give up easily in the face of U.S. pressure. 

"It's true, right now it's very difficult. The Dear Leader is also suffering with the people," she said, referring to Kim Jong Il. 

"Because we have the Dear Leader, we have hope in our hearts that we will be able to overcome any hardships." 

But even in her touched-up version of North Korea, subtle hints lend credence to Korea experts and workers here who predict Pyongyang's grip on the population will slip once it loses its choke-hold on information. 

"When I first came here ... the people didn't know their situation," said another Chinese-Korean worker who has visited other areas of the North. "They laughed at us. They said, 'You're here to make money, aren't you? Here the government gives us everything.' They were poor, but they didn't know it. Now, they don't say it, but after five years, their thinking is changing. ... " The fences might prevent tourists from seeing everything that goes on in the villages here, but they don't stop the villagers from seeing the Hyundai employees and the tourists -- their expensive clothes, their cameras, their watches, their money. 

The fences, resort workers said, were put up in part to protect Hyundai property from looting by North Koreans, including soldiers, who, given the opportunity, steal anything of value, including car batteries out of the buses. 

The resort employees interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity. 

North Korean college students, by definition members of an elite class here, pester the resort workers for money, knowing that the workers receive tips from tourists. Villagers sneak through thickets of trees to get close to the buses and ask for food or money. "There are a lot of women prostituting themselves just to live," said a Chinese-Korean employee. "If you just give them some food, they'll sell themselves." 

Some park guides ask tourists directly for cash, as one young man did shortly after meeting an American, suggesting that the visitor could slip a $100 bill to him without anybody noticing. A North Korean can live decently for a week on a dollar, some here said. 

That is in part because there is so little to buy. This country has markets where people can buy food to supplement their rations, but meat remains scarce and, when available, so pricey that few can afford it. 

The countryside is largely devoid of wildlife, and only a handful of cows, a couple of pigs and one dog could be seen from the road on a bus ride. To buy a single dog to eat, said Chinese-Korean employees, would cost about $350, or 10 times the price in northeast China. 

The only industry making money in North Korea is the military industry, experts say. North Korea exports missiles and weapons technology for much-needed hard currency, and devotes its resources to the military, which the propaganda here declares must come first. 

That helps explain why North Korea might already be a nuclear power, even as it depends for its survival on international food aid and oil piped in from China -- fuel supplies China cut off for three days this winter. 

The North's reliance on aid has increased drastically during the current nuclear stand-off with the United States, and experts believe that the financial pressures on the regime -- and the United States' quick victory in Iraq -- have forced Kim Jong Il to the negotiating table. 

Some critics believe that Kim's hand would be even weaker if it were not for the heavy investments Hyundai has made in the North, most visibly here at Kumgang. Hyundai has invested at least $500 million to draw visitors here, about 100 miles north of Seoul and 125 miles east of Pyongyang. Hyundai is also embroiled in a scandal for secretly funneling an additional $500 million to Kim Jon Il as an alleged payoff to secure a historic summit in 2000 between Kim and then-South Korean president Kim Dae Jung. 

Idealists view the money-losing venture as a symbolic precursor to peaceful reunification, while Hyundai's critics see it as a boondoggle that has fed cash to a repressive dictatorship. Many of the South Korean tourists simply consider the trek to Mount Kumgang as a rare chance to peer at their neighbors to the North. 

Karaoke at night The tourists ride a bus for about four hours to the peninsula's east coast, then take a four-hour boat trip to the port of Kosung, because Pyongyang has yet to give clearance for regular trips on a much faster overland route from Seoul. During their stay, they can bathe in hot springs, hike up Kumgang, walk around a lake and along a rocky shore, and take in a North Korean acrobatics show. At night, the lounge in the floating hotel offers a Filipino band and karaoke. 

Hyundai plans to build a golf course and ski slopes. 

When tourists arrive, they are greeted by a tranquil if doctored scene from another age. Outside the village walls, children in bright blue, yellow and red sweat suits try to fish in shallow water with bamboo poles while their mothers wash clothes. Soldiers walk casually on a set of unused railroad tracks. 

Men, women and children walk or bicycle along unpaved paths snaking toward a vacant horizon, leading to other buildings or villages miles away. The bicycles have small round license plates posted on their front baskets -- because they're so valuable, the South Korean tour guides said, though the plates are just as likely a means of regulating movement. 

Once or twice a day, one might see a car, though it is probably driven by a government official. On a dirt lot outside a school, boys kick an old soccer ball, while a few feet away younger children and parents throw a basketball toward metal rims mounted on trees. 

Many of the children wear new school uniforms provided annually for Kim Il Sung's birthday. Kim's professed love of children is plain for all to see on one of the many billboards portraying him surrounded by admirers, painted in the propagandist style of socialist realism. 

These North Koreans were off-limits to visitors. No pictures, no pointing, no stopping. Just a glimpse of socialist paradise as seen from a tour bus. 

The North Koreans aren't going anywhere, either. Strict restrictions on travel make it difficult for most to leave the area in which they are born -- this despite claims by park guides that people in North Korea can move freely. The Chinese-born workers here who have visited their relatives know the government tries to prevent people from traveling, partly because that's how information travels. 

"If people start to get exposed to different ideas, things will explode," a Chinese-Korean employee said. "They must not learn anything about other countries." 

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