‘Hard Target’ North Korea Poses Challenge to U.S. Spying

If Stalin’s Russia was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill described it in 1939, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea 72 years later is an even more inscrutable intelligence target.

The technological revolution that has brought the Internet, smart phones, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the outside world to other repressive regimes has just begun lapping at North Korea’s shores, mostly along the Yalu River on the Chinese border.