Dear Leader's Kidnapping Ring

Calling all touchy-feely, give-peace-a-chance useful idiots: How do you propose that the civilized world deal with a nuclear-armed psychopath like this?

Starting in 1977, North Korean agents were "ordered to bring foreign nationals in magjabi [a Korean term mean-ing 'grab anybody']," says Tsutomu Nishioka, vice president of the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea (NARKN), who has interviewed former North Korean agents. Many were put to work as cultural trainers for North Korean spies in an elaborate stage set built in a huge tunnel beneath Pyongyang. According to a book written by Ahn Myong Jin, a former North Korean agent who defected to the South in 1993, "There were re-created examples of South Korean supermarkets, banks, high-class hotels, a night district, police stations, and elementary and middle schools." Ahn recalled "more than 80 people who trained us to become 'South Koreans.' Most of them were abducted from the South to be used as our teachers." Ahn said that the South Koreans he met "all seemed to have deep pain inside their heart. One teacher who taught us how to behave at drinking joints in the South said, 'You are sneaking into the South, but please do not bring [back] innocent South Korean children playing on the beach'."

The motivations of North Korea's rulers are often murky, but apparently Pyongyang geared up its abduction program to train better spies. In the mid-1970s, when his father, Kim Il Sung, was still alive, Kim Jong Il was in charge of espionage operations. He decided that North Korea's spies needed to look, dress and act like capitalists in order to blend in with their targets. The North Koreans were already in the kidnapping business by then. They had been snatching South Koreans ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953. In 1969, a South Korean airliner was hijacked and flown to Wonsan, a city across the DMZ. Pyongyang agreed to repatriate 39 people, but 11 South Koreans were held back—and have never returned.