If enacted, the new bill — the ADVANCE (which stands for Advance Democratic Values, Address Nondemocratic Countries, and Enhance) Democracy Act of 2005, introduced into both houses on March 3 — would bring about a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy. To maintain a regional balance of power, ensure access to vital resources, and pursue larger national security goals such as the “war on terror,” the United States has traditionally worked with dictators big and small, from the tyrants of the past (such as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) to current autocratic allies (such as Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia). The ADVANCE Democracy Act, the foreign policy version of “Just Say No,” on the other hand, would attempt to steer the United States away from engaging with tyrants under any circumstances.

Those who are skeptical of the bill, including both liberals and conservatives, say its goal of achieving democracy worldwide is hypocritical, because while the United States encourages some democracy movements in the Middle East, it continues its economic and military support of strong-arm leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. What’s more, some critics say, the bill ignores the tensions between democracy promotion and America’s economic and security goals.

Specifically, the act would put democracy promotion at the top of the State Department’s agenda. It would establish a new Office of Democratic Movements and Transitions, require the State Department to issue an annual democracy report, and set up an advisory board of nongovernmental VIPs to evaluate all democracy-promotion activities and spending.

Initially funded at $250 million for two years, the act would direct resources to pro-democracy movements worldwide. The bill proposes to turn U.S. embassies into “islands of freedom” and align U.S. diplomats with pro-democracy movements in nondemocratic countries — linking performance pay and promotions of Foreign Service officers to their efforts to spread democracy. The bill would also authorize the president to block financial flows to states that resisted democratization.

This plan to upend the world’s remaining dictatorships (there are more than 40, according to the nongovernmental organization Freedom House) began with former U.S. ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer and his 2003 book, “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil.” “Some people think a world without tyrants is utopian,” Palmer says. “And they think it’s more utopian to have a deadline.” But, Palmer says, “we’re down to a limited number of dictators, and it’s entirely feasible to get the rest of them out. Most are pretty creaky and won’t even live until 2025!”

Palmer’s book didn’t generate much of a stir in the press, but it did capture the attention of influential politicians like Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif., in the House and John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., in the Senate, the four cosponsors of the ADVANCE Democracy Act. The primary catalyst for the democracy legislation, however, was strategist Michael Horowitz of the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Fresh from his success in pushing passage of the North Korea Human Rights Act, Horowitz, along with the National Coalition for Religious Freedom and Human Rights (a below-the-radar group of evangelicals and others that came together to promote the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998), was ready to kick things up a notch.

Their efforts were aided by Bush’s remarks in his State of the Union address. Palmer says that he almost wept with joy when he heard those words. Adds Horowitz: “There were heated efforts within the State Department to say that this speech was just rhetoric, but no, it was an extraordinary speech, and it changes everything.”

Horowitz expects easy passage for the act. “Obviously Republicans can support it because it’s so in sync” with the president’s address, he says. And he thinks Democrats, including some who opposed the war in Iraq, will support the bill because it promotes “peaceful means of supporting democracy.”

The State Department might be expected to put up some resistance to legislative meddling in its mission. “That was [its] initial reaction toward the anti-trafficking legislation that was passed in both houses. That was also the initial reaction of the international religious freedom legislation,” says Lorne Craner, head of the International Republican Institute and former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor in the Bush administration. The State Department eventually successfully adapted to the institutional changes mandated by both pieces of legislation, he notes. “And given the president’s words and his actions, I think at this point [the act] will get a more sympathetic hearing from the … leadership than the trafficking or religious freedom legislation did.”

Although a bill promoting democracy with bipartisan support might seem to be noncontroversial, conservatives have traditionally expressed skepticism toward the strain of messianic unilateralism that runs through neoconservative thought. As Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote 15 years ago in “The National Interest,” “It is not the American purpose to establish ‘universal dominance’ in the provocative formulation of Charles Krauthammer — not even the universal dominance of democracy.”

It’s not only conservatives who find fault with the strategy of putting democracy above all other considerations. “The inevitable fact is that in some places it is necessary to weigh competing American interests against one another,” argues Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And this bill seems to assume an ‘all democracy all the time’ approach to foreign policy without even seeming to acknowledge deeper tensions between a democracy goal and other economic and security goals.”

It also fails to take into account pressing short-term issues such as North Korea’s nuclear weapons and China’s growing influence in the international arena, Carothers says. “This bill doesn’t seem to acknowledge that conceiving of our relationship with China as a democracy mission is probably not going to happen and will not help integrate China into the international political and economic system in the next two to 10 years.”

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, sees the bill as an effort to give what are seen as negative U.S. policies, particularly in the Middle East, a more positive spin. (Bush’s nomination of longtime advisor Karen Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy is clearly another part of that effort.) The bill uses “the power of the U.S. military occupation and military presence in the region since 9/11 to declare that a new historical moment has arrived,” she says. “The problem is that all the things the Bush administration wanted to fight against turned out to be lies — Iraq’s nukes, potential weapons of mass destruction, links with al-Qaida. You can always say that you’re fighting for democracy because it is such an elusive concept.”

Bennis adds that the Bush administration’s “claiming credit for the move to democratization is very insulting to the peoples of these countries — the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese. These democratization attempts have been in place for the last 25 years at least, and have failed because of the efforts of the U.S. government.”

The issue of U.S. hypocrisy also troubles former ambassador Palmer, a supporter of the bill. “Young Arabs see us as inconsistent, as promoting democracy but propping up the Saudi dictators. They feel that we’re not credible.” He believes that the ADVANCE Democracy Act will eliminate the double standards by which the U.S. government supports democracy some of the time, in some places.

Carnegie’s Carothers, however, argues, “You cannot legislate the elimination of double standards in America’s approach to democracy in the world, because those double standards are based on the fact that our interests don’t always go together despite all the nice rhetoric in presidential speeches.”

To overcome the bill’s critics, Horowitz will again rely on the support of the evangelical community, which he considers to have been “the most powerful force in human rights in the last 20 years.” That force was evident when the North Korea Human Rights Act seemed to be on the verge of failure last year. “I can tell you that senior officials of the Korean and Chinese embassies told me that the bill had zero chance of passing the gantlet in the Senate,” Horowitz recalls. But then his coalition went into overdrive, putting pressure on Democratic leaders such as Tom Daschle, on whom the coalition threatened to unleash 300 Korean-American pastors if he didn’t help remove obstacles to the bill’s passage. Daschle capitulated, then lost in a close reelection race in November anyway.

If significant legislative resistance to the ADVANCE Democracy bill emerges, expect another wave of pressure from an alliance of evangelicals and neoconservatives. Having successfully shifted the debate on North Korea from security issues to human rights concerns, it is now attempting to sell a more ambitious program: the destabilization of more than 40 dictatorial regimes around the world. Whether the result is 20 years of increasing democracy (think Poland) or 20 years of devastating decline (think Russia) will depend not only on passage of the democracy act but also on the way that events affecting America’s economy and national security — which aren’t always in our control — play out on the world stage.

In separate incidents in 2010, after issuing dire threats of “revenge,” it did indeed sink the South Korean naval ship Cheonan and shell the South’s Yeonpyeong Island.

Although short of all-out war, both of those attacks — like others earlier such as the 1968 capture of the U.S. Navy spy ship Pueblo — were major and deadly provocations.

The government of South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and conservative South Korean news media organizations, the two groups specifically targeted by the latest threats, will need to be vigilant.

The current rhetoric stems from North Korea’s resentment of South Korean comments showing contempt for a huge and lengthy celebration commemorating the late North Korean founding dictator Kim Il Sung’s 100th birthday, which was April 15.

The centerpiece of the celebration was to be a rocket launch — supposedly putting a satellite into orbit. In the view of South Korea and the United States, it was a test of the North’s developing missile technology. In a major humiliation, the launch fizzled. Taking note of that, South Korean government and media comments also questioned the priority that the North throughout its history has given to circuses over bread, and guns over butter.

“Traitor Lee Myung Bak,” the North’s Foreign Ministry spokesman complained in a statement issued Sunday, “let loose a string of such malignant invectives that can be uttered only by a shark — that the North might spend a ridiculous amount of money for the celebrations of the centenary of the birth of President Kim Il Sung, and that the amount of fund[s] would be enough to buy a large quantity of food.”

In fact, in an April 16 radio address Lee estimated that the regime could have used the money it spent on the birthday bash to buy a six-year supply of corn for its perennially hungry population.

Because Lee and his supporters desecrated a holiday so sacred it amounted to “the great jubilee in human history,” the North’s military and civilians alike “are shaking with irrepressible resentment,” the ministry’s statement said. “They are now eagerly waiting for the issue of an order so that they may mercilessly punish the traitor.”

If there is reason to hope nothing will come of the current threats it is that phrase about waiting for “an order.”

On Friday, the regime packed Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square with neat rows of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians crying passionately for the blood of Southerners. Spokespersons for various groups in the North were quoted as saying that new leader Kim Jong Un had only to give the order and they would follow.

In other words, as has happened quite a few times over the decades, the gigantic weapon of a furious army and people has been cocked, and this time it is up to Kim — a 20-something grandson of Kim Il Sung — to pull the trigger by issuing the order to go ahead if he chooses to do so.

Not mentioning that crucial element of awaiting an order, though, was a message Monday from a unit of the military called the “special operation action group,” which warned that “the special actions of our revolutionary armed forces will start soon to meet the reckless challenge of the group of traitors.”

“Targets are the Lee Myung Bak group of traitors, the arch criminals and the group of rat-like elements including conservative media destroying the mainstay of the fair public opinion,” said the statement, released by the North’s Korean Central News Agency. (A search of KCNA articles published since January 1996 found no other mention of a special operation action group.)

“Once the above-said special actions kick off, they will reduce all the rat-like groups and the bases for provocation to ashes in three or four minutes,” the statement said. The actions will employ “unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style. Our revolutionary armed forces do not make empty talk.”

Among grievances the special operation action group mentioned were South Korean military boasts last Thursday that the South’s newest missiles can reach any part of North Korea — including, in the words of the North’s statement, “striking the supreme headquarters through an office window.”

The announcement included a media target list, for involvement in a campaign to “build up public opinion in favor of the rats’ group.”  The list included broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN, as well as national daily newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, which it pointedly noted has its headquarters in downtown Seoul.

Dong-A Ilbo explained that what put the newspaper atop the list was an April 17 article quoting a South Korean intelligence source on the results of reading Kim Jong Un’s lips as the young leader spoke with three senior military brass. The lip reading was done from a telecast by North Korea’s Central TV station showing the four reviewing a military parade on April 15.

The paper doesn’t come out and say so, but some of Kim Jong Un’s quotations make him appear like a kid playing under the Christmas tree with his new toys. He “smiled whenever vehicles with ballistic missiles passed, including the new long-range missile, and said, ‘Great. Great.’”

The threatened special actions are supposed to be unprecedented. That would seem to rule out another missile or nuclear test (although either or both could be in the cards separately) or an assassination raid on South Korea’s presidential Blue House, as was attempted in 1968. Since Kim Jong Un’s image polishers have attempted to portray him as info-tech-savvy, a cyber attack seems one strong possibility — although in that case the threatened “ashes” might be figurative.

Meanwhile, whether it follows through with this particular threat or not, the multitasking regime probably has succeeded at least for the time being in distracting a great many of its subjects from grinding poverty and official repression and corruption, channeling their anger away from manifest policy failures and toward external enemies.

Jong Un’s portly figure and haircut have invited inevitable comparisons with his grandfather. But his first public speech since becoming leader four months ago could have been written for his father, Kim Jong Il, who died of a heart attack last December.

“Yesterday, we were a weak and small country trampled upon by big powers,” he told tens of thousands of soldiers and citizens who had gathered in Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang.

“Today, our geopolitical location remains the same, but we are transformed into a proud political and military power and an independent people that no one can dare provoke,” he said.

The parade that followed was an opportunity for the regime to display an impressive inventory of military hardware. It included what appeared to be a new long-range missile, although it did not appear to be big enough to reach the U.S. mainland 9,000 miles away, according to analysts cited by the Yonhap news agency. Some suggested it could even have been a mock-up, designed to raise anxiety levels among its neighbors.

There were small, but symbolic departures from the past, not least of which was Kim’s relaxed demeanor once he had completed his monotone address.

But the message resonating around the square was as unambiguous as it was predictable: The military-first policy pioneered by his father, at huge cost to the well-being of the country’s 23 million people, would continue.

“Superiority in military technology is no longer monopolized by imperialists, and the era of enemies using atomic bombs to threaten and blackmail us is forever over,” he said.

The U.S. and its allies, meanwhile, are struggling to come up with an appropriate response. Japanese officials are under fire for failing to quickly announce the rocket’s launch — a delay the Nikkei newspaper called a “40-minute vacuum.” All the defense minister, Naoki Tanaka, could tell reporters later was that “some kind of flying object” had been launched from North Korea, and that Japan’s territory had not been threatened.

Japan, like the U.S., is now talking in vague terms about additional sanctions against the regime, although it is difficult to identify any meaningful measure that hasn’t been tried already. Tokyo imposed bilateral sanctions, including a ban on all imports and exports, after the North tested a long-range missile in July 2006. New measures could include tighter restrictions on remittences to the North from ethnic Koreans living in Japan.

The U.S., where President Obama faces mounting criticism of his policy of engagement with Pyongyang, has pushed for a united response to the launch from the UN Security Council. That may include a fresh attempt to deprive the regime’s nuclear and missile programs of cash by expanding the UN blacklist of North Korean accompanies and individuals. But no new sanctions have been proposed amid opposition from China and Russia.

“We will continue to keep the pressure on them and they’ll continue to isolate themselves until they take a different path,” Obama said in an interview with a U.S. television network.

The South Korean president, Lee Myung Bak, implored the North to step back from the brink. “The leadership of North Korea might think they could help further consolidate their regime by threatening the world with nuclear weapons and missiles. However, such acts will only put North Korea in greater danger,” Lee said in a regular radio address on Monday.

He noted that last week’s rocket launch cost $850 million — enough money, he added, to solve food shortages in North Korea for six years. “The way for the North to survive is to voluntarily dismantle its nuclear weapons and to cooperate with the international community through reform and open-door policies.”

His North Korean counterpart gave little indication of that in his address on Sunday. Instead, there is growing acceptance that Kim will attempt to re-establish his credibility with a third nuclear test or a provocative action directed at the South.

As the Korea Herald said in an editorial on Monday, a nuclear test would not only raise anxiety levels in Washington. It would, the paper said, “pose a serious threat to South Korea as well. “Just as Washington promises to marshal international sanctions against a nuclear test, so does Seoul need to renew its commitment to retaliating against Pyongyang for any military provocation.”

Others called for another attempt at luring North Korea to the negotiating table. Tong Kim, a visiting research professor at Korea University in Seoul, believes a revival of the Feb. 29 deal granting North Korea access to U.S. food aid in return for abandoning its uranium enrichment and missile development, could dissuade Pyongyang from another bout of saber-rattling.

“Another nuclear test by the North would certainly create more political and security problems in this year of presidential elections in the United States and South Korea,” he wrote in the Korea Times. “It would also delay the resumption of the six-party talks, which are still the best possible forum for denuclearizing North Korea.”

Six months later, after a 6,000-mile journey that took him through China, Thailand, Laos and Taiwan, he completed the perilous trip that so many of his compatriots attempt, only to die en route or fall into the hands of unsympathetic Chinese authorities.

Yet more and more North Koreans are prepared to take such risks as they flee hunger and oppression in search of a new life in South Korea, where their newfound freedom is clouded by discrimination, mental health problems and financial hardship.

At around 12 percent, the unemployment rate among defectors is far higher than the 3.4 percent among South Koreans. Those working earn significantly less than their southern counterparts, despite government subsidies and three months of mandatory resettlement training, according to the government-affiliated North Korean Refugees Foundation.

Even so, a recent government survey showed that seven out of 10 adult defectors are satisfied with life in the South; only 4.8 percent said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, according to the unification ministry poll.

About half of those questioned left the North due to food shortages, while 31 percent said they came to the South in search of freedom. Just over a quarter fled because of the North’s political system.

They are among more than 23,000 North Koreans who have defected to the South since the Korean War ended in a truce — not a peace agreement — in 1953. The trickle of defectors through the 1990s rose dramatically about 10 years ago, the result of a prolonged famine in which more than 1 million people may have died.

Last year 2,737 people — one of the highest figures on record — defected to the South.

Seong Ho would almost certainly have died traversing the freezing Tumen River, which separates North Korea and northeast China, had it not been for his younger brother, Ji Cheol Ho.

The elder Ji had most of his left leg and his left hand amputated after being involved in a car accident as a teenager. Using a prosthetic limb provided by the South Korean health authorities, he now walks with a barely perceptible limp.

But he journeyed to freedom on a set of wooden crutches made by his father. “The river was really high because it had rained a lot,” Seong Ho says of the night he and his brother, 26, bribed North Korean border guards with money sent back secretly by their mother, who had defected to the South in 2005.

“The current was strong, but we knew we risked being killed if we stopped where we were. Our only choice was to jump into the river. I had to swim with my good leg and my crutches. At one point I started to sink and thought I was about to die, but my brother helped me across to the other side.”

The pair split up in China to avoid arousing suspicion, agreeing they would swallow the poison they were carrying if they were caught. Incredibly, with the help of brokers, religious groups and a large slice of luck, they survived the long journey over land and sea. When they next met they were in Seoul — free, in one piece, and reunited with their mother.

Their bid for freedom could easily have ended in China, where the authorities are taking an increasingly hard line against defectors. Last week, South Korea’s parliament condemned the authorities in China after it emerged that they had forcibly repatriated more than 30 defectors captured along the border.

But their joy at arriving in Seoul was tempered by the discovery that their father had died after making an unsuccessful attempt to defect.

“He died a week before I managed to phone home,” Seong Ho says. “He waited for us to contact him, but after months went without hearing from us he decided to try to cross the border. He was arrested and tortured, and asked repeatedly where his sons were. He died three days after his release. A neighbor found his body and held a funeral for him.”

Every defector who arrives in South Korea brings with them a unique story of why and how they left the North. They are united, though, by a belief that life in the prosperous South will make up for the pain of separation from loved ones and the risks they took to get here.

Given those high expectations, it is inevitable, says Seong Ho, that some find themselves marginalized and disillusioned in their new home.

“We are a minority in South Korea, and that inevitably means there are challenges. North Korean students face discrimination, mostly because of their accent, so many defectors never get used to their new environment. It’s all about having the determination to succeed,” he says.

For his brother Cheol Ho, the simple pleasure of independent study is in stark contrast to the regimented life he led before. “Unless your family is part of the North Korean elite, you have to do an assigned job in a specific place your entire life, whether you like it or not,” he says.

“But here in South Korea, you can do anything you like. You can study as much as you want, and you can dream beyond what you are capable of. You can even dream of becoming president. But that’s not allowed in North Korea.”

The transition from the communist North to the capitalist South is hardest for the increasing number of young female defectors, many of whom are enticed by secret glimpses of life in the West on contraband videotapes.

“Most North Korean defectors I meet are women, and they have numerous problems,” says Kim Yong Lan, a South Korean activist who helps defectors adjust to their new environment.

“They are very weak as a result of physical torture. They also suffer damage to their mental health, such as fear and anxiety. They have to go through hell to get to South Korea, but when they arrive there is no one here for them. They know there is a risk that the relatives they left behind will be tortured and forced to live without enough food. That makes them feel guilty about being here.”

Kim Su Ryeon, a 23-year-old student, defected in 2006 with her mother, and arrived in the South two years later. “I once thought I had overcome my biggest challenge because I had defected and even experienced what it feels like to be on the verge of death,” she says.

“So when I first came to South Korea I was young and thought I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. … But I was wrong. I am now safe here, and my safety is important, but I now I face other psychological problems.”

Do Myeong Hak, secretary general of North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a Seoul-based group of defectors, says the number of refugees will continue to rise, but not just as a result of famine.

“It’s not just an issue of the food supply,” says Do, a poet who arrived in South Korea five years ago. “Even people who can make a living in North Korea are deciding to defect because they are more aware of the outside world. More information is reaching North Koreans. Even if the food supply is maintained, the number of defectors will continue to rise.”

The Ji brothers, now university students in Seoul, try to help other defectors through their organization Now, Action, Unity, Human Rights. While he builds bridges between young North and South Koreans through campaigns, meetings and social events, Seong Ho is making plans, a simple luxury he never thought possible six years ago.

“I’m a student and I don’t have regular income, but once I get a job I should be able to make money,” he says. “I live in a much smaller room compared to the one in North Korea, but I’m definitely happier here.

“The difference between South and North Korea is like the difference between heaven and hell.”

The wires are abuzz with news of a soon-to-be-released book based on emails and interviews between Kim Jong Nam and a Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi over a seven year period. In the book, which is called “My father Kim Jong Il and Me,” Jong Nam reportedly said that North Korea is bound for collapse and called his half-brother, Kim Jong Un, a figurehead.

What “a joke to the outside world,” Jong Nam is purported to have said of the ascent of Jong Un, whom he admitted he has never actually met. More seriously, Jong Nam predicted, “The Kim Jong Un regime will not last long” and “without reform … the regime will collapse.”

The ruling elite in Pyongyang, the ones who are really in control, must be wondering what to do about a problem like Kim Jong Nam, a man who is, it seems, unafraid to speak his mind from where he lives in China.

Jong Nam’s forecast is bold; foreign analysts hesitate to speak out so frankly. We’ve been waiting so long for North Korea to collapse, for civil strife to erupt, for the generals and party leaders to lunge for one another’s throats, that it’s now fashionable to predict “stability” — a word that suggests no idea at all as to what’s going on.

Add to all these hoary perceptions the instant analysis of North Korea as “a failed state” that exists on life-support from China, and you pretty well know all that anyone has to say about the place.

Into this morass of ignorance steps Kim Jong Nam, firing off verbal salvos that are wildly unpredictable, not to mention improbable. Isn’t he risking his neck with casually dubious comments to journalists who find him from time to time near his home in the gambling enclave of Macau?

Could it be that one day we’ll wake up to find that Jong Nam has been mysteriously snuffed out like a few others who’ve dared to spill the regime’s “secrets” after fleeing for sanctuary elsewhere?

Jong Nam’s case, though, is indeed special — he’s got the Chinese on his side. They may not appreciate his odd deprecatory comments to Japanese reporters who’ve found him in the casinos, on the street, even on one occasion in a Macau bus, but last thing they want is the embarrassment of a high-profile killing on their turf.

The notion of getting rid of Kim Jong Nam, however, is not new.

After his mother, actress Song Hye Rim, died in a hospital in Moscow in 2002, the lady who should theoretically have been his stepmother, Ko Yong Hui, is believed to have thought it would be a good idea if Jong Nam just “disappeared” during travels to Europe.

Ko, of course, was pressing for the succession of one of the two sons she had during her relationship, never quite a marriage, with Kim Jong Il, before she too died overseas — of cancer in Paris in 2004.

By that time Kim Jong Nam had more or less lost out thanks to his profligate lifestyle, revealed in 2001 when he was caught trying to enter Japan through Tokyo’s Narita airport carrying a phony Dominican passport. He only wanted, he said, to take his 4-year-old son to Disneyland, but he never really lived down that incident.

More or less in exile, however, Jong Nam poses a threat that North Korea’s paranoid regime doesn’t need. The regime by now has mentioned Ko, who was born in Japan, a member of a North Korean dance troupe when Kim Jong Il first spotted her, as Kim Jong Un’s mother.

Memories of Jong Nam’s late mother have faded into oblivion, but her only son lives on as a persistent critic who might some day want to be a contender for power.

North Korea’s public-relations machine has no problem denouncing South Korean “puppets,” promising “punishment” for any and all of them and spewing out one unlikely tale after another about Kim Jong Un’s prowess.

By now the North even has a sure avenue to foreign audiences through a newly opened Associated Press “bureau” in Pyongyang staffed by two North Koreans.

Presumably they’ve both been well briefed by their North Korean handlers on just what they can file. Assuming they would like to avoid consignment to the gulag, they can be counted on to report statements and editorials as if they were news while ignoring anything to do with the inner struggle for power, much less, horrors, horrendous human-rights abuses that North Korea always denies.

Not so Kim Jong Nam. With his views now on the record, he’s emerged as a font of wisdom and insight into his late father’s fiefdom. His comments so far have been on target — as damaging as the missiles that North Korea continues to test-fire in a show of power that hides any explosions beneath the surface.

The character who takes the reader on this wrenching journey and gives the book its title, Jun Do, is not an orphan despite having grown up in an orphanage in the provincial town of Chongjin. His mother — a beautiful singer who, like all beautiful women, we are told, got “shipped off to Pyongyang” — is simply gone, leaving his father, the Orphan Master, a devastated and none-to-compassionate man. The orphans, like the beautiful women, are little more than a commodity (if a far less valuable one), and are sold off to work at hazardous factory jobs. The resourceful Jun Do survives this Dickensian situation and lands in the army. First, he learns to fight in the pitch-dark tunnels under the border with South Korea. Then he becomes part of a seagoing team of military kidnappers who specialize in abducting foreigners with desirable talents from beaches and piers.

In the course of the novel’s first half, Jun Do will go from unwanted urchin to ad hoc envoy by way of a surveillance station concealed on a fishing boat. He even finds himself in Texas for a few days, acting as translator for a government minister (who’s actually a driver pretending to be the minister). But wherever he is, Jun Do’s fate is precarious. At any moment, anybody’s life can take a catastrophic turn. If your shipmate defects, the rest of the crew gets sent to prison camps. If your boat gets boarded by a bunch of frisky American soldiers and they make off with your obligatory photograph of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il as a souvenir, you get sent to a prison camp. If you fail in the daft diplomatic mission to which you have been detailed, you get sent to a prison camp. If you manage to avoid the prison camps long enough to grow old, the regime will supposedly send you to a retirement village on a famously beautiful beach, but when Jun Do’s ship cruises past the area one day, its white sands are ominously empty.

You can probably guess where Jun Do ends up, and then, roughly in the novel’s middle, the book switches from a straightforward, third-person narrative to a braid of very different voices. There’s a variation on the jingoistic broadcasts every North Korean citizen is forced to listen to from dawn to dusk and the first-person recollections of a nameless interrogator trying to crack a particularly tough case. The interrogator’s subject has brazenly impersonated a celebrated national hero (and possible rival of the Dear Leader) to the extent of moving in with the man’s wife, North Korea’s most beloved movie star.

The impostor is Jun Do — and he isn’t. “For us,” a seasoned operator tells Jun Do before his transformation, “the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” Since the Dear Leader chooses to behave as if the impostor really is Commander Ga, then, for the time being, that’s who he is. The novel itself becomes a maze of false fronts and hidden truths — the very stuff of survival in a society based on deprivation, arbitrary cruelty and lies.

“There is a talk that every father has with his son,” explains the interrogator, “in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family … We must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.” If I ever have to denounce you or you have to denounce me, the man is saying, remember that it’s not the real you or me who does this.

The forlorn hope that love can persist in such circumstances is belied by the interrogator’s own parents, who fear him and never speak an unguarded word in his presence. He becomes fascinated with “Commander Ga,” who seems to have found genuine love with the actress. Meanwhile, the loudspeaker voice carries on, spinning yet another version of the novel’s events, full of all the preposterous propaganda of a dictatorship built around a cult of personality. Is it even possible to possess an identity — let alone to know intimacy — in such a world, where everyone is desperately pretending to be what everyone else knows they are not? A world where, with the slightest misstep, the people you love can be swallowed up by the gulag, disappearing forever? The first time Jun Do sees an American telephone book he’s dumbstruck at the realization that “you could look up anyone and seek them out.”

Although “The Orphan Master’s Son” spins itself into a web of uncertainties, the novel never scatters, meanders or lapses into arty opacity. Johnson makes a story about the instability of stories into an impressively coherent and arresting narrative. The main character, whoever he is, moves ever closer to true selfhood, which is, for him, the equivalent of doom; yet it’s a joyful doom, as strange as that may sound. From peripheral sources, it’s clear that Johnson spent years on the research for this novel — which extended to a trip to North Korea itself — and this shows in the fine texture of his observation. But the real marvel of “The Orphan Master’s Son” is its imaginative depth and breadth, something that absolutely can’t be faked. Which may be why there are no real novelists in North Korea.