National Geographic Explorer: Inside North Korea

Mysterious.

Terrifying.

North Korea is the most isolated country on Earth.

Kim Jong Il, known as "the Dear Leader", rules as a god-king.

He controls the world's fourth largest army

and plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Now, we'll penetrate North Korea

with a man on a mission to help the blind see.

We'll find a world of absolute conformity

full of government minders.

Tomorrow you are going out of our country.

And unimaginable horrors that people risk their lives to escape.

As we try to capture the real story of life inside North Korea.

1:45 a.m.

The 38th parallel.

Along the border of North and South Korea.

The 148 mile-long border is the most heavily militarized in the world.

This joint South Korean-American platoon

is on constant alert for infiltrators from the North.

Behind these fences, North Korea has a million-man army

and now nuclear weapons which they could use or possibly give away to terrorists.

The soldiers can monitor every sound and movement close to the border.

But what makes this place so dangerous

is the uncertainty of what lies on the other side of the divide.

North Korea is one of the most secretive countries on Earth.

It's regarded as an "intelligence black hole".

But we know some basic facts:

North Korea is roughly the size of Mississippi.

It has 23 million people, a showcase capital Pyongyang,

and is completely controlled by Kim Jong Il.

The Dear Leader is an absolute dictator,

worshipped in a personality cult perhaps more extreme than any other in history.

Kim Jong Il is the son of God in North Korea.

He is the state.

The notion of questioning his ability to rule or what he does doesn't enter into things.

Everyone is trained from birth to love the Dear Leader,

and no outside sources of information are allowed.

Newspapers and television are controlled by the state.

There's no Internet, cell phones have been banned,

and many don't even know a man has walked on the moon.

There's no freedom.

It's a country run on tyranny and dictatorship.

I don't think anyone can understand North Korea

until they experience it.

North Korea is known as the Hermit Kingdom

because of its extreme isolation from the rest of the world.

But on the other side of Asia

one man is literally planning to bring light to the darkness of North Korea.

Nepalese eye surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit

travels the world setting up eye clinics in developing countries.

Dubbed a "miracle doctor" by the media,

Ruit trains local doctors in inexpensive and effective treatments for cataracts.

North Korea may be his biggest challenge yet.

Thousands of people go blind,

due to a lack of even the most basic medical facilities.

The annual number of surgeries performed is just, just very little

and the blindness magnitude is one of the highest in the world.

Ruit plans to travel from Nepal to North Korea

to do more than 1000 surgeries in less than 10 days.

His mission is purely humanitarian.

But what the North Koreans don't know is that our camera crew is going with him.

- So what do you think of the cameras so far, Dr. Ruit?

I think it's big.

You think these cameras are big?

Yes, it's big.

Our camera crew is posing as members of Dr. Ruit's medical team.

We're going to document his work, and show the world what life is like inside North Korea.

This meeting in a Katmandu hotel room will be the last time our team can converse in private.

- So there will be a North Korean man traveling with us the entire time?

Yes.

From here to Pyongyang?

- From here to Pyongyang and back to Katmandu.

North Korean minders will meet us in Nepal and monitor every step until the trip is over.

Doctor Ruit knows our South African camera man Bryan and I will be watched very carefully.

Do you think Bryan and I will be followed?

I am sure.

And he's concerned that the cameras will attract too much attention as we enter the country.

We can put the camera down there.

And wants to pack them more carefully,

buried beneath the medical equipment.

Okay, and pack it with linens.

At the Katmandu Airport, a North Korean official checks our luggage.

And Dr. Ruit's plan for packing our cameras seems to work.

Everything's okay with the luggage.

Two North Korean minders are already keeping an eye on things.

And our team is on edge as we wait for our flight.

All of us will be watched very carefully.

I think you should shut the camera down now.

After hours in the air, we steal these shots as we approach North Korea.

Normally Americans are not welcome here.

And I'm told I'll be the only one in the entire country.

North Korean animosity toward the U.S. hasn't changed since the Korean War

more than a half century ago.

They still view us as imperialists

and hold us responsible for dividing the country between North and South.

On the ground, we get our first glimpses of the capital, Pyongyang

and shoot undercover footage.

No easy task with minders in the car.

We pass 12 lane highways with hardly any cars.

And see images of the Great Leader everywhere.

Pyongyang is a city of the relatively privileged:

The government rewards strong supporters by letting them live here.

And unless you're a high ranking official,

you need a permit to travel anywhere in the country.

They've seized our cell phones.

Immediately, there's a feeling of being completely cut off from the outside world.

At the hospital, hundreds of blind people have already gathered for surgery.

Since the North Koreans know we're documenting Dr. Ruit's medical procedures,

we're allowed to shoot inside.

Hopefully, this will let us see past the propaganda that's usually presented to outsiders.

This hospital is probably as fancy as it gets in North Korea.

Most of this cutting edge equipment was donated by other countries,

but few doctors know how to use it.

This one is from America. Iris.

The government has let Dr. Ruit and his team come

because it's a way for Kim Jong il to get services to his people.

Our team has had to bring most of our equipment and supplies with us.

And because blackouts are common, even here in the capital,

we've brought our own generator for power.

We can only stay for 10 days,

but in that time, Dr. Ruit hopes to conduct more than 1000 operations to help the blind see.

And if the mission's to be a true success,

he'll train North Korean surgeons to carry on his work after we leave.

With such a poor quality of surgery which is performed,

we need to do a lot of training programs.

While we're anxious to get to work,

first our minders want to take us to see their version of North Korea.

We're starting to get a sense of what it's like to be trapped under the iron grip of Kim Jong Il.

At our hotel, all of the books are by one author,

Kim Jong Il's father, the founder of North Korea, Kim Il Sung.

I hope we can see what life's really like here,

but Kim Jong Il controls everything.

And the rare times that he's granted foreigners access,

they've only been shown idealized versions of the country.

Like in this Dutch documentary called "A day in the Life".

In this scene, a mother sings nursery rhymes as she walks her child to school.

Sing along:

The pathetic Americans kneel on the ground.

They beg for mercy.

Then she goes to work at the garment factory.

It's a worker's paradise.

We wish to follow our infinitely good hearted

comrade Kim Jong Il for eternity, and honor him.

Finally, she returns home to a lavish meal.

Try some pancake. And a little kimchi.

You should eat this pancake with the soy sauce.

The film shows only the cheerful facade,

because here, image matters.

And North Korea goes to its extremes to show its best face to the outside world.

From North Korea you can see the South Korean border village of Tae Sung Dong

It has a 328 foot tall flagpole towering over it.

But just 1.5 mile across the border,

the North Korean village of Kaesong Dong, was not to be out-done.

They built a flagpole 525 feet high, the tallest in the world.

And the town itself is not what it might appear.

In this propaganda village, most of the buildings are merely facades.

Hollow on the inside,

They were built to entice South Koreans to defect to the paradise in the North.

It’s a fitting metaphor.

In North Korea, thing aren't necessarily what they seem.

After letting us shoot inside the hospital for days,

our minders take us for a walk in a park and allow us to bring our cameras.

Our cameraman comes across a bench.

So why is it in a glass box?

Sorry?

Why is it in a glass box?

Our people want to preserve, no damage.

Oh, yes.

It's a special bench sat upon by none other than Kim Il Sung himself.

That's cool, Mr. Park. Very cool.

Back on the streets of Pyongyang,

our cameraman wants to take a photograph of a statue of the Great Leader.

It's huge, so he lies on the ground to make it fit in his shot.

But the minder lets us know this is a mistake.

A big one.

No.

There is no one, no foreigner, who just lie down

in front of our Great Leader's statue.

I'm afraid.

Tomorrow, you are going out of our country.

The minder doesn't follow through on his threat to kick us out of the country.

We have the Great Leader in my heart.

In our heart!

But it's clear that antagonism still exists between North Koreans and outsiders,

more than 50 years after the fighting ended.

In 1910, Korea was colonized by Japan.

The brutal occupation ended more than 1000 years of Korea's reign asa sovereign nation,

and was a major source of shame.

Japan lost Korea in World War II

and the country was split between the American-backed South

and the Russian-backed communist North, led by a young rebel named Kim Il Sung.

In 1950, Kim Il Sung invaded the South to unify the country,

and the U.S. opposed Communist expansion at all costs.

As many as four million people died in the Korean War,

which included some of the most brutal warfare the world has known.

In a four-month period alone, the U.S. dropped nearly one million gallons of napalm.

18 of 22 major cities in North Korea were at least half obliterated.

In 1953, after three years of fighting,

Korea remained divided in almost exactly the same place as it had been before the war began,

the 38th parallel.