The North has said little about its reasons for expelling Private King. But several experts on the isolated country said it boiled down to this: Times have changed, and North Korea is now more likely to see an American deserter as a burden than as a benefit, unless the defector is a high-profile person privy to secret information. Mr. King, to Pyongyang, is a low-value asset, said Lee Sung-Yoon, a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington who has written a book about the North.
But while the North still makes such movies, its nuclear arsenal has become a vastly more important domestic propaganda tool for Mr. Kim, said Cheong Seong-gol, president of the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government think tank in Seoul.
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]