North Korea’s approach to marketing itself to foreign visitors has often been contradictory, the product of competing bureaucracies and the changing whims of the leadership. As in many other fields, tourism is affected by the actions of several different branches of government, with incompatible policies and changes in the composition of the leadership often appearing to create massive internal confusion.

The output of the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) is a good example of this. It proudly and faithfully reports even the most banal signs of appreciation from the outside world (“Greetings to Kim Jong Un from Mexican Political