Crew members of the USS Pueblo, an intelligence-gathering ship captured Jan. 23, 1968 by North Korean gunboats in international waters near Wonsan, pose for a photo delivered to a relative of one of the crewmen.

Kim Il Sung's attempts at developing heavy industry and Stalinist economic reordering — farmers, for example, were forced to give up their land and join "cooperatives" and "socialist villages" — produced little but hardship.

The one major growth industry was the dictator's cult of personality, which North Korea developed to extremes that surpassed even the idolatry of Stalin and Mao. Kim's World War II exploits as an anti-Japanese guerilla were burnished into resplendent, if fanciful, myths. In 1962, a party congress endorsed Kim Il-Sung-chui — "Kim Il-Sungism" — as the definitive interpretation of Marxist theory, as it applied to Korea. A key part of that philosophy was the concept of chuch'e, a national identity built upon self-reliance — no doubt meant to keep North Koreans from thinking about the humbling reality that their impoverished nation had to import fuel, grain and machinery and was heavily dependent upon Soviet and Chinese aid.

As its patrons became increasingly bitter rivals for supremacy in the communist world in the mid-1960s, North Korea found itself caught in the middle. Economic assistance from the two giants declined sharply, and North Koreans had to struggle harder and harder to survive.

Kim's apparent strategy to keep his society unified was to stir up patriotic fervor by causing international tensions. In 1968, he seized a U.S. intelligence ship, the Pueblo, which the Americans insisted was in international waters off the Korean coast, and held its captain and crew captive for a year. He finally agreed to release them after the United States agreed to issue a written apology.

It mattered little that the Americans openly proclaimed that the apology was meaningless and offered only to obtain the prisoners' freedom. Kim could claim to his people that he had humbled a superpower. That same year, he sent a team of assassins on an unsuccessful mission to kill then-South Korean president Chung Park Hee. The team actually got within 1,000 yards of the Blue House, the president's official residence, before they were repulsed.