“[W]e traveled with poison, so that if we were caught, we’d take it and kill ourselves.”

Sue Lloyd-Roberts continues her look at North Korea by interviewing refugees in Seoul and asking them about the images her minders allowed her to film. At 13:00, Lloyd-Roberts interviews Young Howard, a/k/a Ha Tae Kyung, the founder of Open Radio. She even sits in as he interviews a source by telephone. She seems to presume (incorrectly) that Ha is North Korean, but in fact, he’s a South Korean and a former leftist political prisoner. It’s both unsurprising and striking how clearly North Koreans see things in their homeland, in contrast to most South Koreans.

Lloyd-Roberts’s effort to pierce the regime’s facade this way is the mirror image of the controversy between Amnesty International, which tried to do the same, and the W.H.O., which expects us to join it in believing that the regime showed it the true picture of medical care in North Korea. But then, you don’t get the backing of the Chinese government for a high-profile U.N. job by speaking the truths hidden behind the disinformation put out by repressive regimes, and Chan’s background suggests that her acquired talent for willful blindness has been career-enhancing for her.