Jong Il.

This is coolbert:

Visit this web site and read how one journalist put together a story [called a "profile" in this case], on the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

"The Paper Profile

How Peter Maass reported the story of a reclusive dictator."

The journalist Peter Maass was able to amass data on the dictator Kim Jong Il and organize into a "story".

[please do not confuse this Peter Maass with Peter Maas. The latter is a famous author who has written a variety of books on organized crime and figures associated with same. They are not one and same person!]

The story, called a "profile" WAS printed in the New Duranty Times [New York Times].

What Maass did was almost identical to what an intelligence research analyst working for the any one of many U.S. intelligence agencies would have done. Amass a body of data, reports, stories, books, interviews, etc. Extract the relevant material and organize into a cogent form.

Sources mentioned by Maass include:

* People who get quoted in newspapers and go on TV to talk about North Korea.

* A book by Konstantin Pulikovsky. [a Russian official who had been Vladimir Putin’s representative on Kim Jong Il's 2001 rail tour of Russia.]

* The memoir by Hwang Jang Yop. [Kim Jong Il's father's closest advisor for more than thirty years before fleeing North Korea.]

* A book by Choi Eun Hee, a South Korean actress, and Shin Sang Ok, her film-director husband. [both kidnapped by Kim and held captive in North Korea for years before release.]

* An unofficial transcript of meetings between Kim and South Korean media executives that occurred in the year 2000.

From this amount of "background" information, Maass was able to write his story on Kim. Probably an accurate one too.

Maass comments on what is out there and how it can be gotten:

"I thought it would be very hard to get any primary sources on Kim Jong Il," Maass explains. "And it ended up not being easy to get those sources -- I mean, I had to dig around a lot -- but it wasn't great sleuthing."

This sort of stuff can be done. Even by the person who is not an intelligence research analyst. As Maass would say, not easy, but not THAT difficult with some work.

Let me qualify that. The work of a newspaper reporter is quite analogous to the workings of an espionage case officer or an undercover spy. Find sources of information on a subject and develop those sources. That is what Maass did here.

[the various "authorities" on intelligence matters state that a large amount of information they use for analysis is based on what are called "open source material". Stuff that is available for almost anyone to find if they put the time and effort into doing so. And this sort of "stuff" is valuable. But what is most of interest to intelligence agencies is SECRET stuff. "Stuff" not readily available and being kept hidden for whatever reason. Allen Dulles said that about 80 % of what the CIA uses in it's analysis is based on open source material. It is the other 20 % that is of the most interest. The 20 % that spies and intelligence case officers the world over are striving to get their hands on!!]

coolbert.