LOS ANGELES — You will never get anything of significance done with North Korea unless you go right to the top. The essence of its political culture is a feral fusion of Asian family values ("father knows best") with rigid communist hierarchy.
At international conferences, midlevel North Korean operatives are usually too scared to negotiate anything other than the hotel bar bill. They fear deviating even one inch from the party line. That line — in tone and in content — is set by one to three or four big tunas in Pyongyang.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton met with Pyongyang's biggest — if aging — tuna last week and got to leave with a prize: two jailed celebrity American journalists. Back in March they had been grabbed by North Korean border guards, taken back to the capital, charged and convicted of violating national-security law, and sentenced to a dozen years of hard labor.