Imagine having all of that happen to you over a simple poster on a wall / A DEEP DIVE INTO NORTH KOREA EP 4 #story #mystery #History #education

This is real security camera footage from inside a hotel in North Korea. The government claims the person you're watching is an American college student on vacation, pulling a propaganda poster off the wall. This blurry clip is at the center of one of the darkest stories to ever come out of this country. But to understand what happened to him, you first need to understand how a vacation in North Korea even worked. Welcome to episode 4 of A Deep Dive in North Korea. Until a few years ago, the world's most closed country actually had a tourism industry. You could go to small agencies mostly around China that sold group tours. With it, you'd get a flight or an overnight train from Beijing a few days inside for a couple thousand dollars. But from the second you arrived, the rules took over. Government Minder's went everywhere with you. We are talking from breakfast to bedtime. You stayed in an approved hotel and the most famous one sits on an island in the middle of Pyongyang's river. Mainly so guests can't wander into the city on their own. You were told what you could photograph. No soldiers, no construction sites, and if you photographed a statue of the leaders, you weren't allowed to crop any part of them out. Visitors were even expected to bow and lay flowers at the giant bronze statues. And tours that went mostly describe the trip as calm, polite, and even fun, as long as you followed every rule. But of course, the tours had a secret. The entire trip's a performance. Tours only visit Pyongyang in a handful of approved sites. And Pyongyang itself is a showcase city. Only the most loyal families are actually allowed to live in the capital. Tourists get taken to model schools where children perform flawless routines. They go to model farms, a spotless hospital, and for years, the metro tour showed only two of the most impressive stations, which sparked the rumor that the rest of the subway didn't even exist. Visitors describe department stores as being fully stocked with products, ones that nobody was actually allowed to buy. It's like propaganda village just scaled up to an entire city. In December of 2015, a 21-year-old college student from Ohio looked to one of those tours. His name was Otto Warmbier. He was a university Virginia student on a five-day New Year's trip. And that island hotel is where he was staying. On his last night, North Korea claims that he went up to a staff-only floor and tried to take a propaganda poster off the wall. That's this footage here. It's so blurry that you can't identify who's in it. The next morning at the airport, Bahto was pulled out of the boarding line and his tour group flew home without him. Two months later, he appears at a televised press conference sobbing. Reading in confession, almost nobody believes he wrote, "I never should have allowed myself to be a lord by the United States Administration to commit a crime in this country." His trial only lasted one hour. His sentence was 15 years of hard labor. Just so you understand what hard labor in North Korea is like, it's a specific kind of hell. Prisoners in these camps work 12 to 16 hours a day in mines, quarries, logging crews, fields, all of it on a starvation ration. There's next to no medical care. Survivors describe beatings for missed work quotas, winters with no heat, and having to eat rats and insects just to stay alive. People regularly do not survive their sentences. That is what a 21-year-old tourist was sentenced to, over a poster on a wall, that for more than a year, nothing. In June of 2017, North Korea suddenly announced it was releasing him on humanitarian grounds. However, when the plane landed in Ohio, his parents ran on board and found their son in a coma. He had been unconscious almost the entire time. Since shortly after his sentencing, North Korea blamed botulism, which is a rare food poisoning that can cause paralysis, plus a sleeping pill. Now American doctors found no botulism, just severe brain damage from lack of oxygen. He never woke up. Otto died just six days after coming home, who's only 22 years old. After that, the United States made it illegal to visit North Korea on a US passport. That ban is still in effect today, and it's been renewed every year since 2017. So is the country even open right now? To almost everybody? No. In January 2020, North Korea sealed its borders completely because of COVID, and kept them sealed longer than any country on earth. Then when they finally cracked the door open, it was for Russian tour groups only. Then in February of 2025, one small border region opened to Western tourists for the first time in five years. It lasted three weeks. A few dozen people got in, then the country shut everything down with no explanation. The strangest detail, North Korea recently built a massive beach resort on its east coast, designed for foreign tourists. It's sitting there right now, almost empty, waiting for tourists that its own country won't let in. Tomorrow is the final episode of this series, and if you want to stay up to date and have that video on your feet automatically, be sure to give this video a like and follow. We're going to be looking at the biggest myths of North Korea, and what happens in this country next? Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll catch you in the next one.