BEIJING -- The latest astonishing story from North Korea, featuring a spy agency that sent frogmen onto Japanese beaches to kidnap innocent victims, is another chapter in the saga of the highly militarized Hermit Kingdom, where the impelling forces are paranoia, secrecy, firing squads, concentration camps and an all-consuming personality cult.

Foreigners are rarely allowed into North Korea, except on carefully controlled tours. But if the reports filtering out of the reclusive country are true, the revelations of midnight beach abductions in the 1970s and 1980s are just part of a larger pattern of bizarre conduct.

With 1.2 million soldiers in uniform, the fifth-largest army in the world, North Korea has been preparing for war since the last Korean war ended in 1953. It has caused alarm in Japan and the West by developing long-range missiles that raise the threat of strikes as far away as North America.

Life in North Korea is dominated by the needs of the country's military and security apparatus. Even during a desperate famine that brought starvation to as many as three million people in recent years, the regime has been careful to preserve full rations for its troops. In effect, the military has kept the whole country on a war footing for half a century.

Above the military was the guiding hand of former guerrilla commander Kim Il-sung, also known as the Great Leader, the Light of Human Genius and the Summit of Thought, who became a godlike being to his 22 million people. After his death in 1994, absolute power shifted to his son, Kim Jong-il, known as the Dear Leader.

Even then, the personality cult surrounding Kim Il-sung remained so extreme that North Korea's supreme assembly named him "eternal president" in 1998, four years after his death.

"Every year on his birthday, [Kim Il-sung] would send us gift packages of cakes and sweets," recalled Kang Chol-hwan, who grew up in North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s.

"In my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods?"

When they reached the age of 7, children were given uniforms and ranks. They memorized the speeches of the Great Leader and signed up for the Pupils' Red Army, where they practised marching with fake machine guns.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, North Korean security agents fuelled the wartime climate by launching commando raids on the South Korean presidential palace, attacking South Korean government delegations on foreign trips and clashing with the enemy at sea, in addition to the kidnapping missions on Japanese shores.

Domestic agents and informers kept the whole country under tight surveillance. In 1977, at the age of 9, Mr. Kang and his family were arrested and shipped off to Camp 15, at the infamous Yodok concentration camp. They were never given a reason for their arrest, although apparently it had something to do with an outspoken grandfather.

Mr. Kang was a witness to 15 executions at his concentration camp, mostly by firing squad. In his memoir, published last year after his escape to South Korea, he described how the guards stuffed rocks into the mouths of the prisoners to keep them quiet as they were executed.

After two prisoners were hanged for an escape attempt, the other prisoners were ordered to surround the corpses, pick up stones, and hurl them at the dead bodies, shouting "Down with the traitors of the people!"