The country is no enigma for Selig Harrison, though. The outspoken scholar and former reporter has visited 11 times since 1972 and regularly interviews powerful North Koreans.

While the United States is perplexed about what it can do to stop North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Harrison believes his contacts in the North have given him the answers.

Harrison sees North Korea as a struggling country that should be pitied, not feared. He says North Korea wants Washington to accept it as a nuclear power; eliminating the weapons would have to follow an improvement in relations.

His critics consider him an apologist for a government that brutalizes its citizens and a mouthpiece for North Korea's anti-American views.

Many lawmakers and U.S. officials take him seriously, however, and supporters praise him as an invaluable link between two wary countries. Few Americans get as close as he to North Korea's leadership. When he returns from the North, Harrison often is called on to brief Congress, scholars and reporters.

Harrison, who runs the Asia program at the Center for International Policy, sees himself as a "journalist in think tank disguise."

"My role is to tell it like it is, which a good journalist should do," Harrison said in an interview in his Washington office.

He believes his extraordinary access allows him to explain "what makes them tick," which is notoriously difficult for Washington to determine.

What North Korea thinks is important because the country of late has conducted nuclear and missile tests and threatened nuclear war on its neighbors and the United States.

Harrison's focus on North Korea began when he was Northeast Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972.

In 1972, Harrison says he and Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times were the first independent American journalists to visit the North since the Korean War. He twice interviewed Kim Il Sung, the country's revered founder _ on the 1972 trip and again in 1994, as a scholar, shortly before Kim died.

Harrison says he gets such rare access because he is honest with North Korean officials and does not twist their words when he returns to the United States. The interviews he had with Kim Il Sung, the most important person in the country's history, also helped cement his role as an American North Korea could talk to.

Official high-level contact between North Korea and the United States is infrequent, and more informal channels often are used. Former President Bill Clinton recently won the release of two imprisoned American reporters during a trip to the North; Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico who has traveled to the North on diplomatic missions, this week hosted North Korean diplomats.

Harrison's comments on the North often infuriate conservatives.

Joshua Stanton, a blogger at One Free Korea, has written: "One can only wonder what about the North Koreans is so believable to Harrison's more credulous side."

Harrison also has been criticized for what some see as the North's habit of using him to try to renegotiate the terms of already settled nuclear agreements with the United States.

After returning from his most recent trip to the North, in January, Harrison offered a suggestion that was at odds with long-standing U.S. policy: with the North demanding recognition as a nuclear weapons state, Washington should refocus its strategy on trying to cap the number of weapons in North Korea's nuclear arsenal.

The Obama administration has made clear that it is not interested in a cap. Washington wants the North first to take irreversible steps toward abandoning its nuclear ambitions, with senior U.S. officials refusing to accept "halfway measures."

Victor Cha, a former U.S. deputy negotiator at North Korean disarmament talks, said in an interview that Harrison and others' trips to the North often result in a public narrative "that all North Korean belligerency is because of U.S. inattention."

That, Cha said, "is a disservice because it doesn't force people" to look closely at North Korean intentions.

A key moment in Harrison's career came during talks on the Clinton administration's "Agreed Framework" with North Korea. Coming amid high tensions between the countries, that 1994 accord froze the North's nuclear facilities but fell apart in 2002, after the Bush administration claimed North Korea had embarked on a secret uranium program.

Harrison's three-hour conversation in 1994 with Kim Il Sung, he said, laid the foundation for a visit by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and for the North's agreement to the freeze.

Bruce Cumings, a North Korea specialist and University of Chicago history professor, writes in his book "Korea's Place in the Sun" that Harrison helped avoid another war by bringing Washington and Pyongyang together.

Harrison, addressing his critics, says: "Everything I've ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I've ever advocated has come to pass."