North Korea lets in a few thousand foreign tourists every year on tightly controlled, and expensive, guided tours. But over the decades a handful of foreigners have come a cropper after entering by more unconventional routes.

A handful of US soldiers defected during the Cold War, including a sergeant named Charles Jenkins who deserted on impulse in 1965 and immediately regretted it. Over the next four decades, he was frequently beaten, forced to memorise chunks of North Korean ideology, played the part of an evil American in propaganda films, and married a Japanese woman who had been abducted by North Korean spies. Both of them were eventually released and today they live peacefully in Japan with their two children.

In 1966, a Venezuelan communist poet named Ali Lameda went to Pyongyang to help translate the works of the country’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, into Spanish. He made the mistake of explaining to his North Korean comrades how ridiculously exaggerated their propaganda was – he ended up spending six years in prison before being sent home. A French translator, Jacques Sedillot, who was arrested at the same time, died in Pyongyang after being released from prison.

An American army helicopter pilot accidentally strayed from South to North Korea in 1994; after signing an apology he was released after just 13 days.

The last American to enter uninvited was a troubled young man named Evan Carl Hunziker, who swam across the river dividing the country from China while drunk and remained there for five weeks. He was only released after Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico who was then a US Congressman, travelled to North Korea with a $5,000 “accommodation fee”. Mr Hunziker shot himself dead a month later after falling into depression.

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