Sitting in the hotel bar the night before the flight to Pyongyang, the painfully sober tour organiser asked whether we had any gifts for the Dear Leader. Well, no – what do you get the dead guy who has everything? It was February 2012, and the isolated North Korean state was reeling from the death of its dictator.
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No matter, our guide said, and proceeded to tell an incredible tale of how in the 1990s a South Korean academic had been friendly to the northern regime for close to two decades before trying to foist an ashtray on Kim Jong-il. It was to be for his use only, the academic stressed, and he wanted to deliver it personally knowing how much the Dear Leader loved to smoke. How honoured he would be to know the ashtray he had taken painstaking care to design would sit on the Dear Leader's desk.
The North Koreans were touched but suspicious, the story went, and had it tested. The ashtray was radioactive, at barely detectable levels, and was designed to assassinate him slowly.
Real or fantastic, this spy thriller intrigue is the standard level of paranoia for the North Korean regime. They have no doubt been on the receiving end of such attempts, although their own atrocities – from a bombing in Yangon to using spies to down a commercial jet and a notorious abduction program – are more egregious.
Waking to read of Kim Jong-nam's death at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, a victim of chemical burns or a poison pen if not both, is both surprising and yet totally in character for the regime.
The eldest son of the late dictator and half-brother of the current leader, he had survived at least one previous attempt on his life after falling out of favour in 2001 with an attempted defection.
Known for frittering away his share of the ill-gotten family fortune in Macau casinos and taking rhetorical potshots at Kim Jong-un, he was a loose end. But, like his uncle and others before him, Kim Jong-nam's death will do nothing to lessen speculation the country is fraying at the edges. Effective at maintaining control through terror, executions with mortar shells are not the actions of a stable, or sane, country. Why kill when you can overkill?
What the precise motivations and meanings of the murder were will be debated, and Pyongyang watchers will analyse whether it came on Kim's orders or was the work of hardliners warning him to keep in line. Like so much about the secretive state, much can be guessed at but little can be certain. The timing, with Kim Jong-il's birthday on Friday usually a time of military parades and fireworks, is intriguing.
Outrageous as carrying out an assassination at a busy airport might be, it's not even the most troubling news from North Korea this week.
On Sunday, the launch of the Pukguksong-2 ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead marked a significant step forward in the country's arms development. Experts point to the shift from liquid to solid fuel as a key step towards intercontinental capability; the missile's range is thought to be about 2000km.
It was a very cold morning on February 16, 2012, when I stood in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun and watched the army march past the fledgling dictator; the APCs which rumbled past were more decrepit than impressive. There weren't even tanks that day. Much has changed. In the five years since, Kim Jong-un appears from the outside to have cemented his position; either that or other forces have cemented him into it. The regime has poured money and manpower into its hardware, with three successful nuclear tests and marked progress in its missile technology.
This would be worrying enough at the best of times, but with the Trump administration off to a rocky start and a president prone to temper tantrums these are not the best of times. Much is made of Kim Jong-un's relative youth, but it's not like there's an adult in the White House at the moment.
For all the threat North Korea poses to the outside world, it should never be forgotten that the regime's greatest crimes are those committed against its own people.
Former High Court judge Michael Kirby's report for the UN highlighted starvation, public executions and the extent of the prison camps. A population almost the same as Australia are living in a totalitarian state, but the hundreds of thousands in the camps endure hellish conditions. That was 2014.
Last month Kirby was reported as saying nothing had changed. That, more than assassinations and internal power struggles, is what should truly shock us.
Michael Ruffles is a Fairfax journalist who has lived and worked in Asia.
