I have a question, and I'd welcome any responses from readers who might have an answer. Earlier this month the American evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham and some of his colleagues flew on a chartered Boeing 747 from Charlotte, North Carolina to Pyongyang. It was billed as the first direct flight from the U.S. to the North Korean capital in half a century, and I have no reason to doubt that's true. Grahama's charity, known as Samaritan's Purse, brought 75 tons of humanitarian aid (valued at $8 million) - a response to the recent bout of flooding that has triggered the latest in the North's long string of national catastrophes.

What I'd like to know is whether Graham was combining that entirely worthy gesture with a bit of practical politics. There certainly wouldn't be anything wrong with that, of course. But it's interesting to think about. World leaders (American presidents as well as North Korean communist bosses) often resort to non-diplomatic back channels to broach sensitive topics that they'd like to discuss. The only trick is finding an intermediary that both sides can trust. Now, I have no doubt that George W. Bush - himself a born-again Christian - is entirely in his comfort zone when it comes to using pastors as go-betweens. But Kim Jong Il? Surely he isn't inclined to press the flesh with people who've devoted their lives to spreading the Gospel? After all, his treatment of Christians within his own country doesn't exactly make him look like a friend of the church.

In reality, though, the picture is a lot more complicated. The present North Korean leader's father, Kim Il Sung, was brought up in an observant Christian household, and even played the organ in the local church before ultimately finding his way to a new kind of religion when he discovered revolutionary Marxism-Leninism a few years down the road. That feature of his biography isn't as unusual as it might seem. As we explain in this week's article on North Korea's underground church, evangelical Protestantism swept over Korea in the late 19th century. Before World War II, Pyongyang, of all places, was known as the "Jerusalem of the East" for its role as a focus of Christian education and missionary activity. Billy Graham's future wife, Ruth, even attended Christian boarding school in Pyongyang in the 1930s. Meanwhile, South Korean evangelicals I've spoken with continue to trade rumors of a potential Kim Jong Il successor whose surreptitious Christian beliefs could well transform the country if he ever comes to power. That's probably an illusion, but a pretty revealing one nonetheless.)

All this means that, oddly enough, Christians are a known quantity in the North as well as the South (where around 40% of the population openly practices Christianity today). And that, in turn, may explain why the Kim Family Regime sometimes seems surprisingly happy to welcome Christian aid organizations to the North even when it's giving a hard time to the secular do-gooders of the UN. The Kims may not like having Christians putting on airs at home, but at least they seem to know what the foreign ones are on about. Billy Graham visited Pyongyang twice, in 1992 and 1994, and is said to have put considerable effort into preparing the ground for the ill-fated U.S.-North Korean nuclear agreement in 1994. Some North Korea-watchers have claimed to me that Jimmy Carter's own status as a born-again weighed in his favor when he was trying to negotiate that same deal for the Clinton Administration. Franklin Graham, meanwhile, made his
first visit to Pyongyang in 2000.

All this activity seems especially intriguing when you consider that evangelicals have been behind some of the harshest critiques of North
Korea's dismal human-rights record in recent years. Yet there's a pattern here. Soviet leaders loved grabbing a few headlines with
well-meaning liberal doves who came to call in Moscow, but when it was a matter of actually doing serious business - like signing arms-control deals - they often seemed to prefer hard-core conservatives. Stalin would famously remark that Churchill was the capitalist leader he respected most, for example.

In any case, as the Bush Administration pushes ahead with its diplomatic offensive on North Korea's nuclear program, keep your eyes on evangelicals bearing gifts. Franklin Graham's delegation is said to have held meetings with high-ranking North Korean officials upon arrival in Pyongyang. Probably nothing to it, I guess. Or maybe something?