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Late one night this summer, an anonymous North Korean slipped across the Tumen River into China. He risked death if collared — but so do all of the desperate souls trying to escape the world's last Stalinist hellhole. What distinguished this man from his compatriots — dozens get across the border every month — was an incredibly rare item that he had stashed in his luggage: a phone book available only to high-ranking North Korean officials.

The identity of the escapee has not been disclosed; it's also unclear how the smuggled phone book ended up in Japan. But one thing is certain about the 373-page, dog-eared volume with 50,000 names and numbers, a copy of which was obtained by TIME: since its arrival in Japan some five weeks ago, it has been treated by North Korea watchers as a combination of the Rosetta Stone and Enigma, the machine used by the Nazis to encode messages during World War II. "It's amazing that a phone book should offer important insights into the nature of any government on the face of the earth today," says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. "But that tells you how successfully the North Korean leadership has suppressed information that might allow outsiders to draw an independent assessment of it." Kim Choong Nam, a North Korea specialist at the East-West Center, a think tank in Hawaii, agrees: "This phone book gives us the best picture yet of how North Korea works."

Can a mere phone directory really shed light on the most shadowy corner of the so-called Axis of Evil? There is a precedent: four years ago, a North Korean dissident based in China sneaked home to shoot film of a farmers' market, and the tape wound up in Japan. At first, it got little attention. But after intelligence agencies finished studying it they reached a startling conclusion: Pyongyang had lost faith in central planning and was cautiously embracing capitalism. Indeed, this summer, Pyongyang finally announced a raft of market-based economic reforms.

The purloined phone book was apparently printed in 1995. And yet a Japanese academic who has scrutinized it over the past month contends that it is of even greater significance than the video. The very fact that it was smuggled out suggests dissent at the pinnacle of North Korean society, says the academic, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution from North Korean agents: "The phone book can only have come from somebody within the establishment — and someone opposed to it."

Early analysis suggests there is plenty of raw intelligence to be found in the book. For one thing, it provides an intriguing glimpse into some of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's methods of controlling his people. His government runs informant hotlines that remain open day and night in case snitches want to rat out their neighbors or colleagues. According to the academic's analysis, the hotline can be reached by dialing local area codes and then 82. The book also suggests that the ruling party has a previously unknown outlet for its relentless propaganda: cable television. Most important, the book provides a comprehensive listing of government ministries, intelligence bureaus, and some military offices — precisely the kind of information outside intelligence agencies have long been denied. There are 18 pages in the Pyongyang section devoted to government offices — a sign that power is highly centralized in North Korea and that the nation's bloated bureaucracy is alive and well, even if its economy is dying. (Restaurants fill only one page.)

One of the first things the Japanese academics examining the phone book did was to start dialing numbers to North Korea's Elite haunts. In most cases, they found the numbers couldn't be dialed from overseas. But even when they got through, hard-nosed operators quickly brush-ed them off every time.

North Korea watchers say it could take months to finish wringing the phone book for information. But already they hope for another refugee to flee with a more recent edition. "If we have ones from different years," says Kim at Hawaii's East-West Center, "we can see whether North Korea is changing." One thing they have not found is Kim Jong Il's direct line. He is unlisted.

• Velisarios Kattoulas/Tokyo
• A smuggled phone book sheds rare light on North Korea's secret workings