I might as well have J-O-U-R-N-A-L-I-S-T tattooed on my forehead, or at least stitched to the back of my shirt. And then there’s the question of my nationality. It must be the way I walk.

Four of us took part in a mini-invasion of journalists into North Korea last week.

We all had independently made arrangements to travel to North Korea. It involved a bizarre assortment of contacts, involving a Russian in Australia, an American-Korean with good contacts in North Korea, and consular officials at the North Korean mission in Shenyang, the large city near the North Korean border.

I won’t go into details about how the visa was obtained. Anybody can Google and find tour agents offering trips to the DPRK. But going as a journalist is a bit trickier. For North Koreans, we Western journalists are part of an Axis of Evil.

So when we arrived in Shenyang to pick up our visas, we are told the following: You will go in undercover. The North Korean Foreign Ministry knows you are journalists and has granted you visas but the more conservative national security agency doesn’t know. So don’t tell anybody you are a journalist.

After a few hours in Pyongyang, our tour guides/minders begin to get suspicious. One of us is a professional cameraman from South Africa, with a big tripod to boot. We are all snapping pictures and taking video like crazy. I hear one of the guides ask an English colleague flat out if he was a journalist. No one asked me, thank God. I probably couldn’t have kept a straight face.

But then, all they had to do was look at my clothing. Unwittingly when I packed, I grabbed a white polo shirt. What I had forgotten is that stitched on the back were the words “World Press Briefing.” My journalist colleagues got a good yuck out of that when they saw me parading my vocation on my clothing.

Am I a journalist? Duh!

Then there’s the question of my nationality. When our group arrived at the USS Pueblo (read an earlier story and my story about the seized U.S. spy ship here), we began to joke with the tour guide Li Gyong-il about our different nationalities, which included U.S., England, South Africa and Finland. The South African asked if Ms. Li could tell where he was from, and if he was American. She immediately retorted something like,  “Certainly not, you don’t walk like an American.”

Say what? Do we Americans walk differently? She was rather emphatic that somehow the morphological type and gait of Americans was unique.

On our final morning in Pyongyang, we were caught by surprise when the senior tour manager arrived demanding that we sign a statement that we were not journalists and that none of the images and video we captured were meant to be aired or published. We took one look and declared him crazy, utterly refusing, and after a few minutes he desisted.

Am I a journalist?

Guilty as charged. My shirt does not lie.