PROPAGANDA : In North Korea, ‘Facts’ Look a Lot Like Fiction : Information-gathering in the secretive Communist nation is a surreal exercise in sifting black from gray.

North Koreans may be facing a shortage of fuel, food and foreign exchange, but the scarcest commodity of all here is undoubtedly information.

In this secretive, isolated Communist nation, the simple task of gathering facts can become a surreal exercise in sifting black from gray; in getting different answers to the same question in one day; in seeing that surface reality can be an elaborate fabrication; in trusting nothing from anyone.

Take, for instance, the story of the Tong Jil Apartments. Pyongyang officials say the 50,000 apartments in the central city were built in record time by “heroic workers of Korea” and “given by Great Leader Kim Il Sung to his beloved people.” About 30,000 families are said to have moved in on Kim’s 80th birthday on April 15.

The white concrete apartments look shiny and new from the outside.

But venture inside. Enter the third-floor home of Lee Kyung Ho, 32. The wallpaper is still wet. There is no electricity and not even a light switch. There is no running water, no trace of food. The elevators don’t work.

Although it seems as if Lee might have been hastily brought in to pose as a tenant, he insists he and his wife moved in two weeks ago. Yet he has trouble remembering his parents’ age, the number of his children and the date of his wedding. Is the scene real? How to know?

In the northern port city of Chongjin, a procession of 150 foreign business people, scholars and journalists driving down the main road in six buses saw well-scrubbed children in uniform, men in suits, women in skirts; all strolled about, smiling and waving.

But look closely through the dirty windows of tenement buildings lining the street. Raggedy-looking children and elderly people in T-shirts press against the glass and somberly watch the procession. Others peer over village walls, and a few crouch on clay rooftops.

Could the people on the street have been placed there in their Sunday best, instructed to wave and appear happy?

Official explanations are equally confusing. North Korea’s foreign debt, the subject of much speculation, is pegged at $4 billion by Japanese trading houses; it is $6 billion in Western press reports. At a news conference in Pyongyang, Deputy Prime Minister Kim Tal Hyon first said the sum is $10 billion; 30 minutes later, he changed the figure to $1 billion.

Two of Pyongyang’s biggest mysteries that preoccupy foreigners draw, as expected, various explanations.

Why are there so few bicycles? Because Kim Il Sung went to Beijing and hated the glut of bikes there, one foreign diplomat said. To limit people’s mobility, another said. Because they are too expensive--nearly two months’ worth of wages--a foreign aid worker said. Because the public transportation system is good enough, shop owner Chang Hye Suk said.

And why has Pyongyang’s most stunning structure, a pyramid-shaped 105-story hotel and office building, sat for years, skeletal and incomplete?

The hotel was reportedly ordered up by Kim Jong Il--Kim Il Sung’s son and heir apparent--to eclipse South Korea’s highest structure. It was begun in 1988. One foreign industrialist said the North Koreans told him it was structurally unsound. But Pyongyang officials laugh that off, saying they are awaiting only imports of smoked glass to finish the exterior.

Oppressed by the secrecy, foreigners tend to huddle in hotel tearooms, trading information in whispered tones, making instant allies of Americans, Asians, Europeans. “They do everything to keep us foreigners isolated, especially from foreign journalists,” one diplomat said.

But if foreigners have sources for obtaining information, not so for the local populace. Blissfully unaware of the world beyond them, most North Koreans seem to believe the state slogan, “There Is No Shade in Our Country, Only the Shine of the Sky.”

At Pyongyang’s top high school, electronics student Tak Kwang Song, 17, was asked when North Korea will catch up economically with the south, where the per capita gross national product is five times higher. Tak blinked in disbelief.

“I think you are informed that our country is more underdeveloped than South Korea,” he said, “but that is not the case.”