On Oct. 24, 1995, as a man now known as Kim Dong-sik hiked up a rain-slick mountain road in Buyeo, about 95 miles south of Seoul, he could not shake off a foreboding. He and another North Korean agent had sneaked into South Korea by boat 52 days earlier on a mission to bring home a Communist spy who had been working in the South for 15 years.

A U.S. attempt to smooth relations with Pakistan using a bit of hip-hop diplomacy hit a speed bump Wednesday when the Pakistani military briefly detained an American music group accused of taking photographs of sensitive installations.

The U.S. State Department's Virtual Student Foreign Service is a fledgling effort at harnessing technology to expand and improve American diplomacy. What's most striking about it, though, isn't the technology.