By Tom Quigg

For The Daily World

If you live on Earth, you have to be asking yourself what is causing the craziness between the United States and North Korea. Why is President Donald Trump calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “little rocket man”? Why is Kim calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard”?

An expert on the subject is author and journalist Blaine Harden, a 1970 graduate of Weatherwax (Aberdeen) High School. In a recent article in The New York Times titled “Rocket Man Knows Better,” Harden explains why “two neophyte leaders with strange hair and thin skins are insulting each other in bizarre ways.”

In Harden’s three recent books on North Korea — the newest, “King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea,” comes out today — he explains the origins of a crisis that is now threatening the United States with a possible nuclear missile strike.

Harden, 65, was in seventh grade when his family moved to Aberdeen. His father, a welder, had been working at Grand Coulee Dam and moved to the Harbor to work at the Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier pulp mills.

His family lived in a house behind the Aberdeen YMCA. This was handy, since he loved basketball and played there nearly every night. One of his memories was shooting his bolt-action .22-caliber rifle in the hills behind Aberdeen with his friend Ted Hackstadt. He also was a catcher in Babe Ruth baseball, playing for a team sponsored by Bigelow Chevrolet.

His interest in writing came later. He credits his high school English teacher, Gary Gibson, for pushing him to read serious books. He also recalls getting roughed up by other students because he expressed himself a lot in class. It was his ability to express himself that earned him the right in 1969 to represent Aberdeen at Boys State, which was held that year at Gonzaga University.

The day after he graduated high school, Harden left Aberdeen. His father had taken a job back at Grand Coulee Dam. That fall he enrolled in Gonzaga, which he says was the “only college I’d ever visited.” There, he roomed with Jim Solan of Aberdeen, a former baseball teammate. Eddy Logue from Hoquiam was in the same dorm, and the three became fast friends.

Logue still recalls the “brilliant way Blaine looked at things, that was unlike everyone else.” He also remembers his friend’s sharp sense of humor and way with words.

After Gonzaga, Harden studied journalism at Syracuse University, getting a master’s degree and establishing a contact that would lead to his career as a foreign correspondent and author. He took a class from Howard Simons, managing editor of the Washington Post, who had come to Syracuse as a visiting professor. Simons helped lead the Post’s reporting on the Watergate scandal, and Harden desperately wanted to work for the newspaper. He devoted all his time to Simons’ class, ignoring all the others.

In 1976 Simons offered him a job, first at the Post-owned Trenton Times in New Jersey, and two years later at the Post in Washington, D.C. So began a 28-year, on-and-off career with the Post. The four off years were at The New York Times, where he served as national correspondent and writer for the Times magazine.

His Washington Post career included assignments covering Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkan wars. He also covered presidential politics and served as bureau chief in New York and Seattle. His last assignment for the Post was as East Asia bureau chief based in Tokyo, writing about Japan and the Koreas.

In 2010, a time when the Post struggled financially because of the internet, Harden took a buy-out and moved his family to Seattle.

He wrote two books during his time at the Post. “Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent” (1990) was based on his reporting in that part of the world. “A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia” (1996) is about the unintended consequences of damming the West’s most powerful river.

From his reporting in Korea, he wrote “Escape for Camp 14” (2012), which became a global best-seller, with more than 500,000 copies printed in 28 languages. It’s the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have been born in a North Korean political prison camp and escape to the West. This book reveals more than you’ve ever heard about human rights abuses in North Korea.

In 2015, “The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot” was released. It’s about the rise of the Kim family dictatorship in North Korea, and a young pilot who escaped the country in a MiG-15 fighter jet and now lives in Florida.

Today, “King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea” is being released.

“It is an untold story about Air Force Major Donald Nichols, who was part Rambo, part Kurtz,” Harden said. “Virtually unsupervised by the U.S. military, Nichols operated in a hidden world of mass executions, torture and severed heads. After 11 extraordinary years, American military authorities spirited Nichols out of Korea in a straitjacket and forced him to undergo months of electroshock in a military hospital in Florida, where Nichols said government doctors tried to ‘erase’ his brain.”

If you like spies, murder and intrigue, this book promises to have it all.

Harden’s formative years on the Harbor may have had something to do with his ability to express his thoughts, as Logue puts it, “in such a brilliant way.”

“King of Spies” is available at all major booksellers.

Blaine Harden’s latest book, “King of Spies,” became available today at all major booksellers.