Was it Kim Jong-il? Or was it a fake North Korean leader who entertained Bill Clinton on that mission to Pyongyang to retrieve the two imprisoned American journalists?

In the absence of fact, the Hermit Kingdom has long been a free-fire zone for outlandish rumour. And they got more outlandish than ever after Kim reputedly suffered a stroke in August 2008. Kim was variously said to be close to death, about to be toppled by a coup, or fixing the succession for his youngest son. Or was he someone else?

The mainstay of the Kim-is-fake cottage industry is a Japanese university professor called Toshimitsu Shigemura, who once claimed that the real Kim died in 2003, and that everything since has been make-believe. One Kim, he maintains, even flatly confessed to a Japanese visitor, "I am a double".

The Clinton visit in August had Shigemura's alarm bells ringing again, when the former US president was pictured alongside a far healthier-looking Kim than the wan and feeble Great Leader seen after North Korea test-fired a long range missile on 5 April 2009.

"They were totally different people," Shigemura asserted to the Christian Science Monitor last week.

Most experts can't quite believe North Korea would have sent out a bogus Kim to spend more than three hours in Bill Clinton's company, including what the North Korean official media called 75 minutes of "exhaustive" private talks.

But evidence that he sometimes uses doubles is strong. Did the man who reportedly had a stroke 14 months ago really make 122 visits this year to factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest?

A double is "possible", Choi Jin-Wook, a specialist at the Korea Institute of National Reunification told the Monitor. "These dictators always need lookalikes for national security reasons. Kim Jong-il is giving 'on the spot guidance' too often for his health."

Fakery is nothing new for totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union was doctoring photos from its very earliest days. Saddam Hussein is known to have made much use of doubles; so too, it is said (albeit on somewhat flimsier evidence), did Hitler and Stalin.

And what ruler would not use doubles on occasion if they had the chance? Who wants to attend the boring factory ribbon-cuttings and conferences a democratically elected leader must endure? How nice to be able to send a lookalike and focus on things that really matter, such as grooming one's son as successor.