North Korea plays the old 'arrest an American' card Most severe sentence: US citizen Kenneth Bae, who faces 15 years hard labour in a North Korean prison camp. Seoul: By sentencing a US citizen to 15 years hard labour this week for committing hostile acts against North Korea's government, the reclusive state is forcing the US to choose between two equally distasteful options. As it did twice in the past when Americans were held hostage by North Korea, the US could send a former president to win the release of Kenneth Bae, who was convicted and sentenced on Tuesday in Pyongyang. Then, North Korea, as it did before, could advertise such a high-profile visit as a US capitulation before its new young leader, Kim Jong-un, who craves a chance to burnish his profile as a tough anti-American strategist. Or, as its leaders have repeatedly vowed, the US could try to break North Korea's habit of blackmailing its adversaries by ignoring its latest pressure tactic - and allow its citizen to languish in one of the country's infamous prison camps. Under North Korean law, Bae - known in Korea as Pae Jun-ho - should be transferred to a labour camp within 10 days of the ruling. The sentence was announced the same day that joint US-South Korean military drills ended. Analysts say the end of the drills might cause North Korea to tone down its bellicose rhetoric and shift its focus towards drawing the US back to the negotiating table - using, among other things, the plight of Bae as bait. "The timing of the sentencing makes us think that the North is again playing its old card," a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul, Koh Yu-hwan, said. But will the Americans play the same game? If the US sends a former president whenever North Korea holds an American captive, they say it will run out of former presidents. Bae, 44, a Korean-American who ran a tour business out of China, was arrested in the special economic zone of Rason in north-eastern North Korea in November after leading a group of businessmen from Yanji, China. South Korean human rights advocates said Bae was interested in helping orphans in the North and that security officers there may have been offended by pictures of orphans Bae had taken and stored in his computer. Bae is at least the sixth American detained in North Korea since 2009, and his punishment was the most severe. The others were eventually deported or released. Most, like Bae, were devout Christians. Pyongyang has been particularly angered by Christian activists' campaigning to bring outside news and Bibles into the isolated country, using balloons and people smugglers. In 2009 two US journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested after North Korea said they had entered illegally and committed "hostile acts." They were sentenced to 12 years of hard labour but were released five months later, when former president Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang. In 2010, another American, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, was arrested and sentenced to eight years of hard labour, also for illegal entry and "hostile acts." He was freed when former president Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang to ask for his release and, according to North Korea, "apologised" for the man's crime.