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When President Obama secretly sent envoys last summer with a warning against new nuclear and rocket tests and an offer of a thaw in relations, they found themselves meeting only with functionaries, according to current and former government officials. And the few Western diplomats who live in Pyongyang are desperate enough for one-on-one meetings that a British envoy rode on a roller-coaster with Mr. Kim, who shocked the diplomatic corps with invitations to Rungna People's Pleasure Ground. The British foreign office reportedly later explained that any engagement was "vital."

Even Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor who has visited the North eight times, was locked out of a meet and greet with the third Kim in the family dynasty this year when he visited Pyongyang with Google's Eric E. Schmidt, whose Silicon Valley star power was supposed to prove irresistible to the young leader.

Enter Dennis Rodman, the tattooed, lip-studded former N.B.A. star, who not only got a meeting with Mr. Kim, but proclaimed him a "friend for life" while watching a basketball game during which the two conversed in English. (Mr. Kim's English was said to be limited.) In photos that have gone viral, the two men were seen laughing together.

Mr. Rodman made the trip to the North with Vice Media, which is producing an HBO series, but there was no guarantee that Mr. Kim would see him, even though the North Korean leader is known to be a die-hard basketball fan.

Mr. Rodman and his traveling companions are now the only Americans known to have met Mr. Kim, who took power more than a year ago and is facing the prospect of new sanctions from the West over his first, and the country's third, nuclear test. The only high-level officials Mr. Kim has met while in office, experts say, are from China, the nation that keeps North Korea alive with shipments of food and oil.

Why Mr. Rodman? The meeting fit with a longtime pattern of frequently unconventional and always well-choreographed encounters with the Kim family, usually accompanied by a blitz of cold war-style propaganda. "The Pyongyang basketball match was a great PR arena for Kim Jong-un," said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul, who said Mr. Kim could present himself as open-minded to his own people while signaling to the West that he was "not a bad boy" and not as isolated as the United States might wish.

And while the choice of Mr. Rodman might seem odd to some — he is known for cross-dressing and was visiting a conservative nation where long hair for men and short skirts for women are forbidden — Mr. Richardson said in an interview on Friday that it was not surprising given Mr. Kim's love of basketball. (Mr. Richardson said he was asked by North Korean officials in recent months to persuade Michael Jordan to visit.)

Those foreign diplomats posted in Pyongyang rarely get to glimpse the supreme leader. They were invited to the annual New Year's Eve festivities at the palace this year a half-hour before they began, barely giving them enough time to don formal wear.

Even though Mr. Rodman is no diplomat, Mr. Richardson said the visit could be valuable given the lack of good intelligence about Mr. Kim, a man whose nuclear arsenal and visceral anti-Americanism makes him a threat.

"Any information about Kim Jong-un, his mannerisms, his ability to speak English, his personal assessment, is valuable," said Mr. Richardson. "He is their leader, and in our visit, he had lots of support."

The State Department was not nearly so sanguine. Despite questions about the trip and whether the government would debrief Mr. Rodman on his return, a department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, did not suggest a visit to Foggy Bottom was in the offing.

"We haven't been in touch with this party at all," he told reporters Thursday, leaving out Mr. Rodman's name. "If there are Americans who after traveling in North Korea want to get in touch with us or have something to share with us, we take the phone calls."

The Kim dynasty — Kim Jong-un, his father and grandfather, the country's founder — have used foreign visitors for specific goals. Kim Il-sung, the grandfather, entertained former President Jimmy Carter in 1994 when North Korea and the United States appeared at the brink of war over the country's nuclear program; after a boat cruise, the two men struck a deal that averted conflict.

 And in 2010, the North invited Dr. Sigfried S. Hecker, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was shown a secret uranium enrichment plant that American intelligence agencies had missed. That sent two messages: that the North had another pathway to a bomb and that one of the most watched nations on earth could still keep some secrets.

One former visitor said the North was clear about what it wanted from him. Ric Flair, a professional wrestler who traveled to the country in 1995, recalled in an autobiography that his handlers asked him to make a speech at the airport on the way home. "They even had specific points that they expected me to articulate — things like North Korea being a worker's paradise," said Mr. Flair, who added that he decided to speak only in generalities.

In the end, his reticence hardly mattered: he says he was still quoted by the official state news agency as saying that Kim Il-sung, the dictator who had died a year earlier, "had devoted his life to the Korean people's happiness, prosperity and Korean unification."

Vice, a provocative culture magazine that has expanded into videos of dare devil travel, conceived of the basketball public relations stunt to help gain access to the country and in the hopes that Mr. Kim would show up. Having heard of Mr. Kim's basketball passion (said to have been nurtured during his time at a school in Switzerland), Vice asked Mr. Rodman and three Harlem Globetrotters to travel to Pyongyang and asked the Globetrotters to perform in an exhibition game.

For the record, Vice says the 110-to-110 tie between the American players and the North Korean team was the result of a fair battle. Also for the record: a Vice producer named Jason Mojica who was sending Twitter messages from the scene said the banquet that Mr. Kim invited the crew and ballplayers to was an alcohol-fueled affair. "Um... so Kim Jong Un just got the #VICEonHBO crew wasted... no really, that happened."

Vice has said part of the purpose of the trip was "basketball diplomacy," an allusion to the Ping-Pong diplomacy that helped open United States relations with China decades ago. But even when China and the United States were deeply estranged, the Chinese did not threaten a nuclear "holocaust" or release a video showing the American president bathed in flames. North Korea has done both.

But some media critics make the point that it is easier to talk about basketball than the gulags that imprison an estimated 1 in 120 of North Koreans.

"One hopes that — in between the lavish 10-course meals at Kim's palace and 'paying tribute' to the statues of late despots Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il — Rodman may have actually learned something about North Korea and the people he says he loves," Ishaan Tharoor, a Time writer, wrote on time.com.

And that was before Mr. Rodman, who was photographed hugging Mr. Kim, left the country on Friday, according to The Associated Press, with these words of affection for him: "Guess what, I love him. The guy's really awesome."

At a time when the Obama administration is struggling to persuade China to sign on to sanctions over the recent nuclear test, seeing an American star cozying up to Mr. Kim seems reminiscent of high-profile visitors years ago to Saddam Hussein's palace or Muammar el-Qaddafi's tent.

"The image that comes to mind is a guy who's playing with matches," said Victor Cha, the Korea chairman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of "Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia." "He's sitting atop a renegade nuclear weapons state, and the thing that drives him is not the entreaties by China or the United States, it's meeting Dennis Rodman. Maybe we should have given Rodman the denuclearization brief."