What do you get the dictator who has everything? Dennis Rodman's weird gifts for Kim Jong-un

As diplomats go, he is perhaps one of the most unusual. Dennis Rodman is back in North Korea in his one-man mission to change the world via his pioneering model of "basketball diplomacy".

The former basketball star, a friend of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, touched down in the reclusive dictatorship on Tuesday, the Daily Beast reports, in a piece headlined: "Dennis Rodman's North Korea trip just saved the world".

How has the American done this? With a unique selection of gifts.

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More precisely, Rodman is handing over a copy of The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump's ghostwritten 1987 bestseller - although the BBC thinks it might be unnecessary.

"Mr Kim has at his disposal ways and means of negotiating which would be unpalatable even to a New York real estate developer," it says. This is the man, after all, allegedly responsible for executing hundreds of people, including members of his family.

Rodman's choice of gift has raised speculation that he could be there as a secret emissary of the government. After all, he's probably the only person in the world who can call both leaders friends, after appearing on Trump's Celebrity Apprentice.

He told CNN he hoped to do "something that's pretty positive" before he boarded a plane bound for the reclusive state.

But sadly, "the State Department has strongly denied that Rodman’s trip is anything other than a private one", the Washington Post reports.

However, Rodman also took with him a mermaid puzzle - and that, the BBC believes, feeds the "Rodman as secret ambassador" theory.

"Either they're both lying, and the mermaid puzzle, ingeniously, once completed, carries a coded message, or they're telling the truth, and one of Dennis Rodman's gifts to the leader of North Korea was a mermaid puzzle," it says.

And finally, there is a copy of Where's Waldo? Totally Essential Travel Collection, the US version of Where's Wally?.

What does this signify? No one has a clue, especially since Kim rarely, if ever, leaves his country.

The Washington Post speculates the puzzle and the Where's Waldo? are for Kim's young daughter, whom Rodman has met. We prefer to think they are for the leader himself.

Oh, and there were some fancy soaps as well, because gift-buying for one of the world's most notorious dictators is apparently similar to finding something for your mother-in-law.