Chapter Three
All in the Family

A disco ball shimmers from the ceiling. strobe lights flash across the translucent tiles of the dance floor, pulsating to the rhythmic beat of salsa music. No, this is not a scene from the Odyssey nightclub made famous by John Travolta’s gyrating hips in the 1970s movie Saturday Night Fever. It is Banquet Hall Number 8 in Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il partied. In this dance hall, it is said, Kim treated his guests to banquets and burlesque shows. Indeed, on one occasion, according to his former chef who escaped the North, Kim sometimes would indulge in excesses manifesting his total control:

During a banquet one night, a group of live dancers in the entertainment entourage were performing a disco dance. Suddenly, Kim Jong-il ordered, “Take off your clothes!” The girls took off their clothes, but then Kim told them to take it all off. They seemed surprised and could not hide their bewilderment, but they could not object to the Dear Leader’s orders. In awkward embarrassment, they stripped down and continued their performance in the nude. . . . After a while, he turned to his cabinet staff members and instructed them, “You guys dance with them too.” And soon enough I, too, was ordered to dance. However, he cautioned us, “You’ll dance, but you won’t touch. If you touch, you’re thieves.”1

This story is just one of the many that have informed the folklore of the mysterious and eccentric North Korean leadership. There probably is no other leader of a nation-state today that is the butt of more ridicule than Kim Jong-il of North Korea. Students in my classes at Georgetown know Kim best from the hilarious puppet caricatures in the 2004 movie Team America depicting an angry little Kim singing “I’m So Ronery” as he clutches his nuclear bombs. Indeed, Kim has become an integral part of political cartooning in newspapers around the world, imaged in his Mao suits, bouffant hairdo, and elevator shoes.

The silliness sometimes seeps into policy. During a round of Six-Party Talks in Beijing, as we waited for a meeting with the Chinese, we sat in our delegation room in the Diaoyutai complex, which was adjacent to the North Korean delegation room. I glanced over to see members of our delegation huddled around someone’s iPod, giggling loudly. They were watching a scene of Kim Jong-il from the movie Team America, when one of our members, a jaded foreign service officer, thought it would be “funny” to take the iPod into the adjacent room and show it to the North Koreans. We decided against this impromptu introduction to American pop culture, and probably avoided a diplomatic incident. (We did, however, share it with our South Korean allies for a good laugh.)

The jokes about the North Korean leadership, however, fill a black void of reliable information about the successive generations of Kims that have run North Korea. The dearth of understanding would not be so troubling if this country were not a dictatorship with a million-man army, ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons. Adjectives such as “opaque,” “unpredictable,” “irrational,” “reclusive” are often used to describe what we basically know little about. Unlike our knowledge of other world leaders, we have little ground truth about the Kim family. Our intelligence community has less information about the North Korean leadership than that of any other country in the world today. Only one former U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) has met both the dad (Kim Il-sung) and the son (Kim Jong-il). And until this year, no American had ever laid eyes on the grandson (Kim Jong-un), the twentysomething-year-old heir to the throne. The fact that, until late September of 2010, the only picture we had of the grandson, the new leader of the world’s renegade nuclear state, was of him as a grade-schooler is both historically unprecedented and downright frightening.

THE DAD: KIM IL-SUNG

The first leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, was born on April 15, 1912, in the village of Man’gyŏngdae near the capital city of Pyongyang. I have visited the site, now a tourist attraction nestled atop mountains overlooking the city. His beginnings were undeniably modest, and North Korean authorities have done nothing to lionize the site, perhaps desirous of accentuating his rise to greatness—the North Korean version of the American Dream.

The state’s story of Kim Il-sung launches from these origins depicting him as a glorious revolutionary from the day he was brought into the world. He is credited with many accomplishments, including the founding of an anti-imperialist league at the age of nineteen, and then the founding of the Korean Communist movement. Kim Il-sung’s destiny was to become the country’s leading freedom fighter against the Japanese colonizers. According to the story line, he led guerrilla forces against the Japanese and ultimately defeated them at the end of World War II and expelled permanently the hated occupiers from the Korean Peninsula. Kim then became anointed as the leader of the country. In this official history, there is no mention of the United States and the atomic bombs in 1945 that led to Japan’s unconditional surrender. There is no mention of the role of the Soviet Union in installing Kim as the North Korean leader in late 1945, and the rally of 300,000 held for his welcoming, in which he turned up wearing a Western suit with numerous Soviet military medals pinned to his chest.2 Every North Korean child today believes that the Korean War was started by South Korea and the United States in a surprise attack on June 25, 1950. They believe that Kim Il-sung repelled the Americans and within three days drove U.S. forces south to the Pusan perimeter. There is no mention of the Chinese intervention in the war, nor that the instigator of the war was Kim himself. Kim Il-sung has since been recorded in North Korean history as the ultimate leader, the epitome of everything Korean, and everything good in the world. Though he passed away in July 1994, the government designates him as the Eternal President of the country, forever alive in the spirit of North Koreans, even as his body lies in state in the Kim Il-sung Mausoleum on the outskirts of Pyongyang.

Here is the real story. Kim Il-sung was born as Kim Sŏng-ju. He was a Christian, not a Communist. What is significant about his birth date (aside from being the same day that the Titanic sunk) is that this was only twenty years after the 1882 treaty of amity and commerce with the United States, which paved the way for Western missionaries to come to the peninsula. These missionaries touched Kim’s father, Kim Hyŏng-jik, born in 1894, who spent his school years at the first private American Christian School in Pyongyang (Sungsil Middle School). By all accounts, he was a young man of faith. He eventually became a Presbyterian elder who worked during the day as an herbal pharmacist and taught at a small rural Christian school southwest of Pyongyang. As Japanese occupation authorities carried out draconian policies to colonize Korea, Hyŏng-jik traveled in 1916 to China as a young man and met up with Chinese nationalist and anti-Japanese movements, for which he was arrested and imprisoned for one year when he returned to Korea. The experience seared him. He participated in the March 1, 1919, Independence Movement, a nationwide peaceful demonstration of Koreans against Japan’s occupation. The Korean calls for independence went unheard by the world, and Japanese authorities ruthlessly suppressed the demonstrators. Seeing no future in a country ruled by the hated Japanese, Hyŏng-jik left his homeland the following year, taking his family to Manchuria. He died there a young man, at the age of only thirty-two. Kim Il-sung’s mother, Kang Pan-sŏk, was the daughter of a local schoolteacher and Presbyterian elder and was herself a devout Christian, having served as a deaconess in a local church.3

Kim Il-sung, the eldest son of the family, was only seven or eight years old when his family moved to China. They lived in the Korean-populated Jilin Province, where he was educated in Chinese schools and ended his formal education in the eighth grade. The official state history records that Kim Il-sung founded the Korean People’s Army in 1932, but this is incorrect. He joined anti-Japanese guerrilla movements that were looking for Chinese and Korean nationalist recruits after Japan colonized Manchuria. Kim was a twentysomething, ambitious man displaced from his homeland. He spent the next twenty years in the Communist movement in China, and like many young nationalist Koreans saw this as a career path and devotion to the Korean independence cause.

According to one of the best accounts of Kim—written by Suh Dae-sook, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii—Kim organized his first guerrilla unit in 1932 but started to make a name for himself the following year at the Battle of Dongning. Chinese guerrillas attempted to take this Japanese-held city but were outgunned and found their unit surrounded. Professor Suh writes that Kim’s unit was able to distract the Japanese, thereby facilitating the escape of the Chinese commander of the unit. Thereafter, Kim became a known quantity among the Chinese and a marked man among Japanese colonial authorities. How great a fighter Kim really was is unclear, but he was clearly no slouch. According to some sympathetic accounts, he was commanding a division-size guerrilla unit by 1936 and had Chinese commanders reporting to him at the tender age of twenty-five. Professor Suh confirms that most of Kim’s fighting was in 1938 and 1939, in southern and southeastern Manchuria. He became a target of Japanese colonial police, who tried to capture his unit. According to Japanese military records, the bounty on Kim’s head went from 20,000 yen ($10,000) to 200,000 yen ($100,000). As the war in the Pacific against the United States heated up, Japan sought to fully assimilate its colonies in Manchuria and Korea to fuel the war machine. Koreans were forced to change their names to Japanese. All were forced to give up their faith and worship the Japanese state religion (Shinto) and pledge allegiance to the emperor. Resistance was not tolerated, and pacification campaigns to root out Korean and Chinese “extremists” grew more intense. Kim Il-sung and his band of fighters could not withstand the pressure. He was eventually forced to retreat to the Soviet border, and by the end of 1941 crossed it for refuge in the Soviet Union, where he stayed until 1945. Kim trained with the Soviets as an infantry officer. He learned Russian. He started a family with his wife, Kim Chŏng-suk, who had joined his guerrilla unit in 1935 as a sixteen-year-old orphan, a food worker. Chŏng-suk gave him two sons and a daughter, and the two young parents lived a fairly normal life during these years. She died in September of 1949 while delivering a stillborn baby at only thirty years of age. This was a truly tragic loss for Kim, and he is said to have carried fond memories of her and mourned this bereavement for all his years.4

What is interesting about these early years of Kim’s life is that the first great Communist leader of North Korea, a revolutionary and a patriot, who owned the Korean nationalist narrative during the Cold War over the rival in the South, enjoyed about as bourgeois and non-Korean a middle-class upbringing as one could have imagined. He was a Christian before he ever became a Communist. He lived in Korea only nine years of his first thirty-three. And he became a Communist by accident, driven by a patriotic groundswell that inhered in every young and relatively educated Korean man who had been rendered country-less by Japan’s unlawful takeover. The majority of Korean families stayed at home trying to make a new life under a new system. But the families who resisted by voting with their feet sought refuge in China, and their young adults, like Kim, found common patriotic cause with Chinese revolutionaries, but not necessarily ideological truth. North Korea’s true first Communist was not Kim but a man by the name of Yi Tong-hwi. With other leftist Christians, Yi established a secret society known as the New People’s Association (Sinminhoe). The group was accused in 1911 of an assassination attempt against the Japanese resident-general, and Yi fled to southern Manchuria. Yi was disappointed that the West, despite its principles of self-determination, did not come to Korea’s aid, and he looked to the newly empowered Russian Bolsheviks for help to form the Korean People’s Socialist Party (Hanin Sahoedang) in June 1918. He set up operations in Khabarovsk in Siberia and harbored ambitions to form an army outside of Korea to liberate the country from Japan. Yi later became a leader of the Koryŏ Communist Party (Koryŏ Kongsandang) in 1919 and eventually premier of the Korean government-in-exile in Shanghai. His extremist views—and willingness to take money directly from Moscow to fund his movement rather than the provisional government-in-exile—led to a breakup of the party. Yi died of an unknown illness in 1928.

KIM IL-SUNG SETTLED in to his new Russian surroundings. He enrolled in a Khabarovsk Infantry Officers School and rose to the rank of captain. Kim ended up leading a multiracial reconnaissance battalion of two hundred Russians, Koreans, Chinese, and other regional ethnicities. Under what was known as the Eighty-eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade, Kim and his comrades were charged with collecting intelligence on Japanese troop movements in Korea and China. The training was said to be rigorous, running from six a.m. to ten p.m. daily, and as a result of his partisan lifestyle, Kim’s health was not particularly good, despite his youth. He was said to have been thin and emaciated, and at certain times unable to participate in some of these exercises and to lead reconnaissance missions.5 This was a far cry from the official history of Kim being the active liberator of his country and master tactician, charging after the Japanese on the front lines of battle. Kim first started to appear in photos with Soviet military officers in 1945, and clearly saw his future better assured by Moscow than by Beijing. After the Japanese surrender, the Chinese Communists confiscated the former colonizer’s weapons and started a civil war against the Nationalists. Kim, however, stayed with his newfound Russian friends rather than return to China. In the end, this strategy paid off for him handsomely. The Allied Powers could not fulfill their promise, embodied in the 1943 Cairo Declaration, to give Korea independence “in due course” after Imperial Japan’s surrender. Korea’s status remained undetermined until at Potsdam, in July 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the Korean Peninsula into temporary occupation zones along the thirty-eighth parallel. Though the issue of Korean independence would formally be taken to the U.N.-administered nationwide election, the emerging Cold War spheres made clear that the division was not temporary.

It was in this context that Soviet intelligence handpicked Kim as the indigenous figurehead to lead the Soviet occupation zone. Stalin approved this choice—not for some well-thought-out reason but as a last-minute decision, since he had no real plan for the occupation. According to Soviet archives, Kim arrived in Korea on August 22, 1945. He was only thirty-three years old, and had been out of the country for about twenty years. Kim’s Korean was not very good, though he was fluent in Chinese and conversant in Russian. Soviet authorities fed him a speech to learn and practice reading aloud in Korean. Relative to other “freedom fighters” against the Japanese, Kim was an unknown quantity. He was not like his counterpart in the South, Syngman Rhee, a seventy-year-old political giant who spent years in the United States studying at Harvard and Princeton, and who led an international appeal for Korean independence—or Kim Ku, a well-known revolutionary leader and the last president of the Korean provisional government-in-exile. Soviet authorities probably preferred Kim because they could assure his loyalty. Moscow did away with potential competitors like Cho Man-sik, a popular sixty-two-year-old leftist Presbyterian deacon, by spreading rumors that he was a Japanese collaborator and then by placing him under house arrest. All of these signs point to Kim Il-sung, the first “Great Leader” of North Korea, as little more than a puppet of an unpopular Soviet occupation of northern Korea. While Western history books record how the United States was wholly unprepared for their takeover of the southern half of the peninsula (General John Hodge was given only days to divert to Korea a force that was training for the occupation of Japan), they do little justice to the extreme unpopularity of the foreign occupation in the North. In a handwritten document recently unearthed and translated by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a young Soviet lieutenant colonel describes some of his occupying comrades’ conduct. He claims that the “immoral behavior of our servicemen is horrible. Regardless of rank, they indulge in looting, violence, and misconduct every day here and there.” He goes on to describe how the “sound of gunfire never stops at night in areas where our troops are stationed,” and that “drunk and disorderly soldiers commit immoral behavior and rape is prevalent.”6 Despite this horribly deviant behavior by Soviet soldiers, Kim continued to praise his patrons in every public speech, contrary to the sentiments of his countrymen. Kim traveled in these early months with an entourage of Soviet soldiers who saved him in March 1946 from an assassination attempt when an alert soldier got his arm blown off while deflecting a live grenade tossed at the young North Korean leader during a public appearance. But this discontent did not bother Soviet authorities; they valued Kim as an instrument of absolute control over the North Korean people. Moscow opposed the U.N. plan for national elections in the two halves of Korea, which it perceived as favoring the more populous U.S.-backed South Korea. On September 8, 1948, three weeks after Syngman Rhee assumed the helm of the newly established Republic of Korea, Kim Il-sung completed his unlikely rise to power by becoming leader of the newly established DPRK.

Kim Il-sung worked assiduously to consolidate his power once he took the reigns of leadership in Pyongyang from the Soviets. By 1949, he had purged all potential opposition leaders either through public executions or by throwing them into newly created labor camps, the precursors to the infamous gulags that are today widely condemned by human rights advocates. Kim became totally dependent in these early years on assistance from the Soviets, which is perhaps another reason Moscow felt they could control him. Recently released archives from the Russian Federation reveal the extent to which Kim was beholden to the Kremlin. In the spring of 1949, the young North Korean leader made one of several trips to Moscow with a laundry list of needs. Kim told Stalin that the DPRK’s very existence relied on continued Soviet aid. Stalin asked what kind of aid. Kim responded with a long list: machines, equipment, spare parts for industry, communications, transport, technical specialists, irrigation structures, hydroelectricity plants, metallurgical plants, steam engines, electric locomotives, textile machinery spare parts, a fifty-eight-kilometer (36-mi) railroad track, transport planes, pilots, teachers, Russian language instructors, automobiles, oil, and $50 million in credits.7 Stalin responded with a curt “Fine,” and then their conversation turned to other topics, such as the South Korean military, the U.S. presence on the peninsula, and foreign trade. Throughout the conversation, Stalin repeatedly poked fun at the North Korean leader, asking him if he was “afraid” of the South Korean military and telling Kim he appeared to have “filled out” since his last visit, but the North Korean leader seemed to have misunderstood or disregarded Stalin’s banter.

But even as Kim became materially dependent on the Soviet Union, the regime started to create an indigenous official narrative of “self-reliance” ideology and myths about the leadership, which were wholly independent of its patron. The state erected the first statue of Kim Il-sung in 1949, marking the beginning of the personality cult. A rewriting of Korean Communist history took place, in which the stories of critical figures such as Yi Tong-hwi were completely erased from the annals. On the one-year anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army, Kim Il-sung first referred to himself as the “Great Leader,” or “Suryŏng,” drawing on a term used during the Koguryŏ dynasty to denote maximum—or supreme—leadership. As this cult of personality gained momentum, Kim gave orders that all references to Soviet support be erased from North Korean history. To this day, North Koreans believe that the Korean Workers’ Party was founded by Kim Il-sung rather than the Soviet Union occupying forces.

In the previous chapter, I talked about juche as an ideology of control. Juche transformed from a political ideology into a cult of personality and semi-religion from 1949. The one statue of Kim Il-sung in 1949 grew to an omnipresent thirty thousand monuments and images by 1982 and to over forty thousand by 1992.8 The state took draconian measures to erase any influences, political and religious, which might detract from fidelity to Kim. Over two thousand Buddhist temples and Christian churches were burned. As Jasper Becker notes, the persecution of Christians was especially intense given the relative success of the missionaries in Korea compared with other parts of Asia. Kim incarcerated over a hundred thousand Christians and spread rumors that missionaries were Western spies who branded Korean children with hot irons and sold their blood.9 The irony of these measures was obvious to the few who knew Kim’s background, growing up in a Christian household; and the objectives were clear: Kim was replacing God with himself in the minds of North Koreans. Through destroying others, he made himself the Creator of everything material and spiritual in the North Korean state. Nothing existed before him. State propaganda thereafter referred to Kim as superior to Christ in love, Buddha in benevolence, Confucius in virtue, and Mohammed in justice. Kim also was made out to be a great warrior and the steadfast protector of the Korean people, and was reputed to have fought a hundred thousand battles against the Japanese in ten years. Yet, as a North Korean defector would later write, if this were true, Kim would have had to engage in twenty-eight battles a day, without interruption, for each day from 1932 to 1941.10 During the Korean War, known as the Fatherland Liberation War in North Korea, the Korean People’s Army is described as being led by the indomitable fighting spirit of Kim Il-sung. Official accounts describe how despite “U.S. material and numerical superiority in its offensives, the KPA men firmly defended the heights of the Fatherland, not surrendering even an inch of land to the enemy.”11 One of Kim’s official biographies further describes him returning home after liberating the country, and becoming so immediately busy building the party, the state, and the army that he didn’t have time to change from the cotton flannel uniform he had worn on the battlefield for the past twenty years. The use of racialized propaganda was also not beyond the North Korean leadership. As North Korean propaganda expert B. R. Myers attests, over the course of the past sixty years, through state propaganda, the people of North Korea have been led to believe that they “are too pure-blooded, and so too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.”12 Their racial purity and homogeneity, the story goes, renders them dangerously vulnerable unless they are under the care and protection of the Great Leader. Over the years and to this day, the United States has been depicted as “bloodthirsty Yankees” and South Korea as “warmongering puppets.” In contrast to the “paradise” of North Korea, the South is depicted as hell on earth, where destitute students sell their blood to pay for textbooks and the American imperialists drive their tanks over children just for sport.13 This twisting of history might seem crazy. But it was logical for Kim. The purpose of history was not truth; it was political control through legitimation of the leadership and through total loyalty.

I ARRIVED AT the foreign ministry building in Pyongyang for a meeting with the North Korean vice minister. This structure sits at the south end of Kim Il-sung Square, which you often see in CNN video footage of goose-stepping North Korean soldiers leading a military parade of missiles and tanks. There were no soldiers on this spring day in April; instead, the square was filled with North Korean women in traditional colorful Korean dress, rehearsing songs for an upcoming festival. The music piped through the public-address system echoed through the hallways of the barren lobby as I entered the building. As I waited for the vice minister’s aide to retrieve me, I stared over the shoulder of my three North Korean minders at a wall mural depicting the Great Leader Kim smiling radiantly as he was giving instructions to young diplomats following him. The whole aura of the painting suggested a political rendition of the Pied Piper story (except for the propaganda music over the loudspeakers). But then I noticed something about the artist’s portrayal of Kim’s face: blushed cheeks, soft and round face, and thin, glossy lips. At the time, the artist’s interpretation of Kim’s face struck me as unusually feminine, which I found strange. I thought better not to ask, lest my minders decide I was having hallucinations from spending a day too many in Pyongyang.

In the end, of course, I was not imagining things. The personality cult built around Kim Il-sung was not just spiritual and political, it was also filial. The iconography portrayed Kim not as a stern, disciplined father figure to the people but as a loving mother. Photos and artwork depicted the soft-cheeked leader, holding farmers and children close to his bosom, appealing to the working proletariat to show sentimentality and piety to Kim as they would do to their own mother. Ri Myŏng-hun, the seven-foot-nine (236-cm) North Korean basketball player who flirted with a possible career in the National Basketball Association in the 1990s, once told foreign reporters that he was honored to play basketball “in the bosom” of Kim. The state therefore created a narrative in which the job of the citizens was to work for and care for the mother (Kim), who was constantly toiling to provide for the family (state). The Great Leader was also depicted as virtuous (whose Mom is not?), frugal, and austere—thus sowing seeds of guilt among those who felt the state was not providing enough. A typical news report from the official mouthpiece KCNA, broadcast nationwide, went as follows:

The Leader did an on-sight inspection at a local factory. He received reports about how the workers met their production quotas ahead of schedule in order to show their loyalty to the Leader. The Leader then offered to share his simple lunch of grains, vegetables, and soup with the workers. The workers were so impressed by the generosity of the Leader to share his small and simple meal with them, they sobbed with tears of joy and pledged to work even harder to please the Leader.

Filial piety is not a Marxist concept, but it is an Asian one. Kim’s grip on the people was therefore accentuated by the fusing of the Stalinist personality cult–like order with these neo-Confucian values. Bizarre as it sounds, it was very effective. People still felt great sentimentality for Kim and the revolutionary cause even as they suffered from relative deprivation. They were taught to believe that even under hardship, the Great Leader was more frugal and working even harder than the proletariat, so how could anyone complain? When Kim died in 1994, tens of thousands mourned in the streets as if they had collectively lost their mother. A recent study by the respected scholar Park Kyung-Ae found that interviews of North Korean defectors today find sentimentality expressed for the leadership even as they expressed great anger with the political system.14

I recount this history because it casts an ordinary pall on the official and extraordinary narrative of Great Leader Kim’s accomplishments as the first ruler of the country. There is no denying he is immortal in the minds of North Koreans, but his story contains puzzles and imperfections that were very human. In this vein, Kim Il-sung’s sustained rule after the DPRK’s birth in 1948 is almost as puzzling as his rise to power. Here was this bourgeois young Christian man who became a competent but unheralded anti-Japanese independence fighter based in Manchuria, who then got handpicked by the Soviets to run a country at the age of thirty-three. The young and inexperienced leader then pressed his two benefactors, Stalin and Mao, to support his plan to invade South Korea, promising success. Kim attacked on June 25, 1950, starting a war of Koreans against Koreans, sooner than either Stalin or Mao had expected, and his adventurism in the end cost the Chinese an estimated 800,000 lives.15 Moreover, the war effectively cost the Chinese the territory of Taiwan, which the United States committed to defend during and after the war. It cost the Soviets hundreds of millions of dollars in material and equipment. In spite of these huge mistakes, Kim remained in power in North Korea, accumulating total and absolute control. Why didn’t the Chinese or Soviets kick him out after the Korean War and replace him with someone else? How did Kim turn the country from socialism to a bizarre cult of personality?

A number of factors contributed to this outcome. The imperatives of the Cold War made it so that the Soviets could not abandon North Korea even after its failed and costly attempt to unify the peninsula. Korea had become a critical proxy war in the global struggle with the United States. Neither Washington nor Moscow intrinsically valued the peninsula, but both assigned high strategic value to it—meaning they could not allow it to fall into the hands of the enemy. From Stalin’s point of view, Kim may have had his flaws, but he had to stick with him. Internal splits within the Chinese leadership after the war were fortuitous for Kim Il-sung as well. Peng Dehuai, who was commander-in-chief of Chinese forces during the Korean War, wanted to oust Kim for his mistakes. Peng would have probably been successful had he not fallen into disfavor with Mao. Peng’s criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward eventually led to his demise, thereby allowing Kim to stay in place. Geopolitics also operated to Kim’s advantage. The emerging split within the Communist bloc between the Chinese and the Soviets benefited the North Korean regime handsomely as both capitals vied for the allegiance of the North. Thus, rather than being rejected by Stalin or Mao for his failed war, Kim was courted by both in the years following the war, as Stalin and Mao wanted to legitimate their dominance in the movement by having smaller Communist countries, like the DPRK, on their side. In international relations theory, we call these “structural explanations,” which basically means the confluence of forces in the strategic environment would have benefited Kim—or any other leader, for that matter—at the time. But there is another specific answer for Kim Il-sung’s iron grip on the leadership mantle, which has less to do with structure and everything to do with the agency of a particular individual: the rise of his first son, Kim Jong-il.

THE SON: KIM JONG-IL

I want to introduce this mercurial figure to readers by explaining a less well-known but critical role the Son played in the state-building of North Korea. Kim Jong-il was known to be a cinephile. His favorite movie of all time was Gone with the Wind, and this affection apparently is widely shared by North Korean elite. In both official and sidebar meetings with North Korean counterparts, I would be thrown off by sudden North Korean references to the American classic. In one tense session of negotiations when we confronted our counterparts with the consequences of failure to denuclearize (i.e., U.N. sanctions, etc.), the North Korean negotiator tilted his head back and said, “Well, frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.” It brought levity to the moment, although the North Korean said it in all seriousness and with an artistic flair. Kim Jong-il apparently liked James Bond movies, too, and reportedly enjoyed Die Another Day,16 which portrays an ambitious and ruthless son of a North Korean general who plans to take over the world with a laser-firing satellite. (The son eventually kills his father in the movie’s climax.) He had a video library of over twenty thousand movies and has written books on filmmaking. In 1978, he orchestrated the kidnapping of the famous South Korean director Sin Sang-ok and actress Ch’oe Un-hŭi because he liked their movies. The Son spent his early years producing many of the propaganda films and revolutionary operas for the state. This was not just Kim’s hobby horse, nor his ambition to become North Korea’s next Martin Scorcese. Instead, it was part of a deliberate effort to elevate his father to demigod status. These films and the maternal-like depictions in art of the leadership created loyalty through appealing to the sentimentality of the revolution and through weaving together political loyalty and filial piety.

Indeed, Kim Jong-il played a major role in the deification of his father and the transformation of a Korean Communist system into the bizarre personality cult–based regime that it is today. This transformation was driven by the politics of family succession. The Son found himself in intense competition with his father’s younger brother (Kim Yŏng-ju) and his stepbrother (Kim P’yŏng-il, from the father’s second marriage) for the mantle of designated successor. Kim Yŏng-ju was his brother’s trusted representative in the occasional secret talks that took place with the South Korean CIA in the 1970s. It is also said that he worked at a Japanese-owned store while the family was in exile in Manchuria, and that he spent the early half of the 1940s living in Hawaii, returning only after liberation in 1945.17 Kim P’yŏng-il is said to be a debonair, English-speaking diplomat who served as DPRK ambassador to Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, and is currently ambassador to Poland. In his younger years, he was a spitting image of his father, and his military service bestowed popularity upon him with this powerful faction, something Kim Jong-il couldn’t have claimed to have.18 Hwang Jang-yŏp, the highest-level defector ever from North Korea, who served as mentor and confidant to the Kim family, once told me that the rivalry among these individuals was intense and that it was entirely based on who could put Kim Il-sung on a higher pedestal. As I mentioned earlier, the frail, eighty-seven-year-old Hwang, who was the founder and a former teacher of juche ideology, came to Washington to deliver a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Because of persistent North Korean assassination threats, he arrived with an FBI detail of eight officers, which turned out to be a necessary precaution, as only weeks later, South Korean officials arrested two North Koreans posing as defectors, who were sent to kill Hwang. Hwang talked about how the competition between Kim Jong-il and his relatives led to excesses of the personality cult prevalent today. In 1965, shortly after joining the party and heading up its Propaganda and Agitation department, Kim Jong-il ordered party officials to publish the first biography of his father for external consumption, which introduced the world to all the absolutisms of the Great Leader. In the early 1970s, Kim Jong-il headed a government agency known as the “4-15 Creation Group,” named after his father’s birthday, which was in charge of creating personal monuments to his father. Kim ordered the construction of over twelve thousand monuments and statues in his father’s name, including the Man’gyŏngdae birthplace (1969), Juche Tower (1982), and the Arch of Triumph (1982) modeled after the French monument.

He constantly showered his father with gifts, including a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz, which now sits in the Kim Il-sung Mausoleum on display. In 1972, to commemorate his father’s sixtieth birthday (a celebration known in Korean as Hwan’gap), the Son ordered the building of a massive, $800 million, seventy-foot (21-m) gilded statue in the center of the city, known as the Great Monument on Mansu Hill.

By 1992, there were a total of over forty thousand pieces of iconography.19 The Grand Monument upset both the Soviets and the Chinese. Moscow believed that such grandeur in the context of the global socialist movement, of which North Korea was a part, should only be reserved for Stalin. Deng reportedly was very upset with the extravagance of the statue when he first saw it. This eventually led the North Koreans to strip the gold leaf off of the statue and redo it in the bronze gild that visitors see today. In the end, however, the monuments worked for Kim Jong-il’s purposes: in April 1974, he was formally anointed as the successor to his father and took on the moniker of the “Dear Leader,” a full twenty years before he would eventually take power. Kim Jong-il’s image did not start to appear in portraits in government offices until around 1988, in large part because once he had become the designated successor against all other contenders, he had no need to usurp his father’s position, instead waiting in the wings for his day. Ironically, the most significant piece of iconography in the Son’s likeness stands outside the entrance of the nuclear facility at Yongbyon, where the North produced plutonium for nuclear bombs. It is a fifty-foot (15-m) monument of Kim Jong-il standing with scientists and soldiers, with a slogan encouraging the scientists to promote the nation’s defense.

Kim Jong-il’s efforts to create a virtuous, frugal, and austere aura around his father contrasts starkly with the reported excesses associated with the Son’s lifestyle. He romped around eight different palaces, connected by underground train, each complete with a golf course, indoor wave pool, home movie theater, video game room, regulation basketball courts, horse stables, and shooting ranges. Each palace is detectable with overhead commercial satellite photography, all constantly illuminated against the surrounding darkness and fully staffed, in large part so that no one can determine which one he is visiting at any given time.

The late Kim was an avid consumer of things Western, including CNN and MTV, video games (Mario Kart was reportedly a favorite), and music ranging from the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys. During former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s meeting with him in October 2000, Kim let on that he was a huge National Basketball Association fan, which prompted the secretary—now a Georgetown University professor—to give him an autographed basketball from NBA icon Michael Jordan. Robert Carlin, a former State Department official, who accompanied Albright on that trip, recalled:

We were looking for something that was a little more meaningful than a bottle of scotch or a miniature Statue of Liberty or a Buffalo Bill book—something with more importance to him . . . [h]e may have been initially surprised by it, but you could tell he was pleased. I don’t think he expected it. It was a very personal gesture, in a sense. . . . It showed him we went through some effort to get the signature. They realized it wasn’t just an ordinary ball.20

The ball now sits in the Museum of International Understanding, which displays all the gifts given to the Dear Leader. It sits next to a hunting rifle given by Vladimir Putin and a crocodile bag proffered by Fidel Castro. Subsequent to Albright’s gift, Jordan’s management team was approached in 2001 with an official invitation to visit North Korea and play for the Dear Leader. South Korean conglomerate Samsung, which sought to improve inter-Korean relations under the South Korean government’s Sunshine Policy of engagement, offered to underwrite the bizarre event. Jordan, who probably abhorred involvement in a diplomatic dance aimed at trading his signed basketballs for Kim’s basketball-size nuclear bombs, graciously declined the invitation.

There are more lurid reports that Kim enjoyed the company of Norwegian models and that he retained constantly replenished “joy brigades” of women who entertained him. He stocked a spirits cellar of over ten thousand bottles of the world’s finest wines and liquors, and until his death in 2011 was one of the single biggest foreign customers of Hennessy Paradis Cognac. The Son, as evident from his paunch, loved food, and stories told by his former chef, Fujimoto Kenji, are impressive. Fujimoto recounted how Kim ordered him to go on global buying sprees to bring the best items back to Pyongyang for Kim’s consumption. The chef went to Tsukiji fish market in Japan to buy nearly three thousand pounds (1,360 kg) of the best sushi and squid, and to Mistukoshi department store in Ginza to buy red-bean rice cakes and Japanese cigarettes; he then went to Thailand for the best papayas and mangoes, to Czechoslovakia for Pilsner draft beer, to Denmark for bacon, to France for Perrier water, and to Iran and Uzbekistan for pistachio nuts and caviar.21

Moreover, the Son did not cut down on his excesses. They became even more egregious, particularly as his countrymen went through difficult economic times. Swiss trade statistics show that at the height of the famine in the 1990s, he imported $2.6 million worth of luxury Swiss watches. In 1995, he paid $15 million for U.S. professional wrestlers to do exhibition matches in North Korea—the most money at the time that professional wrestling ever made for a foreign event. A few years later (1998), he paid $20 million for two hundred new S-500 Class Mercedes limousines.22 Kim was entirely willing to satisfy his taste buds during the famine. In 1997, Italian gourmet chef Ermanno Furlanis and a team of chefs went to North Korea for three weeks at the invitation of the government. They were put up in a seaside villa and were provided with three fully equipped kitchens to teach North Korean chefs how to cook Italian foods. In an interview in 2001, Furlanis recounted that he explained the need for a special type of oven in order to properly bake pizza dough, and it was brought to him a few days later. He also recounted how the North Koreans mistakenly provided French wines and cheeses to the chefs. When Furlanis pointed out the error, all the materials were taken away and replaced a few days later with a collection of the finest Italian cheeses and Bartolo wines from his home country.23 Yi Yŏng-guk, a former bodyguard of Kim Jong-il who later defected to South Korea, assessed that his former boss’s excesses made the extravagant Philippines dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos look like paupers. In a 2005 interview, Yi explains that Kim “has at least ten palaces set in sprawling grounds . . . They contain golf courses, stables for his horses, garages full of motorbikes and luxury cars, shooting ranges, swimming pools, cinemas, fun-fair parks, water-jet bikes, and hunting grounds stocked with wild deer and duck.”24

THE MIND BOGGLES at comprehending what sort of individual was capable of such decadence. According to the official history, the second leader of North Korea was born in a secret military camp on February 16, 1942, on Mount Paektu, which is the mythical birthplace of the Korean race. As the annals record, his birth was foretold by a swallow, and the heavens celebrated with a double rainbow and the appearance of a new star in the night sky. The real story, however, is less spectacular. Kim was born as Yuri Irsenovich Kim in the Russian town of Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk, when his father was a captain in the first battalion of the Soviet Eighty-eighth Brigade—a guerrilla unit composed of Chinese and Korean exiles. Details on these years are scarce, because it is not part of the official history, but according to interviews with North Koreans close to the family in Russia at the time, Kim attended a Russian school with other children of the Eighty-eighth Brigade, where they were taught Stalinism-for-preschoolers. The future leader of North Korea apparently did not like the sessions very much, according to one South Korean newspaper report, because he spent his time disobeying teachers and biting other classmates.25 He had a younger brother, Kim P’yŏng-il, known as “Shura,” born in 1944, who drowned when he was three years old, and a younger sister, Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, born in 1946. He also had two stepbrothers (Kim P’yŏng-il, named after the drowned boy, who is the above-mentioned ambassador to Poland; and Kim Yŏng-il, who died in 2000 in Germany) and one or two stepsisters from later marriages of his father.

The sister, Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, appears to be the most important female in Kim’s life. Kim was deeply affected by the death of his mother, Kim Chŏng-suk, who died in childbirth when Kim was only seven years old. He has invoked his mother’s name when referring to Kyŏng-hŭi as “[M]y only blood family whom I was asked to take care of by my mother till the moment she died.” There are stories that recount how Kim and his baby sister awaited from the hospital news of their mother’s state and cried in each other’s arms when she was gone. After the death of their father in 1994, Kim grew even closer to his sister. The Japanese national security adviser to then-premier Abe Shinzo (2006–2007), Koike Yuriko, wrote in 2010 that Kim Jong-il told the Central Committee after his father’s death, “Kim Kyong-hui is myself, the words of Kim Kyong-hui are my words, and instructions issued by Kim Kyong-hui are my instructions.”26 North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yŏp described to me in 2010 that the sister was the only person Kim Jong-il could truly trust, which gave her enormous power behind the scenes. Her husband, Chang Sŏng-t’aek, who holds the number two position in the party, Hwang explained, is only powerful because of his marital ties to the Kim family. The sister graduated from Kim Il-sung University and held the relatively unassuming position as deputy director of the light industry department. She later served on the Party Central Committee in 1988 and Supreme People’s Assembly in 1990. In September 2010, she was promoted to the rank of four-star general in the army and elected to the twelve-member Central Committee of the Party—which put her in a more prominent leadership role, alongside Kim Jong-il’s youngest son.

With the end of the Japanese occupation, Kim Jong-il returned to Korea when he was around three or four years old, in the fall of 1945. He attended primary and middle school in Pyongyang, where he was known to be a bit of a renegade and found himself in different types of trouble with teachers and with house help at home. Only a few months after his mother’s death, Kim was sent to China (probably Jilin) while his father attacked the South in the Korean War. Undoubtedly, he saw this separation of the family not as his father’s fault but that of the American imperialists, which certainly instilled in him a hatred of the United States. In 1964, he graduated (with top academic honors, of course) from Kim Il-sung University, where he majored in political economy. According to the official history, he wrote twelve hundred works during his illustrious college career, including “The Characteristics of Modern Imperialism and Its Aggressive Nature.” His personal life reads like a script from The Sopranos: Kim’s first wife, Kim Yŏng-suk, was the daughter of a party official and was picked by his father in a Korean-style arranged marriage. This marriage bore one daughter, Kim Sŏl-song, who has never been seen in public. Kim soon lost interest and fell for Sŏng Hye-rim, a then-famous North Korean film actress. A woman of Yangban roots (pre-twentieth-century Korean aristocracy), Sŏng was married, but when the Dear Leader falls for you, you don’t have much of a choice. Her husband was sent away to France and she gave Kim his first son, Kim Chŏng-nam. Sŏng traveled frequently to Moscow and later died there in 2002. Sŏng’s niece and nephew later defected to France, where the nephew gave interviews about life inside the Kim family. He was later found dead in South Korea. Kim’s taste for women in the arts was again apparent in his next partner, Ko Yŏng-hŭi, a Japanese-born ethnic Korean who was a member of the Pyongyang dance troupe. She gave birth to Kim’s other two sons, Kim Chŏng-ch’ŏl and Kim Jong-un. She died, reportedly during cancer treatment, in Paris in 2004. Kim’s last-known mistress was Kim Ok, who served as his personal secretary since the 1980s. A pianist by training, she graduated from Pyongyang Musical College, and reportedly became a confidante and caregiver for Kim.27 Much younger than Kim, she is in her forties and was part of the DPRK high-level delegation that visited Washington for consultations with Defense Secretary Bill Cohen during the Clinton administration. She is also reportedly involved in the activities of Bureau 39, which handles Kim Jong-il’s personal funds.28 Her relationship with Kim Jong-il’s sister, Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, is not known.

Kim Jong-il was nothing like his father. While his father had bona fide, albeit inflated, revolutionary credentials as a freedom fighter against the Japanese, Kim Jong-il had none to speak of. If anything, he had a reputation as an antihero, a spoiled and pampered prince-in-waiting. His father was a handsome and physically big man for a Korean, while his son was short at five feet, one inch (155 cm, hence the height-compensating elevator shoes and the bouffant hairstyle), with an omnipresent paunch. (Madeleine Albright noted that when she met him in 2000, she was wearing high heels, and so was he.) Kim’s behavior manifested insecurity about his deficiencies—there are reports that in addition to his four partners, Kim had several other mistresses and some nine additional illegitimate children. He also worked systematically at assuming positions of power in the North Korean government. After university, Kim joined the party and put himself in charge of the propaganda machine, instructing writers and artists to produce over eight thousand revolutionary films and operas in honor of his father. He ordered the construction of seven massive movie studios around the country. I drove past one of these on the outskirts of Pyongyang—a long, sprawling complex of low-rise white buildings and warehouses that make Fox Studios in Los Angeles look small. The story lines of all of these propaganda films and musicals were vehemently anti-American and about paying the ultimate sacrifice for Kim Il-sung. Wŏlmido is a story about a North Korean battalion of the Korean People’s Army defending a small island (Wŏlmi) off the coast of Korea during MacArthur’s landing at Incheon during the Korean War. The story ends with the battalion, fighting valiantly against all odds, ultimately dying in their defense of the small piece of North Korean Motherland. The musical score emphasizes the sentimentality of the Revolution: “In his bosom, I live and die. / I long for his bosom at all times. / The country I call my mother / I know now is the General’s bosom.”29 Ordinary citizens were required to watch these movies and then discuss the virtues of serving Kim Il-sung. School competitions were not spelling bees but contests to see which students could recite the most passages from a revolutionary movie. The theory behind this propaganda was simple and also attributed to Kim. The Revolution always needed a Supreme Leader. Masses alone were not sufficient for the cause. They needed to be led by a single leader who was the “brain and spirit” of the Revolution, while the masses were the body. This became the essence of Kimilsungism. It is reported that Kim also instructed the Korean Central News Agency in 1964 about the ideological mission of the organization to be the mouthpiece of the Great Leader’s ideology broadcast throughout the world. KCNA today is the primary organ of news coming out of North Korea to the outside world, and has become replete with colorful phraseology denouncing the United States as “imperialist warmongers,”30 the Japanese as “reactionaries steeped in the idea of militarist aggression to the marrow of their bones,”31 and South Korea as “a tundra of human rights where dictatorship and suppression prevail.”32 Individuals are also not spared the KCNA’s wrath, having referred to former U.N. ambassador John Bolton as “human scum and [a] bloodsucker,”33 former vice president Dick Cheney as “the most cruel monster and bloodthirsty beast,”34 and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “a political dwarf,” a “human butcher,” a “fascist tyrant who puts an ogre to shame,” and the “kingpin of evil” who puts “Hitler into the shade in man-killing and war hysteria.”35 We have Kim Jong-il to thank for this.

The Son never served a day in the military, and yet in a militaristic society where revolutionary credentials are a requirement of leadership, he had to have some. It is now believed, both through scholarly research and through interviews, that Kim compensated for this by his involvement in a number of terrorist acts during the 1970s and 1980s. Kim is believed to have ordered the 1976 poplar tree incident. The North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yŏp maintained that Kim was the mastermind of the 1983 terrorist attack on the South Korean presidential delegation during a state visit to Burma. The Son is also believed to have orchestrated the 1986 bombing of Gimpo International Airport, killing five and injuring over thirty. Hwang also maintained that Kim was responsible for orchestrating the 1987 terrorist bombing of a Korean Air civilian passenger plane over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 passengers and crew on board, which was designed to sabotage Seoul’s bid to host the upcoming 1988 Olympics. In September 2002, Kim admitted to Koizumi the abduction of thirteen Japanese citizens between 1977 and 1983. The North under Kim Jong-il has also been an active sponsor of terrorism, aiding the Japanese Red Army (JRA) in their 1970 Japan Airlines hijacking, their 1972 Israeli airport attack, and subsequently harboring a number of their members. As recently as 2000, the DPRK is also suspected of having sold tens of thousands of small arms to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines,36 and between 2006 and 2009 potentially provided arms and training to the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and Hezbollah in Lebanon.37 It is through these types of activities that the Son tried to bolster his revolutionary credentials and strengthen the legitimacy of his rule.

Kim cemented his position as the eventual successor, and probably fashioned himself as the ideological father of North Korea’s personality cult. At the young age of thirty, he was elected to the Party Central Committee in 1972, and thereafter became a member of the elite Politburo and party secretary for organization and guidance. From this powerful position, he targeted all elements potentially disloyal to his father, which, coincidentally, also paved the way for his eventual ascension to the throne absent any rivals. Nothing either got to or left Kim Il-sung without being filtered through Kim Jong-il. By the mid-1970s, Kim Jong-il’s portrait started to appear in public places paired with his father’s ubiquitous image. At the 1980 Party Congress, the Son’s position as the successor was cemented when he became a member of the presidium of the party Politburo. By the age of thirty-eight, he became the fourth-highest ranking person in the Politburo, second in the Party Secretariat, and third in the Military Commission.

Despite his anointed position, the Son remained the recluse. Reports proliferated of his on-the-spot guidance alongside of his father in different parts of North Korea, but rarely was there ever footage of his activities. North Korean citizens have never heard his voice in public except on special occasions. He seldom traveled abroad, and mostly only to China. The hagiographers went to work building the official personality cult of the Son, ranging from his exploits as a young revolutionary to his eleven hole-in-ones on an eighteen-hole golf course. Some believe that the Son basically was running the daily operations of the country from 1985 onward, even though his father was still the leader. Should this be true, then the Son only knew the revolution as a losing race against its southern competitor. It was from the mid-1980s that the insurmountable economic gaps between the two Koreas became visible to the world. Electric power shortages became evident. According to defector accounts, food rations got smaller in the 1980s, and the days of bumper crop harvests became a memory of the 1970s. Consumer goods were in short supply. Productivity rates started to decline and infrastructure started to decay. Meanwhile, the South’s economy was growing at a double-digit percentage clip. South Korea started to make inroads in diplomatic and trade ties with Eastern bloc countries, with Hungary being the first in 1987 and culminating with the Soviet Union three years later. In the ultimate statement that must have impressed upon the Son that the competitive legitimation battle with the South was a lost cause, Seoul hosted the world at the 1988 Olympic Games. Visitors to North Korea during this period, as well as defectors, recall how the pace of the country seemed frenetic: people working incredibly hard in mass mobilization campaigns for the Dear Leader in order to keep up with the South, but with lesser and lesser productivity due to dilapidated equipment. It should therefore come as no surprise that during these years of the Son’s unofficial rule, the North pursued the ultimate equalizer: nuclear weapons. In 1985, the North signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT)—largely as a quid pro quo to gain access to more Soviet nuclear know-how—this, ironically, said more about Kim’s nuclear ambitions than about his nonproliferation intentions. Kim Jong-il inspected the Yongbyon nuclear facility and gave scientists and workers there gifts, such as Japanese TV sets, as rewards for their great work in securing the nation’s safety. During this period, the North also reportedly conducted underground nuclear tests, as it refused to fulfill the safeguards and inspection obligations of the NPT.38 Two larger reactors—a fifty-megawatt (MW) and two-hundred-megawatt facility—were also under construction during this period. The North Korean leadership is fond of saying that a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula was the Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s last wish. This may be true, but it certainly was not the wish of his son. On the contrary, the only contribution that Kim Jong-il arguably made to the Revolution was nuclear weapons.

It is during these years of Kim’s rise that mysterious references to an all-knowing “Party Center” (Tang Chungang), which was upgraded to a “Glorious Party Center” (Widaehan Tang Chungang), began to emerge in local newspaper editorials. This was a propagandistic effort on the part of the Son to anchor his place as the exalted imparter of guidance and wisdom in the party and in the psyche of the North Korean people. Kim also resorted to cruder tactics, such as fairly large-scale purges of rival party members by exiling, imprisoning, or “arranging accidents” for them.39 The Son also introduced a new term of reference for the state ideology—“Kimilsungism”—which placed the focus less squarely on juche ideology and more centrally on his father, and by extension, on the emerging Kim dynasty. Kim’s period of unofficial rule peaked in the early 1990s. In December of 1991 he became supreme commander of the People’s Army. In April 1992, he was promoted to the top military rank of marshal alongside top-ranking military official and Kim family loyalist O Chin-u. And in April 1993, Kim became chairman of the party’s central military commission. (The parallels to the power transition to the youngest son, Kim Jong-un, discussed below, are uncanny.) Kim’s coming-out party was his observance and speech at a major military parade through Kim Il-sung Square. The speech—the first public statement by the Son—was terribly uninspiring and poorly delivered, leading some to surmise that the reclusive leader was hiding a speech impediment. (Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright later confirmed, after her October 2000 meeting with Kim, that the man was lucid and decisive.) Over these years, the Son is said to have harbored a number of fairly idiosyncratic traits, such as being extremely secretive and suspicious, pathologically jealous, highly reclusive, and noticeably uncomfortable in public.40 In Politburo meetings, he is said to have regularly shown up late and severely hungover, and other times to belligerently dominate the discussion.41

ON JULY 8, 1994, Radio Pyongyang broadcast a single statement of immense proportion for North Korea:

The Great Heart has stopped beating.42

The sudden death of the Father gave the Son his moment to take up formally the job for which he had been groomed his entire life. Rumors persist to this day, however, that Kim Jong-il’s ascension to the throne was of his own making. In the spring and summer of 1994, the Father, Kim Il-sung, was fairly stressed out as foreign relations swung wildly within months between war and peace. In June, the nuclear crisis reached an apex with the United States when Pyongyang defied U.S. threats and unloaded a batch of fuel rods from the nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, which was the first step to amassing plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Clinton administration responded, as then–secretary of defense William Perry has described, by drawing up plans for a possible military strike against North Korea. While the two countries looked as though they were on the brink of war, former president Jimmy Carter met with Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang and through an extraordinary piece of personal diplomacy negotiated a solution that would eventually form the basis of the October 1994 U.S.-DPRK nuclear agreement. One of the conditions of U.S. diplomacy was that the North improves relations with the American ally in the South. Kim responded by agreeing to the first-ever leaders’ summit with ROK president Kim Young-sam (1993–1998). It was during his preparations for this summit that the story becomes fuzzy. According to accounts by defector Hwang Jang-yŏp, the Father was apparently hidden away in one of his remote villas in the Myohyang Mountains. He was deep in argument with the Son about the details of the upcoming summit, including whether the Father should go to the airport to receive the leader, what honorifics should be used to address him, and, in particular, whether the North should turn out the requisite thousands of citizens to welcome the South Korean leader. The Son was vehemently opposed to giving the despised ROK leader any face while the Father believed it was the proper thing to do. (Later, when Kim Young-sam refused to send condolences to the funeral, Kim Jong-il referred in public to the ROK leader as a “filthy dirt-bag.”) At the time, the Father was already upset at the Son for problems related to mismanagement of the economy. The Father had only recently become aware of how bad the economic situation was in his country outside of Pyongyang, and was genuinely upset that his son had not informed him accurately of the dire state in the provinces. Kim Il-sung saw his meeting with Carter and the upcoming summit with the South Korean president as an opportunity to rectify the situation, presumably expecting large amounts of assistance from these two countries. The two argued, and the Father apparently suffered a heart attack shortly thereafter; he was found a few hours later facedown on the floor of his bedroom. Kim’s regular doctor was not present, replaced by a young, inexperienced physician. Doctors and emergency equipment were rushed to the mountain resort, but due to bad weather one of the helicopters crashed and the other was unable to reach him at the villa in time and he died on July 8, 1994. Further details remain unknown. It is hard to imagine that a medical team was not by Kim Il-sung’s side wherever he traveled. And, mysteriously, all of the doctors, bodyguards, and aides who were present at the time have all since died or gone missing in the gulags of North Korea.

What was so interesting about the Father’s death was that it was met with a genuine outpouring of grief in North Korea. The state required, of course, that the population come out in mourning, but the footage of the citizens displaying deep sorrow did not look faked. The people had been taught to love the Great Leader like their own mother and god, wrapped into one. The psychic and spiritual void created by his death was apparent in the tears of the people. The Son—the Dear Leader—took the reins of power amid massive speculation that he could not run the country. South Korean analysts in the summer of 1994 affirmed to me that the Son would not last through the end of the calendar year. He did not have the experience, the loyalty of the military, nor the charisma to replicate his father. The fact that the country would soon enter the worst period of food shortages approximating a famine only fueled these predictions of collapse. The Son did not declare himself the leader right away. Instead, he figuratively brought his father back to life. After a period of mourning, Kim Jong-il passed an amendment to the Constitution in 1998, declaring Kim Il-sung the “Eternal President” of North Korea. He built a massive mausoleum, in which Kim is entombed. He declared a new calendar, in which Year Zero is 1912, the birth year of Kim Il-sung (hence, 2012 is 100 after-the-birth-of-Kim), and April 15 is basically Christmas in North Korea (except kids don’t get presents). On July 26, 1998, the Son was formally elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly as the leader of the country.

KIM JONG-IL’S DEATH AND LEGACY

When Kim Jong-il formally took the reins of power in 1998, no one would have predicted that only a decade later, he would suffer a stroke, and then only three years after that, he would die of a massive heart attack. And yet, as this book went to press in late 2011, the North Korean news agency broadcast the announcement on December 19 that shocked the world: Kim had died of “an advanced acute myocardial infarction, complicated with a [sic] serious heart shock” due to “physical and mental over-work in caring for the North Korean people.” Despite the relative brevity of Kim Jong-il’s rule, he left some major legacies for the country.

From the start of his rule, the Dear Leader knew his weaknesses and tried to compensate for them. His time in office was based on a tight alignment with the military. Known as “military-first” politics (sŏngun chongch’i), this put Kim Jong-il as chairman of the National Defense Commission. Up until this point, the NDC was known as the highest military organ of the state in control of national defense, but it sat alongside other organs, including the Cabinet, Supreme People’s Assembly, judiciary, and, most important, the party. As leader of the NDC, Kim Jong-il effectively made this the primary decision-making body in the government. Composed at this time of seven generals and three civilians, the NDC supplanted the party as the heart of the state. Today sŏngun politics is the fundamental defining feature of North Korean life. Far from solely being the protector of the North Korean people, the military is a provider of food, services, technical assistance, and revolutionary education. Members of the military are regularly tasked with tilling the fields, fixing the faucets, and unclogging the toilets of everyday North Koreans, ensuring the uninterrupted influence of the military in North Korean society. The conscription system of compulsory service for up to twelve years and mandatory part-time service until age sixty ensures that all are filially, if not directly, connected to the military. According to Professor Park Han-shik, when asked in recent years what type of man they would like to marry, single North Korean girls and women most often respond, “A soldier.”43 This may seem anecdotal, but it is representative of something much larger. Through the elevation of the NDC and the primacy of sŏngun politics, the Kim regime eliminated any separation between the military and civilian spheres, to the point that North Korean culture is essentially a military culture.

The Son’s formal rule of North Korea was short, relative to his father’s half-century at the helm. If Kim had lived to his father’s ripe age of eighty-two, he would still only have ruled the country from 1994 to 2023, a mere twenty-nine years. Instead, at his death in 2011, he had run the country for only seventeen years. His rule was marked only by challenges and failures. The biggest challenge that became evident to the world in the 1990s was food. Upon taking power, Kim contended with the collapse of the North’s food system and the onset of famine-like conditions. In the years leading up to the famine, the regime tried to deal with food shortages with a “Let’s Eat Two Meals per Day” campaign to cut overall consumption, but these measures proved inadequate.44 It was in the mid-1990s, though, that the “socialist paradise” truly began to look more like a living hell. In what the regime referred to as the “Arduous March” (“Konan-ŭi haenggun”), somewhere between 600,000 and a million North Koreans eventually perished as a result of a particularly deadly combination of ill-advised government policy and natural disaster.45 This encompassed between 3 and 5 percent of the total North Korean population and brought unimaginable pain, suffering, and deprivation to the North. This constituted one of the worst famines suffered by an industrialized society in modern nation-state history, largely due to economic mismanagement. World Food Programme (WFP) appeals, which annually averaged over 920,000 metric tons (MT) from 1995 to 2001, helped to alleviate the situation, but the suffering was intense in North and South Hamgyŏng Provinces. There were reports of food riots and rumors of an assassination attempt against Kim, with one of his bodyguards allegedly attempting to shoot him in March 1998.46

Kim’s biggest failure related to botched efforts at economic reform. The North Korean attempt at economic opening, which started in July 2002, was a flawed effort, motivated more by the absence of government supplies (and therefore control) to sustain the public distribution system than by any genuine attempt at ending price controls, rationing, and allowing markets to take over. In simple terms, Kim did not stop government rationing because he wanted to transform North Korea into a free-market economy. He stopped the rationing because the government had no supplies, food, clothing, or rice left to ration. Once the supplies did become available again, Kim reinstituted the ration system as a form of political control. Moreover, on more than one occasion, the state issued unilateral redenomination of the national currency. Why? By redenominating the currency and allowing citizens to exchange only a fixed amount, the measure effectively wiped out the savings and extra cash made by North Koreans from entrepreneurial activities, thereby making them once again dependent on state handouts. Kim believed that political control is more important than economic growth. Kim was once asked about a proposal to bring Club Med to North Korea. The vacation business, famous for building resorts in out-of-the-way exotic and secluded places, could find many such places in the mountains and beaches in the North. The business could be a source of employment and revenues for a starving economy. Kim rejected the proposal because of the risks of exposing people to outsiders, and the fear of losing control. Bureaucrats were only interested in repairing the North’s economy as it was, rather than developing it through interaction with the outside world. In a conversation with the association of North Korean residents in Japan (Chosen Soren), Kim added, “We don’t want hordes of tourists to come here and spread AIDS.”47

Kim’s only positive accomplishment (he had many negative ones), aside from building nuclear weapons, was a short-lived makeover in his public image. This coincided with the June 2000 summit with South Korean president Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and his hosting of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October 2000. The North Korean leader demonstrated confidence, knowledge of world affairs, and wit in these meetings, which was displayed to the world. Whether or not this was a deliberate attempt to shed the “recluse” image he had garnered over the years, Kim told his South Korean counterpart that he had traveled the world secretly and that he was far from the strange, alien-like creature portrayed in Western media. Images of Kim smiling and laughing during the summit captivated a South Korean audience and started to change the way he was viewed. Once a rogue and sinister character, he was now perceived by average South Koreans as everything from “normal” to “statesman-like” to even “cuddly.” Time magazine was so taken by this new Kim that they named him “Asian of the Year” in 2000. Kim revealed to Albright that he surfed the Web and had an e-mail address. She described him as “an intelligent man who knew what he wanted. He was isolated, not uninformed . . . Despite his country’s wretched condition, he didn’t seem a desperate or even a worried man. He seemed confident.”48 Charles Kartman, who accompanied Secretary Albright on the trip and participated in talks with Kim, characterized him as:

A reasonable man, who was fully engaged with us for that very extensive period that Secretary Albright was with him . . . I never saw his attention wander. I never saw him lose the thread. I always found him to be completely on the point and with a lot of energy, and able to make decisions . . . our observation . . . was that this is a man you could do business with. He always seemed to be somebody who had a sense of humor, was personally attentive to the people that he was hosting . . . I hate to use the word, lest I be criticized later, but . . . I would say he was gracious.49

The poor state of the country was never the threat to Kim Jong-il’s longevity as leader; instead, it was his health. Kim reportedly suffered from a series of ailments. A number of these were connected with his heavy-drinking habits. Defectors who were Kim’s former bodyguards reported that in the 1970s Kim was an alcoholic and chain-smoker, and had heart and liver problems. He was occasionally pictured in the press wearing rather trendy dark sunglasses, but this was less a fashion statement than cataract problems. In the 1990s, rumors surfaced that he had diabetes and kidney problems. True or not, his health condition was bad enough that Kim told former PRC president Jiang Zemin in 2000 that he had quit smoking and drinking hard alcohol. Questions about his health were confirmed in August 2008, when he suffered a stroke. The leader disappeared from the public eye for several months. He did not appear in September 2008 at the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations of the founding of the DPRK. He also missed the celebration of the founding of the Korean Workers’ Party the following month. Rumors surfaced that Kim suffered a relapse in November 2008. (I once gave a speech to the annual convention of Korean-American spine and neurosurgeons in Washington, D.C. After the speech, one of the older neurosurgeons came up to me and told me that he was once asked by European colleagues to review an MRI scan of a brain that had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He was not told the identity of the patient, but only that the patient requested a second opinion from a Korean neurosurgeon. To this day, the doctor is convinced it was a scan of Kim’s stroke-stricken brain.) As speculation mounted that Kim was seriously ill, DPRK authorities released pictures showing Kim performing his and his father’s trademark “on-the-spot guidance,” but experts believed the pictures were Photoshopped. When Kim finally appeared at a televised party meeting, the severity of his health problems was clear. He had lost a great deal of weight and was walking with a limp. Those who traveled with former president Bill Clinton to meet with Kim Jong-il in 2009, on a mission to retrieve two American journalists who had been detained in North Korea, noted that Kim seemed lively and fully composed, but at the same time he walked with a limp and showed weakness and trembling on the left side—all telltale signs of a stroke victim. Kim’s subsequent public appearances in October 2010 made clear that at the age of sixty-eight, the leader was on the decline. In 2011, Chinese authorities ironically kept telling outsiders that Kim Jong-il’s health had improved so much that he had reportedly started drinking and smoking again. Pictures of a heavier-set Kim appeared in 2011 to validate the Chinese argument. But clearly these arguments were wrong and offered testament to how little even the Chinese knew about the situation inside Pyongyang.

Some may wonder why Kim Jong-il was never blamed for his terrible rule of the country. Leadership security in a paranoid dictatorship like North Korea is generally kept within the family. Very few have access to the leader, and an elaborate system of monitoring—not unlike those described in George Orwell’s 1984—ensures that there is no mutiny within the ranks. There were two rumored assassination attempts on the life of the Dear Leader by bodyguards (about the only people who could get close enough to Kim). A widely reported incident occurred in April 2004, when two parked trains filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel exploded at Ryongch’ŏn rail station, near the Chinese border, killing 170 and wounding hundreds. Kim Jong-il’s train passed through the same station nine hours earlier en route from China, which led many to believe this was an assassination attempt. Korean Central News Agency, which, as a security precaution, never reports on Kim’s movements, announced that Kim had returned safely to Pyongyang, presumably to dispel immediately any rumors that he had been killed.

Dynastic leadership succession in North Korea was never in doubt. Kim’s health problems from 2008 to 2011 made clear the need to prepare for the next power transition. Handing power over to a son, in North Korean minds, was the normal order of things. Madeleine Albright once asked Kim Jong-il over dinner what country’s model he admired. Unsurprisingly, Kim chose Thailand, because of its strong tradition of royalty and its fierce independence. (Thailand is the only small Asian country that was never colonized.) Indeed, shortly after Kim’s sixtieth birthday in 2002, Rodong Sinmun published a long editorial about how the final victory of the Revolution needed to be multigenerational—if it could not be accomplished by the Father, then it would be accomplished by the Son, and if not by the Son, then by the next generation. “The next generation” referred to one of the three Grandsons.

THE GRANDSONS

In April 2001, Japanese intelligence officials were tipped off that a “person of interest” would be entering their country from Singapore. A portly Asian man in his thirties arrived the next day at Narita Airport. He was sporting an expensive gold Rolex and was carrying a wad of U.S. currency. He was accompanied by two women, decked out in designer clothing and carrying Louis Vuitton handbags, and a young boy. Immigration officials knew something was strange, because the name in the man’s passport was “Pan Xiong” but the passport was from the Dominican Republic. (Even in today’s era of globalization, how many Chinese-Dominicans do you know?) They detained the party and took the man in for questioning. When asked the purpose of his visit, the man responded that he was taking his family to Disneyland. After about one hour of silence in response to a litany of questions by immigration officers, the man finally admitted to paying $2,000 for the fake passports. But the next utterance stunned the officers in the room. The detained man said, “I am Kim Jong-il’s son.” The eldest grandson of Great Leader Kim Il-sung then said he was hungry and asked if the officials could get him a hamburger.

In Confucian tradition, the eldest son usually inherits the family business. For quite some time, it was believed that Kim Chŏng-nam, the man who was eventually denied his visit to Tokyo Disneyland and deported from Narita International Airport, was groomed to be the eventual successor. The oldest of three sons by two women, he was the only child to be born out of Kim Jong-il’s relationship with Sŏng Hye-rim, the actress with whom Kim became smitten even though they were never officially married. Kim Jong-il showered the eldest son with gifts when he was a child, even as the illegitimate son of an extramarital affair. In the 1990s, Kim Chŏng-nam held posts in the military and in the party. But the Disneyland incident, among other problems, apparently put him out of contention, and since then, the eldest Grandson, now about forty years old, has spent more time living outside of North Korea. He has his father’s habits, enjoying gambling, fast cars, and alcohol, and for his efforts, he receives a reported $500,000 allowance that pays for his villa in Macau overlooking the South China Sea. Unlike his dad, he does not prefer Mao suits, instead sporting gold jewelry, stylish blue jeans, and designer shoes. He lives a bizarrely normal life, taking taxis to Korean restaurants or gambling in the Altira Hotel. Japanese reporters follow him like paparazzi and occasionally he will talk to them and to others who seek him out. In June 2010, when there was speculation about Kim Jong-il’s heart problems, he told Korean reporters that his father was in good health. When asked in 2009 whether the eldest Grandson of Great Leader Kim Il-sung was the heir to the throne or whether he was in hiding in Macau because of the Disneyland thing, he responded, “If I were the successor, would you see me in Macau wearing these casual clothes and taking a holiday? I am a North Korea citizen who has the right to live in Macau and China. To call me a fugitive from North Korea is completely incorrect.” In January 2012, Chŏng-nam became an outspoken critic of the power transfer from his dead father to his younger half-brother. Quoted in a book by a Japanese journalist, Chŏng-nam expressed skepticism that the regime could avoid collapse. Such signs of open discord were previously unheard of in the Kim clan.

That leaves the other two Grandsons of Kim Il-sung: Kim Chŏng-ch’ŏl (b. 1981) and Kim Jong-un (b. 1985 or 1987). It became clear in the fall of 2010 that the youngest of the boys, Kim Jong-un, is the heir apparent. Only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old (we do not know his age for certain), the young man was given the rank of a four-star general in September 2010 though he has never served in the military. He was also made the number two in the Central Military Committee of the Party. These two appointments were nearly identical to those of Kim Jong-il some twenty-five years earlier, and effectively signaled that the youngest Grandson of Kim Il-sung would be prepared as the next leader of the country. In February 2011, just days before his father’s seventieth birthday, he was given a senior position on the National Defense Commission, which is the top decision-making organ under Kim Jong-il’s military-first doctrine. Kim Jong-il’s sudden death in December 2011 forced an accelerated dynastic succession process that heaped additional titles on the junior Kim aimed at cementing his leadership position. Kim Jong-un was immediately anointed with the title of “Great Successor.” The official news agency later reported in December that he was made “Supreme Commander” of the Korean People’s Army. On December 31, Kim was referred to by a National Defense Commission statement as the “Great Leader” and new postage stamps were issued of him with his late father. The rush to build his leadership credentials have continued into 2012, including pictures of him meeting with military officials in the field (squeezing his rather rotund body into a tank cockpit) and new propaganda documentaries building the junior Kim’s very own cult of personality.

We know remarkably little about the Grandson of Kim Il-sung. If his father, Kim Jong-il, was enigmatic, the Grandson, or the “Great Successor,” is a black box. His coming-out party was an extraordinary session of the Korean Workers’ Party, the first since 1966, in September 2010, in which the world caught its first glimpse of the five feet, nine inch, two-hundred-plus-pound young man (175 cm, 90 kg) standing next to his aging father. Internet chat rooms in South Korea immediately started to make fun of the Young General, ridiculing his weight (in a country of starving people) and calling him the “Great Eater.” In North Korea, however, citizens knew even less about him, presumably because the government wants to control and mete out every piece of information and every image. A British friend of mine, who had taken his family to Pyongyang for a vacation (the family prides itself on choosing unusual vacation destinations) at the time of the party celebrations, struck up conversations with people leaving Kim Il-sung Square.

He asked them what they thought of the young leader, and they responded with superlatives about his intelligence and greatness, but they then asked my friend if he had seen pictures of Kim Jong-un. It was as if the next leader had been hidden from their view, like a god, up until his rushed unveiling after Kim Jong-il’s death. Then the government could not do enough to get as many images of the young leader out to the public as possible to avoid the perception of any gap in the dynastic succession. Kim Jong-un’s ubiquitous round face appeared in photos, films, posters, and paintings. For the outside world, the initial images were of a young man blubbering at his father’s funeral, and then standing reluctantly before a massive audience in Kim Il-sung Square, speechless but being presented to the nation as the Great Successor. These pictures were later replaced by the Grandson’s own trademark “on-the-site” inspections throughout the country, laughing with military soldiers and farmers just as his grandfather did. For the world, and for the North Korean people, Kim Jong-un’s appearance was clearly calculated to look like the spitting image of his grandfather some sixty years prior, when the Soviets first unveiled Kim Il-sung to the North Korean people. Some South Korean news reports claim that the new North Korean leader underwent cosmetic surgery to bring Kim Il-sung to life in the young man.

I believe that part of the reason for this has to do with the creation of a new ideology for Kim Jong-un that is like his grandfather’s. But it is also because the North Korean people still hold general affection for Kim Il-sung while they appear to be less enamored with Kim Jong-il, despite the mandatory wailing and grieving at the latter’s state funeral.

Promoted along with Kim Jong-un were his aunt Kim Kyŏng-hŭi and her husband Chang Sŏng-t’aek. Kim’s sister was made a four-star general in the People’s Army, and she holds a key position in the party’s Politburo. Chang Sŏng-t’aek was promoted to number two in the National Defense Commission in June 2010 and heads the Ministry of Public Security and the State Security Department, two powerful agencies. Ri Yŏng-ho, a younger general, in his sixties, was also promoted to a four-star general and placed on the Standing Committee and the Central Military Committee of the Party. This series of moves made clear the desire to keep leadership succession within the family, carefully balanced among the key agencies. General Ri is the exception to this family rule, but he remains graced by his close relationship to Kim Jong-il and Chang Sŏng-t’aek. These four individuals make up the collective core of the leadership to follow Kim Jong-il. Their positions represent a balance between the party and the military, which means an elevation of the Korean Workers’ Party’s status relative to the “military-first” years of Kim Jong-il. But there is no doubt as to who will lead in the end. The Grandson is the next great leader and the entire apparatus is designed to ease him into the position, which many believe to have been set up to compensate for a rushed leadership transition, given Kim Jong-il’s declining health.

WHO IS THIS not-yet-thirty-year-old “Great Successor”? The most interesting fact we know about him is that he spent part of his life being educated outside the cloistered North. He spent two years, from about 1998 to 2000, attending the Schule Liebefeld Steinhölzli, a German-language state school near Bern, Switzerland.50 I met a classmate of his who attended the school while her father, a South Korean, was working in the country. Sŏng-mi (pseudonym)51 recalled that there were not many Koreans or Asians in the city or at the school, so “everyone kind of knew each other, or knew when a new kid arrived.” The school was fairly small, with class sizes of about thirteen to fifteen students. One day, dinner conversation at Sŏng-mi’s table turned to news of the arrival of a new family from Korea. Her mom was surprised that she had not heard in advance about this, given the normally close-knit community of South Korean expatriate families, but then later heard from a Japanese parent at the school that the family was from North Korea. Sŏng-mi’s parents, naturally curious about the new family, looked to catch a glimpse of them at the daily pickup of children at the end of the school day. But the young boy’s folks never showed up. Instead, a black van arrived daily and whisked the boy off. Finally, parents’ day arrived, and Sŏng-mi’s family approached the boy at the reception and asked in Korean, “Are your parents here? We would like to meet them.” The boy responded curtly, “Uri ŏmma appa yŏgi ŏpsŏ” (“My parents are not here”)—with a heavy North Korean accent. The response surprised Sŏng-mi’s parents, because the boy used non-honorific Korean, which is an unusual sign of disrespect to elders in Korean society. This made Sŏng-mi angry and she thought ill of the boy.

Sŏng-mi remembers Kim Jong-un as a soft-spoken child. He went by an alias name, Pak Ŭn, and said his family worked at the North Korean embassy in Switzerland. Pak Ŭn always had another Korean boy as a companion at the school. The two were never apart. He participated in many of the activities at school, including sports (basketball) and drama. Sŏng-mi’s parents were curious as to whether Pak Ŭn’s folks would show up for the school play, but instead a woman in a black mink coat arrived, toting a top-of-the-line video camera. She taped the whole performance, presumably to send back to Pyongyang for viewing. Sŏng-mi lost interest in figuring out Pak Ŭn’s mysterious family. One day, she was on the school playground swings waiting for her parents to pick her up. Staring at her dangling feet above the ground, as kids tend to do on swings, she was startled when Pak Ŭn appeared behind her and said in Korean, without emotion, “Can I give you a push on the swing?” She turned away and said, “No.” He responded, “It’s okay, I can give you a push.” She responded, “Hajima!” (“Don’t do it!”). The Grandson of Kim Il-sung then gave her a gentle push anyway. She turned and yelled at him, “Hajimalago!” (“I told you not to do it!”), and screamed at him to go away. The young boy then quietly moved away with his head down, defiant in anger.

In 2009, a journalist and I once discussed the vacuum of information available on the Grandson, and concluded that the only way to learn more about Pak Ŭn was to track down former classmates and teachers at the Schule.52 Through interviews, he found that the Grandson arrived in Switzerland in August 1998 and lived in a flat on an unassuming suburban street conveniently located near a pizza parlor, bank, and market. A mother of one of Pak Ŭn’s schoolmates said that Pak told her son (now a chef in Austria) that his father was the leader of North Korea. As Sŏng-mi’s parents had discovered, no one could ever confirm this, because the parents never showed up at school events, substituted for by an array of embassy officials.

According to his friends, Pak Ŭn was not unlike your average teenager. He loved video games and action movies, and was a big NBA fan. He played pickup games regularly, and, by all accounts, was pretty good and very competitive. His idols, like his father’s, were Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and his room was filled with posters of Jordan, Toni Kukoc˘, and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers. He apparently has attended some NBA exhibition games in Europe.

Pak Ŭn’s German was not very good, so he took language courses to get up to speed. His German was decent by the time he left, and his schoolmates say that he also spoke some English. His curriculum was certainly different from what one might get in North Korea. He took classes on Swiss history from 1291; Swiss government and democracy; and a class on parties and elections, which included study of the U.S. 2000 presidential election campaign. He left as suddenly as he arrived: the schoolmates remembered that their basketball buddy disappeared in the middle of the school year without any notice. Teachers and administrators at the school were given no notice and have not heard from him since. As one classmate said, “He never came to school again. He totally disappeared . . . [w]e were just playing basketball—now he is going to be a dictator . . . I hope he is a good leader, but dictators are usually not that good.”53

The Grandson of Kim Il-sung returned to Pyongyang, where he enrolled in the military academy, graduating in 2006. The hagiography being created for him initially described him as the Young General with “twenty-first-century high-tech skills.” After Kim Jong-il’s death, his moniker became the Great Successor. It was reported in early 2011 that all North Korean citizens were required to watch a program about Kim Jong-un’s great leadership. He is described as a “genius” able to speak German, French, Italian, and English, and actively learning Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. The broadcast also explained that the Great Successor understands the need for the country to become a “self-sufficient nuclear power” after he learned of the aggression of American imperialism. Not to be outdone by the godlike acts of his father and grandfather, he was also reported to be encouraging farmers to grow more food and, on one of his on-the-spot inspections, the Great Successor miraculously created a new synthetic fertilizer that could grow fifteen thousand tons of wheat on a nine-thousand-square-meter (96,875-sq-ft) plot of land.54 He has been associated with projects developing the infrastructure of the country, including a hundred-thousand-unit housing project. His birthday in 2010 was celebrated in North Korea like a national holiday, where official propaganda described the “morning star of Venus shining brightly on Mount Paektu,” the mythical birthplace of the Korean race.

The Great Successor has spent much of his time building credentials with two key constituencies: the DPRK military and China. Just as his father needed military credibility to fulfill his role as a leader of the Revolution, the Grandson, according to press reports, built his around belligerent acts including the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, killing forty-six sailors. South Korean intelligence leaked to newspapers that Kim and his son gave medals to the submarine unit responsible for the torpedo attack. In October 2010, South Korean press also attributed the unprovoked North Korean artillery shelling of a South Korean island Yeonpyeong to the building of Kim Jong-un’s credentials. It was reported that the Grandson visited the artillery units that shelled the island, and that within North Korea propaganda spread that the Great Successor is an artillery expert and is well-versed in battle tactics of conventional military defense. The Great Successor also visited training exercises at the missile site where the North launched its largest barrage of ballistic missile tests in July 2006 in protest against the Bush administration’s policies. On his birthday in January 2012, state-run media broadcast a new documentary in a frenzied effort to further build the junior Kim’s military credentials. The program claimed that Kim Jong-un helped his father to coordinate the April 2009 ballistic missile test (which slapped away the Obama administration’s initial efforts at engagement). In the missile-test control room with Kim Jong-il, the Great Successor was reported to have proclaimed, “I had determined to enter a war if the enemies dared to intercept [our missile].” The broadcast contained images of Kim Jong-un riding a white horse (something his father was depicted doing in propaganda paintings), driving a tank, playing pilot in the cockpit of an airplane, and participating in a firing exercise, “making the New Year’s first sound of gunfire.” Kim Jong-un has spent an inordinate amount of time kowtowing to Chinese officials as well, meeting with virtually every high- and low-level delegation that came to North Korea. These efforts have been reciprocated by the Chinese. In the immediate aftermath of Kim Jong-il’s death, at a dinner in Georgetown, a senior ROK foreign ministry official related to me that the Chinese called in the ambassadors of several countries in Beijing, including the ROK and Japan. The Chinese message to these envoys was that the leadership transition to the junior Kim was under way, that all parties should exercise restraint, and that no one should disrespect the autonomy of the DPRK. This pissed off the ROK official to no end because China was essentially behaving as if the North were a new province of its own rather than as sovereign Korean territory.

AN ENLIGHTENED LEADER?

The unanswered question still remains as to whether the Grandson’s education in Switzerland influenced his thinking about his own country. Life in Liebefeld and Bern could not have been more antithetical to that in North Korea: an open and direct democracy in which citizens exercise national referendum to contest the government. A presidency that rotates every year. Constitutionally and in practice, the state guarantees freedom of expression, religion, assembly, and association. It has a firmly entrenched rule of law, a wholly independent judiciary, and legally protects the rights of religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities. It is a system in which, with enough signatures, even the voters can initiate legislation. At $56,370 per capita GDP, Switzerland boasts the world’s third-highest level of individual wealth,55 has the eighth-freest press in the world, and in 2009 was ranked by Transparency International as the fifth-least corrupt country on earth.56 Does this experience make a difference in the mentality of Kim Il-sung’s Grandson? The education director in Liebefeld believes so. “There is a big difference between attending a school in a free country and a school where everyone has to salute,” said the director. “[Education] is a question of culture.” He believes the next leader of North Korea “will take something away that will have an effect on his life.” Do we have an enlightened leader?

Probably not. His youth is not the issue. After the Korean War, Stalin picked Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea, at the tender age of thirty-three. Kim Jong-il began climbing the party ladder when he was thirty years old, and was anointed as the successor to his father at the age of thirty-eight. For the Kim family dynasty, picking them young is the natural requisite for forty to fifty years of continuous rule.

No, the real problem is the system itself. Even if the young Kim is enlightened, there are three obstacles. True reform in a post–Kim Jong-il era would require the courage to loosen the very political instruments of control that allow the regime its iron grip on the people. The dilemma the young Kim faces is something I wrote about long ago in Foreign Affairs, referring to Kim Jong-il—that he needs to reform to survive, but the process of opening up will undeniably lead to the end of his political control. For North Korea, this was perhaps the most important lesson of the end of the Cold War.57

Even if Kim Jong-un were an enlightened leader who has the courage to attempt such reform, he would be dealing with a generation of institutions and people that are the most isolated in North Korean history. The generals, party officials, and bureaucrats of the Cold War era were far more worldly than those of the post–Cold War era. Kim Il-sung’s generation was able to travel freely to Eastern bloc countries. Kim used to spend time with Erich Honecker in East Germany and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. By contrast, Kim Jong-il’s generation saw Ceausescu get executed in the streets, the Chinese Communist Party nearly lose power to student demonstrations in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and dictators in the Middle East falling to the Arab Spring. The generation of leadership the young Grandson will inherit sees nothing comforting about the outside world. They are afraid of their own shadow. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the way the regime responded to the demonstrations in Egypt in 2011. North Korean authorities banned all news of the public revolt that toppled the Mubarak government. To the extent that it was reported, the North described the protests as being generated by anti-American demonstrators. The regime also banned all forms of public and private gatherings, including in restaurants and open-air markets. This paranoia clearly stemmed from the uncomfortable parallels to their own situation that they might have seen. Kim Jong-il and Hosni Mubarak both ran dictatorships. The two were friends, which was one of the reasons why Orascom, an Egyptian telecom firm, got the exclusive contract for North Korea’s cell phone market. And just as Kim had plans to hand power over to his son, Mubarak planned to do so with his son, Gamal, albeit unsuccessfully.

Finally, despotic regimes like North Korea cannot survive without ideology to justify their iron grip. And as I discussed earlier in the book, the ideology that accompanies the Great Successor’s rise appears to look backward rather than forward. “Neojuche revivalism” constitutes a return to a conservative and hard-line juche (self-reliance) ideology of the 1950s and 1960s—harkening back to a day when the North was doing well relative to the now richer and democratic South. Neojuche revivalism is laced with sŏn’gun (military-first) ideology that features the North’s emergence as a nuclear weapons state (Kim Jong-il’s one accomplishment during his rule). The revolution in North Korea died long ago but the Great Successor will be forced to cling to the core but outdated ideological principles that worked during the Cold War. It is no coincidence that Kim Jong-il frequented visits in his last two years of life to factory towns that used to be the center of North Korea’s mass worker mobilization (Ch’ŏllima) movements of the 1950s. It is no coincidence that NKEconWatch’s Web site, which has the best Google Earth imagery of the North, has reported the rebuilding of chemical and vinylon factories that were the heart of Cold War–era Pyongyang’s now-decrepit economy.

The Great Successor has also been calling for an agricultural revolution similar to that pursued in both the South and the North in the 1960s and 1970s, stressing greater mass labor mobilization to meet production targets. There are reports of sweeping changes in economic laws designed to strengthen the government’s central control. Legal statutes that had previously allowed for some innovativeness and entrepreneurship at the local levels have been completely erased and replaced with provisions calling for central government control over all decisions. All housing and food supplies are to be controlled by the state. All residents in Pyongyang are to carry, at all times, their government-issued residency cards. As one expert, Kim Yong-hyŏn of Dongguk University in South Korea, described, the regime is seeking tighter internal control rather than economic reform.58 Public executions in North Korea more than tripled in the past year. The army reportedly has shoot-to-kill orders for unauthorized attempts to cross the Yalu or Tumen Rivers into China. Public bulletin boards carry government warnings banning the use of Chinese-made cell phones or foreign currency under the threat of death. The number of inmates in North Korean gulags has increased disproportionately.

As a general rule, brittle dictatorships do not implement reform of their systems during periods of leadership transition except if the dictator is a strong, dynamic, and charismatic individual: Deng Xiaoping in China. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. The not-yet-thirty-year-old boy-leader, the Great Successor, does not yet meet this bar. He and his coterie of supporters will have their hands full transacting a rushed dynastic succession, let alone entertaining grand thoughts about fundamental transformation. Some believe that this leadership succession has been carefully planned out in excruciating detail after Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008. They point to the well-executed state funeral, and the rush of propaganda thereafter, building the new personality cult of the Great Successor. Undeniably some planning must have taken place, but Kim Jong-il had twenty years or more to prepare for his inheritance of the family business. Kim Jong-un had barely twenty months. The state funeral went off without a hitch because the North already had a playbook for this event when Kim Il-sung died in 1994 (even dusting off the same 1976 Lincoln Continental hearses). In North Korea, it is not possible for anyone, even members of the Kim family, to say “Hey guys, let’s prepare a plan for when Kim Jong-il dies.” This is a country where an undusted portrait of the leader can get you thrown into a gulag. Based on past precedent, it is safe to say that the powers-that-be in Pyongyang thought they would have at least five to ten years to ease the Grandson into position. Now they are making up the playbook as they go. When Kim Jong-il took over, it was literally years before he came out into the open as the leader. This was largely because he was already running the country on a daily basis for at least fifteen years prior. The frenzied propaganda campaign that put Kim Jong-un in front immediately after his father’s passing reflects less certainty and more insecurity about a rushed transition process, and the need to show cosmetically that all is working inside Pyongyang. Yet even if a path for this third North Korean dynastic succession is laid out in the coming months and years, the road leads to a dead end because of the ideology. This revivalist ideology leaves little room for reform and opening, because it blames the past decade of poor performance on “ideological pollution” stemming from experiments with reform. The Grandson of Kim Il-sung faces a clear dilemma: the state he inherits is not sustainable under this new neojuche revivalist ideology; yet it is the only ideology that can legitimate the new leadership.

THE INFORMATION IN these pages only scratches the surface of the enigmatic Kim family’s rule of North Korea. We know less about the inner workings of this family than we do about any other sought-after intelligence target, including the late Osama Bin Laden. While it is undeniable that the Father, Kim Il-sung, governed North Korea in dictatorial fashion, he also ruled during a period of North Korean greatness, at least in North Korean eyes, when the regime was strong and the steadfast Communist nation was buttressed by Soviet and Chinese patronage. The Son, Kim Jong-il, was responsible for creating the cult of personality of his father and of himself. He then oversaw two decades of North Korean decline, including famine and deprivation the likes of which the citizens of the country have never seen since the end of the Korean War. The Son’s militarization of the political leadership and creation of nuclear weapons remains his only contribution to the state’s history. The Grandson, Kim Jong-un, inherits a country in disrepair, and despite his cosmopolitan upbringing (relative to other North Koreans) is constrained by a state ideology that looks backward to his grandfather’s days rather than forward. And it builds on the nuclear legacy of his father. Reform and opening in this neojuche ideology is equated with spiritual pollution. This new synthetic of an ideology ensures that the Grandson of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung shall be the true emperor with no clothes.