"The New York Times Magazine" Cover Story.
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October 19, 2003
The Last Emperor
By PETER MAASS
The Dear Leader is a workaholic. Kim Jong Il sleeps four hours a night, or if he works through the night, as he sometimes does, he sleeps four hours a day. His office is a hive of activity; reports cross his desk at all hours. Dressed as always in his signature khaki jumpsuit, he reads them all, issuing instructions to aides, dashing off handwritten notes or picking up the phone at 3 a.m. and telling subordinates what should lead the news broadcasts or whom to dispatch to a prison camp. His micromanaging style is less Caligula, with whom he has often been compared, and more Jimmy Carter on an authoritarian tear.
The Dear Leader, as the North Korean media refer to him, wishes to be viewed as a modern leader. He has boasted to visitors that he has three computers in his office, though it's not known if he operates them himself or has aides who do so. His eldest son is reputed to be a computer whiz and, like sons the world over, is credited with bringing his father into the digital age. When Madeleine K. Albright, then the secretary of state, visited North Korea in 2000, Kim asked her, as he said farewell, to give him the State Department's e-mail address.
Because of weakening eyesight, the Dear Leader rarely reads newspapers; for keeping abreast of world affairs, he relies on television. It is a safe bet that he is well aware of the uproar caused by his government's confirmation, earlier this month, that it has begun making nuclear bombs from reprocessed plutonium. In a meeting a few years ago with a group of South Korean media executives, Kim explained that he began watching South Korean television in 1979. A media junkie, he also watches NHK from Japan, as well as CCTV from China and CNN. Having led his nation into chronic poverty and famine, what does he make of the enormous wealth he sees in the broadcasts and commercials?
Ordinary North Koreans would be sent to the gulag for watching Western TV, but the Dear Leader may do as he pleases, as all dictators may do as they please, and it pleases him to watch television. He especially enjoys watching tapes of the latest movies from Hollywood, some of which are believed to be sent to Pyongyang in diplomatic pouches from North Korean missions in New York and Beijing.
Kim is not known to speak Japanese or Chinese, so interpreters presumably assist him with foreign-language broadcasts; on any given evening, his interpreter might be his favorite mistress, Ko Young Hee, who was born in Japan and is assumed to speak Japanese. When Kim watches Russian television, as he says he does, he may not need an interpreter, because he spent his early years in the Soviet Union; when Russians visit, he sings them Soviet military songs. As for English, he knows at least a few words. A Japanese man who worked as Kim's personal chef wrote in a recent memoir that the Dear Leader always asked for extra helpings of toro, his favorite cut of sushi, by saying ''one more'' in English.
The Dear Leader has always been a master of details. Although it was not until 1994, upon the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, that Kim Jong Il became the official ruler of North Korea, he was all but running the country for years before that. Appointments to any senior post were made by him, whether in the Korean Workers Party (which controls all government institutions) or the Korean People's Army. Decisions on all manner of issues -- from the gifts of food and electronic goods that party officials and commoners received on national holidays to the direction and scope of the country's clandestine nuclear-weapons programs -- were made by ''the party center,'' as Kim was called, in whispers, in the years before his father's death. The choicest reward that he doled out was a Mercedes-Benz with a license plate that begins ''2-16,'' in reference to his birthday, Feb. 16.
The Dear Leader's political skills, underestimated by foreign observers until recently, are beginning to register now that he has begun meeting foreigners on a regular basis and now that his regime, along with Iran, is one of two surviving members of the ''axis of evil'' proclaimed by President Bush. Albright's delegation spent more than 12 hours with Kim over two days in October 2000, half of that time in negotiations and the other half at dinners and ceremonial functions. During one negotiating session, Kim was presented with a list of 14 technical questions related to his missile program; the Americans expected him to pass the list to advisers who would respond later. Instead, Kim went down the list, one question after another, and answered most of them himself.
Indeed, the Dear Leader, who turned 62 this year, knows quite a bit about the world around him. And after decades of being nearly clueless, the world around him is gradually getting to know the Dear Leader, too.
he Bush administration is trying to figure out how to end Kim's regime, or at least to neutralize it. This is proving to be an extraordinarily difficult task, since the regime is far more resilient than anyone expected and far more dangerous.
North Korea has possessed short-range missiles for years, but was never known to have long-range missile capability. Then in 1998 North Korea stunned the intelligence community by launching a three-stage rocket bearing a satellite. The C.I.A. says that it believes these Taepodong-1 rockets could be used as missiles to reach the United States. The rocket veered off course after launch, so the North Koreans obviously have some kinks to work out. Even so, Washington is worried, not only about North Korea being able to launch an intercontinental attack but also about the North Koreans selling their missile technology to other regimes. North Korea is believed to have provided missiles to Pakistan in exchange for nuclear technology. And according to a recently released report by David Kay, the C.I.A. adviser on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, North Korea agreed in 1999 to a missile deal with Baghdad that was aborted late last year.
No one is sure of North Korea's own nuclear intentions. In 1994, facing the threat of a pre-emptive attack by the United States, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for a package of foreign aid and energy supplies. At the time, the C.I.A. publicly estimated that North Korea might already possess an atom bomb. The 1994 agreement fell apart in 2002 after North Korea kicked out U.N. nuclear inspectors who were keeping watch over 8,000 plutonium rods that could be reprocessed into weapons-grade material.
During the past year, North Korea strongly hinted that the rods were being reprocessed, and on Oct. 2 the regime announced, more directly than before, that the reprocessing was under way and that its ''nuclear deterrent force'' was being expanded. Experts say that if all 8,000 rods are reprocessed, North Korea could make perhaps 20 nuclear bombs, but it's not certain whether bombs have yet been made; bluffing is an integral element of Kim's nuclear poker game.
Along with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, the United States began the first round of so-called six-party talks in Beijing with North Korea in late August, and a second round may be held in November. Whether those talks take place, and what happens if they do, depends greatly on whether the Bush administration decides to offer incentives for Kim to disarm or whether it decides to isolate him further. The underlying issues are quite stark: Can Kim be reformed? Can he be deposed? At the heart of the matter is this: Who is Kim Jong Il?
Dictators come in different strains, like poisons. Some are catastrophically toxic; others, less so. Quite often, the harm a dictator will cause is associated with an internal drive to violence or a paranoia that begets violence or a mixture of both. Saddam Hussein is a case in point; his personal viciousness is legendary. Dictators of this sort are easy to read and easy to despise because they are obvious killers.
But what is to be made of a dictator who is charming, as Kim can be, and has never been known personally to raise a weapon or even a hand against anyone? This can be a no-less-dangerous strain of dictator, and in the world today, Kim Jong Il is its most striking example. Though friendly with important visitors, Kim is vicious to his own people. An estimated two million of them died during a preventable famine in the 1990's, and several hundred thousand are in prison and labor camps; many have been executed.
While I was a reporter in South Korea, from 1987 to 1990, it was common to view Kim as an erratic playboy; tales of his reclusiveness and tastes for women and wine were abundant. He was, it seemed, a nut job, incapable of holding North Korea together once his father died. While Kim Il Sung was alive, Kim Jong Il avoided the spotlight. North Koreans did not even hear his voice until a broadcast in 1992, when at a ceremony for the army's 60th anniversary, he said, ''Glory to the people's heroic military!'' Six words. It would be many years before he was heard from again.
Kim Jong Il has never granted an interview to a Western reporter, and visits to North Korea by Western journalists are exceedingly rare. (I visited Pyongyang in 1989 but was refused a visa this time around.) However, since 2000 a flood of information has emerged from South Koreans, Russians and Americans who have met the Dear Leader and from high-level defectors who have escaped his orbit. What emerges from these sources is a picture of a dictator who is not crazy like Idi Amin or bloodthirsty like Saddam Hussein. Kim can be courteous, he is very intelligent and he doesn't drink nearly as much as he is rumored to. Nor is he the playboy that the popular myth makes him out to be.
Instead, his dictatorship mixes high technology with Confucian traditions: a kind of cyberfeudalism. It is an ideology that has been catastrophic for the people of North Korea.
It was the summer of 2000, and Kim Jong Il was in a sunny mood. He had just held a summit meeting in Pyongyang with Kim Dae Jung, South Korea's president at the time. The South Koreans, in order to make the meeting happen, had provided $100 million in under-the-table payments, which meant North Korea's usually bare treasury was temporarily not so bare. The cash had created a brief thaw in relations, and on Aug. 5 a delegation of South Korean media executives, including the heads of its television networks and newspapers, arrived at Pyongyang airport.
On their first night in North Korea's capital, the visitors from Seoul were treated to a feast at a banquet hall. Wine from Bordeaux was served, along with multiple courses of Korean food, including kalbi-kuk, a meat stew. The guests ate with copper chopsticks, and their dinner lasted for four hours, presided over at the head table by the Dear Leader. Seated to his right was Choe Hak Rae, then publisher of Hankyoreh Shinmun, a newspaper known for its friendly coverage of North Korea.
As Choe recalls, Kim was ebullient, acting more like a Broadway producer with a smash hit on his hands than a dictator running a repressive and impoverished regime. Kim told jokes and casually conversed about everything from horses to missiles. When a fawning aide stopped by the head table and began praising his boss, Kim told him to skip the formalities -- his precise words, in Korean, were ''Cut it out'' -- and pour wine for their brothers from South Korea. He cried out ''Straight!'' when it came time for a toast, meaning that they should drain their glasses, but he only sipped his own wine. Kim told his guests that his doctors had suggested he cut down on liquor. Dictators can do many things, but they cannot keep their livers young forever.
The conversation turned to hobbies. Kim is an avid equestrian and told Choe that his best thoughts occur on horseback. He prefers Orlovs, a Russian breed, and likes to ride them as fast and as far as they can go.
The subject of war was raised, delicately. Why, Choe inquired, was North Korea's government spending its scarce resources on ballistic missiles instead of education or other social programs that would directly benefit its starving citizens? The Dear Leader did not hesitate to reply. ''The missiles cannot reach the United States,'' he said, ''and if I launch them, the U.S. would fire back thousands of missiles and we would not survive. I know that very well. But I have to let them know I have missiles. I am making them because only then will the United States talk to me.''
The North Korean leader took a liking to Choe and invited him to return with his family, offering to show them around and ride horses with them. When Choe left Pyongyang a few days later, Kim shook his hand at a farewell luncheon and said, with great emotion: ''Keep your promise. Come next spring with your family.''
Choe has not returned -- the North-South thaw has chilled a bit -- but North Korean officials have passed on to him a stream of entreaties from the Dear Leader. The gist of the messages, according to Choe, whom I met in Seoul in August, is quite simple: ''Why haven't you come?''
ccording to the official version of his life story, Kim was born on Feb. 16, 1942, in a log cabin on Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula. When he was born, the official version goes, the sky was brightened by a star and a double rainbow.
The truth is that Kim was born a year earlier in the Soviet Union, at an army base near Khabarovsk, in the Soviet far east, not far from the short border shared by the two countries. His father was stationed there as the commander of a Korean battalion in the Soviet Army 88th Brigade, which engaged in reconnaissance missions against Japanese troops. Because it would be inconvenient, for reasons of Korean nationalism, to have Kim born on foreign soil, his place and date of birth have been fabricated in official biographies.
The biographers also make no mention of Kim's childhood name -- Yura, which is Russian and was used through his high-school years. Kim had a younger brother who also had a Russian nickname, Shura. In 1945, after Japan was defeated and the northern half of Korea occupied by Soviet troops, Kim Il Sung was taken to Pyongyang by his Soviet benefactors and installed as the leader of North Korea. (The official version has Kim Il Sung heroically leading Korean guerrillas in a rout of the Japanese.) A few months later, the boys moved to Pyongyang, where their younger sister, Kim Kyung Hee, was born.
Shura died in 1948 in a drowning accident while swimming in a pond with Kim Jong Il. In 1949, Kim's mother, Kim Jong Sook, died while giving birth to a stillborn child. Though well cared for -- their father, after all, was North Korea's leader -- Kim Jong Il and his little sister became de facto orphans: their mother dead, their father busy laying the groundwork for his socialist paradise. In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and the children were sent to the safety of Manchuria, where they stayed until the war ended in 1953. Kim was learning to survive on his own, which meant using his wits.
Back in Pyongyang, he attended Namsan Senior High School, where the ruling elite's children were educated; he often rode a motorcycle to class. Even then, he was a student of power. According to Hwang Jang Yop, who was a top aide to Kim Il Sung, the younger Kim showed an early interest in politics. (Hwang defected from North Korea in 1997, so his memoir, published in South Korea, is hardly an official hagiography.) In 1959 Hwang accompanied Kim Il Sung to Moscow, and although Kim Jong Il was only a senior in high school, he went along, too.
''Kim Jong Il was intelligent and full of curiosity, asking me many questions,'' Hwang wrote. ''Despite his young age, he already harbored political ambitions. He paid special attention to his father. . . . Every morning he would help his father to get up and put on his shoes.'' In the evening, Hwang wrote, when Kim Il Sung returned from a day of official meetings, Kim Jong Il assembled his father's staff ''and had them report to him about the things that happened during the day. He then proceeded to give orders.''
In 1964, Kim graduated with a degree in political economy from Kim Il Sung University, an elite institution where, according to a South Korean biographer, he was addressed as ''the premier's son.'' He went to work in the central committee of the Korean Workers Party, first as a ministerial assistant, swiftly becoming a senior official in the propaganda and agitation department, which controlled much of the party's agenda.
Kim was working his way up the system, and working the system, but also looking over his shoulder. Nothing in his rise to power would be easy or preordained. Dynastic succession was far from inevitable, and even if there was to be a dynasty, it was not clear whether Kim would be its beneficiary. His uncle, Kim Young Ju, was a senior government official. More threatening, however, was Kim's new stepmother: Kim Song Ae, a typist whom Kim Il Sung married in the early 1960's.
According to accounts from defectors, as well as from Chinese and Soviet visitors to North Korea, Kim Jong Il did not get along with his stepmother. There are unconfirmed stories that he tore her face out of pictures. Kim Song Ae became a member of the central committee of the Korean Workers Party, giving her a position from which to influence succession. She had children with Kim Il Sung, and one of their sons, Kim Pyong Il, was viewed as a possible heir because of his intelligence and likeness to his father. (Famously, Kim Jong Il was several inches shorter than his father, an inconvenience that led him to wear platform shoes.)
As he moved to secure his position, Kim needed to remain in the good graces of his father while outmaneuvering his stepmother, half-brother, uncle and anyone else -- particularly the country's powerful generals -- who wished to lead North Korea.
Kim Il Sung's regime did not take long to veer from Communist orthodoxy and become a personality cult of the sort perfected by Stalin in the Soviet Union. In the early 1970's, North Koreans began wearing lapel pins bearing the likeness of the Great Leader, as the official media described Kim Il Sung; he was portrayed as, basically, infallible. The elite was purged of anyone with wavering loyalty or anyone who might develop wavering loyalties; Kim Il Sung placed close relatives at his side.
During this period, Kim Jong Il was working hard to smooth his way to power.
''I had an impression that he was implementing his plans to get rid of even those very close to Kim Il Sung, including his uncle,'' Hwang wrote. ''In order to show his father that he was the most loyal, he singled out people near Kim Il Sung. Arguing that these people were not loyal and citing doubts about their ideology or competency, he would relentlessly attack and remove them.''
Until recently, conventional wisdom held that through the 70's and 80's Kim Jong Il filled his nights with parties and days with terrorism. In 1987, two North Korean agents placed a bomb aboard a Korean Air Lines flight, killing all 115 people on board. One agent, a young woman, was caught and said after extradition to Seoul that her controllers told her the attack was ordered by Kim Jong Il.
Whatever his role in terrorism, it has become clear that Kim Jong Il was running North Korea well before his ailing father died in 1994, at the age of 82, of an apparent heart attack. In the years before his death, according to Hwang, ''Kim Il Sung was not the Kim Il Sung of years past. Most of his vitality had disappeared, and he was turning into an old man concerned only with successfully handing over power to Kim Jong Il.''
Many North Korea experts believe Kim Jong Il stayed in the background for the sake of appearances: in a Confucian society, a son must defer, publicly, to his father. If Kim Jong Il moved too rashly, he might have engendered resentment from elderly members of the military whose backing or quiescence he needed.
One way he cemented his hold on power was to do as his father did: place close relatives in influential positions. Kim's sister, Kim Kyung Hee, became a powerful figure within the Korean Workers Party and has been referred to in the government media as ''First Lady.'' Her husband, Chang Song Taek, heads the party's organizational department. His brother, Chang Song U, commands the army district that defends Pyongyang.
Kim's control over the military and his insinuation of loyalists into key command positions are a linchpin of his hold on power. He travels often within North Korea, particularly to military bases, because, as he told the South Korean media chiefs, ''my power comes from the military.'' Though he has many posts, including general secretary of the Korean Workers Party, the one that truly counts is his chairmanship of the National Defense Commission, which controls the armed forces.
im's regime is best understood as an imperial court, clouded in intrigue, not unlike the royal households that ruled Japan, China and, throughout most of its existence, Korea itself. Until the 20th century, Korea was led by feudal kings, notably the Yi dynasty. By creating a personal and uncaring regime, Kim Il Sung wasn't stealing a page from only Stalin; he was also stealing it from Korean history, a fact that helps explain its durability.
''North Korea is a semifeudal society that is still based on traditional Korean values,'' says Alexandre Mansourov, a scholar at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies who was a Soviet diplomat based in Pyongyang in the 1980's. ''There are traces of modernity, but if you look at the structure of thinking, it is very traditional, in a medieval sense.''
A hallmark of emperors is lavish court entertainment in the face of poverty or distress in their domains. Kim Jong Il appeared to be cut from this imperial cloth. Through the 70's and 80's, stories emerged from North Korea of wild parties Kim Jong Il held, attended by beautiful women and drunken men. One of the finest accounts of that era comes from Choi Eun Hee, a popular South Korean actress who was kidnapped from Hong Kong in 1978 and bundled off to North Korea. Kim was disappointed with the backward state of North Korea's film industry, so he tried to jump-start it by ordering the kidnapping of Choi and, shortly thereafter, her husband, Shin Sang Ok, a director in Seoul.
After they were taken to Pyongyang, he explained to them, in a conversation that they surreptitiously recorded, ''I just said, 'I need those two people, so bring them here,' so my comrades just carried out the operation.'' Eight years later, after making a number of films in North Korea, Choi and Shin escaped while visiting Vienna.
In a memoir she wrote with her husband, ''Kidnapped to the North Korean Paradise,'' which has not been published in English, Choi recalls being woken one morning at 5 at the guarded villa where Kim had placed her. Her controller told her to get dressed quickly, but wouldn't say why. Within minutes, a Mercedes arrived at the villa and whisked her into central Pyongyang, to a building used for Kim Jong Il's parties.
''As I entered,'' Choi wrote, ''I was assaulted with the pungent odor of alcohol. Farther inside, I saw quite a spectacle. Forty or 50 people apparently had partied all night. The men were drunk, and there were several women I had never seen before.''
They perked up when the actress arrived. She was prevailed upon to have a drink, then another and another. The Dear Leader was not in mint condition; his eyes were bloodshot, and his speech was slurred. He had apparently been drinking all night long.
''A band was performing in the front of the room,'' Choi wrote. ''All the girls were in their 20's. Kim Jong Il, drunk, gave a string of requests. Songs changed according to his request. The girls looked tired. He asked me to conduct the band. I declined, but then the others joined in on the request: 'Comrade Choi, our beloved leader doesn't let just anybody conduct the band. It's a great honor. Do it.'''
So she did it. She soon felt ill from the alcohol, and Kim Jong Il ordered one of the women to take her to a room upstairs to rest. She fell asleep on a sofa, but was soon woken by a senior party official. ''I felt lips on my cheek,'' she recalled. She slapped the official and told him to get lost.
Accounts of this sort gave the impression, outside North Korea, that Kim Jong Il was no more competent to take charge of his homeland than Hugh Hefner. Now, however, his bacchanalian ways are being viewed from a different, subtler perspective. As anyone who has spent time with South Korean or Japanese politicians knows, boozing and womanizing are an integral part of their political culture. Your drinking buddy is your political ally. It is the equivalent, in Tokyo and Seoul, of jogging with George W. Bush. Bonds are forged; loyalties, rewarded.
END OF PART ONE |
