Kim Jong-Il, Revised and Updated: Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader, Revised and Updated Edition

By Michael Breen

An expert on North Korea sheds new light on the enigmatic tyrant

From his goose-stepping military parades to his clownish macho swagger, North Korea's Kim Jong-il is an odd amalgam of political cartoon and global menace. In charge of a nuclear arsenal he's threatened to use against the U.S. and Japan, the man, his motives, and the mechanisms of his absolute control over a country of twenty-three million people remains shrouded in mystery.

In this second edition of his bestselling Kim Jong-il, Michael Breen, a leading expert on North Korea, dispels common myths and fallacies about the so-called "Dear Leader," while turning a spotlight on the man to reveal his true nature and the nature of his hold over a country ravaged by poverty and famine.

• Looks at Kim from a broad perspective, unlike most other books that cater exclusively to those interested in policymaking and international relations
• Features new information about succession plans, as well as the latest scoop on the mounting pressure among world leaders to thwart North Korea's nuclear ambitions
• Illustrated with rare photographs of Kim and his regime

Highly accessible and suitable for anyone interested in learning more about North Korea, it's government, and its leader, Kim Jong-il unravels the mysteries, the myths, and the fallacies about the man in charge in ways that will entice even the harshest critics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118153802

Michael Breen

MICHAEL BREEN is a writer and consultant who first went to Korea as a correspondent in 1982. He covered North and South Korea for several newspapers, including the Guardian (UK), the Times (UK), and the Washington Times. He lives in Seoul.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Dark Country

The first time I went to North Korea, a diplomat told me, sotto voce, The lid’s going to blow off this place. That was in April 1989. Living there made him an expert. Later that year, the pot of revolution would boil over elsewhere. A democratic revolt tore through Eastern Europe, ending decades of communist rule and Soviet control. In China, students called for political reform and occupied Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square for a few giddy weeks before a merciless military crackdown. But none of this prompted the slightest change for North Koreans. More than 20 years later, their lid remains firmly on.

Why? The answer lies with one man, Kim Jong-il. His story reveals why the North Koreans have not dumped their brand of communism onto the ash heap of history despite the example in prosperous, free South Korea of a better way to be Korean. It is not a story easily pieced together. Information that circulates normally in other countries is classified in North Korea. Hence the rush in 2007 by Western policy makers and reporters to buy a detective novel set in North Korea and written by a former intelligence official and full of tantalizingly accurate details, such as the fact that North Korea had years ago built apartment blocks from East German blueprints.¹ What we outsiders do find out is frequently mangled by misunderstanding. The difficulty with North Korea is both detail and interpretation.

In consequence, North Korea plays the outside world, intentionally or not, like a yo-yo. We get pulled in with expectation and cast out, time and time again. For example, relations warmed up in 2000, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung visited the North Korean capital of Pyongyang for a historic first-ever summit. The country’s plutonium-based nuclear program had been mothballed for some time. Later the same year, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited. Hopes for reconciliation were higher than ever before. But all along, the North Koreans were pursuing a new, uranium-based nuclear program. It was a matter of time before the world knew. After the program was exposed by the United States, tensions worsened and then, in early 2003, North Korea became the first country to withdraw from the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the pact that prevents states other than the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France from having nuclear weapons. With American troops having ousted the regime in Afghanistan and soon to be engaged in Iraq, Washington was looking at North Korea through a new lens, no longer as a Cold War communist threat, but as a potential ally of rogue states and terrorist groups. The War on Terror had come to Cold War Korea, bringing with it the likelihood of conflict.

Koreans are familiar with such highs and lows. Their country has long been a land of drama and extremes. Its rift into pro-Soviet North and pro-American South in 1945 was the most extreme among divided nations in modern history. Three million Koreans died when the two sides went to war. In the South, you will find Asia’s most fervent Christians. The North produced a communist personality cult that was—and remains—more fanatic even than Mao’s or Stalin’s. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the North is still described as Stalinist. Exhausted by food shortages, it is economically shriveled. The rival South, meanwhile, is one of the world’s leading economies.

For all its bizarre fanaticism, North Korea was obscure until recently. After the 1950–1953 Korean War, it only occasionally poked out of its self-imposed isolation and grabbed attention. Each time, the reason was negative—assassination attempts on South Korean presidents; arrests of its diplomats for drug smuggling; training of terrorists; the seizure in 1968 of the USS Pueblo, a spy ship, and its crew; the axe killing of two American officers in the DMZ in 1976; the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994; famine; defectors. The only positive story I remember was when North Korea’s soccer players stunned the world by beating Italy to get into the quarter finals of the 1966 World Cup. The people of the English city of Middlesbrough, where they played their matches, became instant North Korea fans. The Koreans ran all around the pitch the entire match, a style that later became known as total football.

The country started to feature more in the world’s press in the late 1990s when its rogue nuclear program reached the desk of the president of the United States. Kim Jong-il is now sufficiently well known to be the butt of foreign talk show hosts and animators. This arrival was helped by a speechwriter’s afterthought. When the White House was preparing President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, North Korea got slipped into the now-famous Axis of Evil, alongside Iraq and Iran, apparently at the last minute and possibly for reasons of style and political correctness, not policy.² Somehow an axis of just two Muslim states didn’t seem complete. Many winced when they heard it, not because they didn’t think North Korea was evil, but because they knew it had no connection to Islamic terrorism, certainly not enough to warrant Axis of Evil membership. They thought this new label would ruin efforts underway in South Korea to coax it out of its hopeless isolation. The effect was to give this minor league rogue state a permanent spot on the U.S. presidential agenda.

Through all this, South Koreans and their friends have been able to reassure themselves that one day, at least, Kim will go the way of all flesh, and that change will come. In the fall of 2008, foreign governments were electrified by speculation that Kim was seriously ill, possibly incapacitated. Some speculated he had died. There was even a claim he had been dead for years.³ It transpired that he had had a stroke, from which he recovered.⁴ Then in 2010, the regime confirmed that Kim’s third son, Jong-un, was to be his heir. In contrast to his own slow motion grooming through the 1970s and 1980s before his assumption of power on his father’s death in 1994, Kim brought his son into the spotlight with astonishing rapidity. He was elevated from complete obscurity to four-star general and vice chairman of the Workers Party’s all-powerful Central Military Commission. This appointment could well mean more of the same for decades to come. There is no reason to assume the son of Kim Jong-il will be free to change course, any more than Kim Jong-il was able to shift away from the themes that characterized his father’s rule since 1948. That point was driven home in 2010 with two murderous attacks, one on a South Korean naval warship that killed 46 men, and the other on a South Korean island near the northern coast that killed four, followed by Pyongyang’s calls for peace talks.

Pool of Darkness

Compared to the normal flow of people and information between states, the country Kim leads is little known. It is unlit. Indeed, if you could scan northeast Asia from space every night—which the United States does, for obvious reasons—you’d pick up something odd. Amid the bright lights of China, South Korea, and Japan, North Korea is a pool of darkness. The black patch is home to 23 million people whose total available energy wouldn’t light up a single town across the border in South Korea. It’s not as if they can do without. The ocean’s giant fists have squeezed the Korean peninsula into mountain ridges, making four-fifths of it uninhabitable. It steams in midsummer and goes to 20 below in winter. You need air conditioning and central heating, as well as lights, to function. You also need fuel. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as it’s called, is an industrialized state, mechanized and heavy industry–friendly in the communist fashion, when in better days heroines in hard hats posed for pictures with their tractors. It’s also right in the middle of a booming region that never sleeps, a three-hour flight from 40 cities with populations of more than 1 million. It should hum, but much of its population is in rags, literally living off grass, and struggling in heartbreaking misery. Why?

For answers, consider the spots of lesser gloom. Like, say, the energy-guzzling Kumsusan Memorial Palace on the edge of the capital, Pyongyang. This was once the country’s White House, where the Republic’s founding leader, Kim Il-sung, lived and worked and received visitors. After his death in 1994, Kim Jong-il, his son, who had other quarters in the capital, had the imposing granite edifice turned into a mausoleum. Elaborate equipment has been installed in this pyramid to sanitize visitors, as if they were entering a semiconductor plant. Visitors say there’s a section of revolving brushes that clean the soles of your shoes, a half-mile of moving walkways, X-ray machines, and sections where the dirt is air-blasted off your clothes. A marble corridor spits you out into a chamber featuring a white statue of the deceased Kim, illuminated from behind by pink lights. And, finally, you reach a vast, darkened hall, filled with somber music. Lit up in the center is a black bier where Kim Il-sung lies under glass in a black suit, brought to near-life by Russian embalmers.

The whole job, embalming and decoration, was lavish for a country with an annual trade of $5 billion, but what price devotion?⁵ Ordinary North Koreans often burst into tears when they catch sight of the corpse and don’t begrudge the cash, which anyway is too vast for them to conceive of. Their devotion is endless. It would be up to Kim himself to sit up and say, This is embarrassing. . . shouldn’t you be at work? This isn’t likely, not because he couldn’t come to life—he is the country’s official Eternal President—but because he got used to being needed in this way. In life, the senior Kim was referred to as the weedae-han suryong-nim, Great Leader. In his time, he was also variously referred to as—prepare yourself—the Peerless Patriot, the Ever-Victorious Iron-Willed Brilliant Commander, the Sun of the Nation, the Sun of Mankind, the Red Sun of the Oppressed People, and more. He is the most famous man in the world, a sincere student told me in Pyongyang. Not a shy fellow, Kim welcomed statues of himself in town squares, the biggest being the 20-meter-version bronze job painted in gold and unveiled on his sixtieth birthday in 1972. It overlooks Kim Il-sung Square, a short Jeep ride from Kim Il-sung University and Kim Il-sung Stadium. In the streets and fields, every adult citizen wears a badge bearing his likeness and, when they get home after a hard day’s listening to songs about him, they can gaze at his picture and that of Kim Jong-il that hang obligatorily in every home. There’s a revolutionary museum all about how he built the Workers’ Paradise. The country’s opera, theater, art, literature, and music are all about him. I put forward the proposal of a 50-to-50 ratio between the creative works of the socialist construction and the revolutionary struggle, he said in a guidance speech to writers.⁶ In other words, half of culture is to be about my activities as an independence fighter against Japan and half about my nation building. The Red Sun of the Oppressed People further put forward the proposal that literature should not be about the life stories of comrades who are still living and might become popular, but rather about comrades who sacrificed their lives—for him. So far, no North Korean has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. A tower commemorating his version of communism stands a deliberate meter higher than the Washington Monument. It was built in 1982 with more than 22,000 white granite blocks, one each for the number of days he’d lived to date. Also finished that year was an Arch of Triumph, bigger and better than the one in Paris and marking the spot where he made a speech in liberated Korea after World War Two. The humble home where he was born is a tourist attraction, the other houses in the village long cleared away. Monuments dot the country where he or his family members allegedly performed a brilliant exploit, communist-speak for serving the cause. Everywhere he gave his world-famous on-the-spot guidance, there’s a commemorative plaque. Amazingly, he beat out the nonexistent competition to win the country’s top awards, the Double Hero Gold Medal and Order of the National Banner, First Class, and established his own to give out, the Kim Il-sung medal, the Kim Il-sung gold medal, and the Kim Il-sung youth award. His birthday, April 15, has been North Korea’s Christmas Day for decades. His face was more important than the country’s flag, the Song of General Kim Il-sung more important than the national anthem.⁷ It is, in short, the mother of all personality cults.

It’s tempting to argue that such lunacy derives from some withering insecurity. But Kim did not slip his own name onto the medal list or give quotas for statues of himself. One man couldn’t pull this off on his own. There’s a broader factor to consider. North Korea is indeed an aberration, but, as offensive as this may seem to southerners, the reverence for leaders demonstrated here is in keeping with Korean traditions. Visualize this: In January 2003, senior executives of Hyundai Asan, the affiliate of the South Korean conglomerate pursuing founder Chung Ju-yung’s dream of doing business in North Korea, went to Chung’s tomb to tell him they were opening the first road for tourists to travel into the North.⁸ The happy report was made at exactly 5:50 a.m., the bad-breath hour that workaholic Chung used to hold his regular morning meeting. This deference to a man who in life would kick his executives in the shins and throw ashtrays at them was entirely of their choosing. But it made sense, partly because their new boss was the most filial of Chung’s sons, but more because loyalty touches the Korean soul deeper than a balance sheet. In South Korea, freedom, sophistication, and competing loyalties serve to temper such cultishness. But in the North, it knows no bounds.

Who Is Charlie Chaplin?

In North Korea, we should consider an additional factor: ignorance. There are no other heroes because people don’t know about them and there is no negative news about the Kims to temper patriotic affection. Again, it requires some imagination to stand in a North Korean’s shoes and appreciate their media environment. What they don’t know about the modern world is astounding. On various visits, I searched in vain to find an ordinary North Korean who had heard of Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, or, the most famous man of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin. Homo nordocoreanus has not been informed that man has landed on the moon because that knowledge risks making him admire America.

Also, importantly, he doesn’t know much about the objects of worship, the two Kims. He’s fed anecdotes and quotes, rather like Bible verses. Which raises an obvious comparison. The less one knows about a revered figure, the more difficult it is to strive to be like them and the greater the tendency to place them on a pedestal and worship them from afar. So it is with Kim Il-sung. Born of heroic lineage, conductor of miracles, single-handed liberator of Korea from Japanese occupation, he is placed so impossibly high that all the subject can do is believe, worship, and proselytize. The call to express loyalty is louder than the call to be like him and nation-build, which may explain why North Korea is an economic basket case. Furthermore, there are no alternative heroes. No movie stars—North Korean films do not even have credits—rock artists, writers, politicians, TV personalities, athletes. And, importantly, no ordinary heroes like firemen, cops, guys rowing across the Pacific, no ascents of Everest, no kids with cancer. Only Him. At school, children learn of His exploits and His love. Of how the Americans started the Korean War and He repelled them. No one tells them that He started it. The elderly know but they keep quiet. Everyone memorizes sections of His Thought. Even prisoners. At train stations, hymns about Him waft from loudspeakers, insinuating their way into the homesick traveler’s emotions. Unity around Him makes us a world power, they think. One day He will free the poor children of South Korea. And when they take the otherworldly journey through His former palace till finally He is lying there before them, they feel unworthy. O magnificent protector. The suffering of the nation bursts and they bow sobbing. It’s religion.

In a democratic world, dictators must justify themselves. They link to their people through shared values, ideas, and attitudes that the smart ones codify for study. To suit his posture as the first Korean leader to break from the long tradition of dependence on foreign power, Kim Il-sung needed his own system of thought. It is called—what else?—Kimilsung-joo-eui (Kimilsungism), but is better understood by its official name of Juche, which means self-reliance. It made Kim seem like an international leader and gave the people something homegrown to study. But citizen and leader in North Korea have always been bound by a subtext that only gets fully expressed in Korean language for domestic consumption. This is a race-based message of Korean superiority, not the born-to-rule superiority the Nazis and the Japanese used to justify their conquest of inferiors, but a more subtle we-are-so-pure-and-innocent-that-we-need-a-great-leader-to-protect-us. It justifies the Kims’ rule and explains away what, for communists and even true believers in self-reliance, are its blatant failures. This racist message sustains even today, despite the superiority of South Korea in all measures, the delusion that all Koreans will one day see the Kimilsungist light.⁹ If this is the pen in the hand of Kim Jong-il’s rule, it needs the hammer in the other. That is, the fearful repression that keeps the citizens in line. We shall return to both issues in later chapters. But for now we should note the most significant factor behind the cult of the man lying in the mausoleum in Pyongyang: the role of his son in its creation.

Koreans historically are known for fervor. Before producing the world’s most fanatical and rigid communist cult, they had adopted Chinese Confucianism and its core value of filial piety in the most extreme form. South Korea boasts Asia’s most devoted Christians and, if such a statistic could ever be measured, we’d probably find more heretic spin-offs and start-ups per head than anywhere else in the world. This curious energy seems to come from what we might call the shaman within the Korean psyche. Before Christianity, Confucianism, or Buddhism, shaman-kings ruled Korean tribes. Their legacy remains in the Korean makeup. The shamans did not teach about contradictions such as good and evil, and right and wrong, which tend to make people pause and think about their feelings and actions. They saw the individual as a whole, men and women as being of equal value, and each person’s characteristics as equally valid. This I’m-okay-you’re-okay approach provided the confidence to implement another shaman idea. That is that life should be lived to the full. To be truly human, you must act with all your energies.¹⁰

The involvement of Kim Jong-il acting with all his energies provided the vital catalyst that made the cult of Kim Il-sung the most extreme in the communist world. In the early 1970s, Kim Jong-il controlled the 4.15 Creation Group, named after his father’s birthday, which produced the immortal classics which the public was led to believe flowed directly from