North Korea Undercover (23 page)

¹
Yoichi Shimada, Professor of International Politics, Fukui Prefectural University, House Committee on International Relations: Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, 27 April 2006.

²
Kim Hyun Hee:
The Tears of My Soul
, William Morrow, New York, 1993, pl 22.

³
‘How North Korea goes about exporting arms’,
Chosun Ilbo
, English language version, 10 March 2010, http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/03/10/2010031000953.html

⁴
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/articlel206351.ece

⁵
Lifton,
Thought Reform
, Pelican, London, 1967 (the book I keep under my pillow).

⁶
Lifton's eight tests for brainwashing are examined in my book on Scientology,
The Church of Fear,
Silvertail Books, London, 2013 but the original is always better: Lifton:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in china
, New York, 1961.

14

God the Bad Elvis Son

For a man bom on the day that the
Titanic
sank, Kim Il Sung lived a long and healthy life. But old age and then the only end of age, as the poet Philip Larkin warned, creeps up on us all. The antidote to the slide towards death was created by the Kim Il Sung Institute of Health and Longevity: the Great Leader must consume dog penises at least 3 inches or 7 centimetres long.
¹
And, in the meantime, his son slowly tightened his grip on the levers of power.

Kim Jong Il is one of the most fascinating villains of history, subtle, charming, gifted, psychotic, cruel, twisted, feckless. Its nigh on impossible to see him clearly through the opaque glass of the dynasty’s propaganda or the bubbling vitriol of the defectors. He kept the regime safe in power; he gave North Korea nuclear weapons; he presided over the famine which killed three million people; he became an international laughing stock. Clip-clopping around in elevator shoes and bouffant hairdo, he will go down in
history as the man who tried to make himself look taller at both ends, the puppet villain of
Team America.
At times, you have to pinch yourself and remember: thiscomedy baddy was flesh and blood. He sent millions to their graves.

Kim the Second’s story starts in confusion, with the place and date of his birth hotly disputed, the regime claiming he was born on Mount Baekdu, behind the Japanese lines in 1942; Soviet sources and Korean defectors are clear that he was born in a barracks in the Soviet Unionnot far from Vladivostok in 1941. No one quite knows why the regime faked not just the place but also the date of birth. His father was born in 1912, so 1942 has a pleasing echo, if you are into the wilder shores of numerology and superstition. Kim Two’s mother was a vivacious but illiterate peasant, looked down on by other mothers within Pyongyang’s elite as someone who knew how to butcher chickens, and not much else. Very quickly the boy-god developed a nasty reputation, biting other children, killing bugs, ‘a lonely and guilty child’.
²

By the time he was five his younger brother was dead; by the age of seven so was his mother. He was brought up by a hated stepmother, surrounded by uncles and half-brothers and nephews, all of whom had an interest in him being done down. His father was consumed with power, and had little time to spend with the boy. Against all Communist propriety, Kim Jong Il succeeded in grabbing the chalice of power, and passing it on to his least feckless son. In much else, he failed, but in that he took power and passed it on, dying in his bed, he can be counted, like his father, as a tyrant success story.

Kim Jong Il was first accused of murder when he was six years old, the victim his three-year-old brother. Young Kim was known
by his Russian pet name, Yura, his little brother, Shura. The three-year-old died in a swimming pool when the family were back in Pyongyang in 1947. One defector account has it that Yura killed Shura by pushing him back into the pool again and again.
³
If so, Shura would not be the last North Korean to die at the whim of the man who became the second god-king. Two years later in 1949, his mother, Vera, or Kim Jong Suk, died after complications with an ectopic pregnancy, leaving Kim Jong Il pretty much alone in the world.

The regimes official story leaves you at sea about his real upbringing. You come across stuff like Kim at the age of eight reading Lenin’s
State and Revolution
and writing a commentary on it, and you know that’s rubbish.
⁴
A few years later, during the Korean war, Kim Two became a prodigy songwriter, being rude about the Americans. This, too, is most likely rubbish. What we do know, however, is that when the war quickly went sour for the North, Kim Il Sung spirited his family out to the safety of China, where they sat out the bombing in comfort.

In the late 1960s, Kim Jong Il started working in what you could call ‘Pyongywood’ or, in regime-speak, the ‘cultural sphere’. You getthe feeling that he was a bit of a stage-door Johnny, desperately keen on impressing the actresses; very soon, of course, it would be the other way around. Early on in his career, he tapped in to the importance of knowing what the Bowibu, the secret police, knew. Towards the end of his life, he ran it. When he was a child, officials used tobow low; he started his first bespoke purges in his twenties. In 1974 he became a Politburo member. But throughout
this time, he was never openly and transparently the heir apparent: he rose to power almost invisibly, just like Stalin, whose ascension to the Kremlin was described asbeing like that of a ‘grey blur’.

Palace intrigue was the meat and veg of Kim Jong Il’s life in his twenties and thirties. He had a lot against him: the biggest weakness was that he had had no experience of revolutionary struggle or the guerrilla war. How could a baby? Throughout his life, he looked small in his father’s shadow.

His old man was a killer, who started a pointless war in which millions died, grew fat while his people starved, purged many entirely innocent colleagues and created a gulag of the utmost horror. But time and again witnesses say that Kim Il Sung had real class, something they hesitate to say about his son. For example, one witness said that for the first few years in power Kim Il Sung still had an‘attractive personality’.
⁵
Breen tells the story that during his audience with the Great Leader, someone asked what he did for leisure. The old thing replied: ‘Soldiers raise bears for me tohunt, but I think that now they hide behind a tree with a tame bear and push it out when I come along.’
⁶
This dictator-joke against himself, writes Breen, went down well. Breen goes on to quote a Tass correspondent, comparing father tyrant and son: the old man was ‘gracious as usual’, the young Kim looked awkward, ‘as if he had swallowed poison’.

All serious rivals to Kim Jong Il with real guts and vigour were fed into Kim Il Sung’s meat-grinder. Yet Kim Jong Il played the long game, building up his father’s personality cult to ludicrous levels, forever inventing new nonsense, always downplaying his own ambition.

Only in 1980, at the Sixth Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, was Kim Jong Il officially ordained successor to his father.
⁷
Long after it had become clear that the Party Centre – as Kim Two liked to style himself with typical opacity – was going to get the crown, he remained in the shadows, waiting, waiting, waiting. His greatest accolade was the near-total ignorance of Western intelligence services. People wondered whether he was a halfwit. When the South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung, an enthusiast for the Sunshine Policy, visited Pyongyang in 2000, people in the South were delighted to discover that their enemy had charm and grace. Kim Jong Il seemed to be no monster. He cracked self-deprecating jokes, was attentive to the South Korean leader, and walked slowly with him – the man from Seoul had a bad limp after a car accident. Told about his newfound popularity down South, Kim Two said: ‘After I appeared on TV screens, I’m sure they came to know that I am not a man with horns on the head.’
⁸

Perhaps he was. Evil hides in murk. The narratives of the people who knew him well and escaped so that they could tell the world are somehow disappointing: the picture that emerges of Kim Jong Il is incoherent, fuzzy, crepuscular. That, perhaps, istestament to his genius as a tyrant, that he made it nigh on impossible for people to read his mind. In
Team America
, the puppet Kim Jong Il feeds ‘Hans Brix’, the comically mispronounced nuclear weapons inspector, to the sharks. Kim is then filmed through the prism of the fish-tank containing the late Swede’s skeleton, his briefcase holding nuclear secrets still chained to a skeleton wrist. The Dear Leader indulges in his melancholic song about the trials of life as a
tyrant: ‘I’m so ronery.’ It turns out that the puppeteers’ mix of psychotic violence and queasy sentimentality is bang on the nail.

The first and perhaps most thoughtful of our witnesses to the real Kim Jong Il is Hwang Jang Yop, the Juche theorist who became the head of Kim Il Sung University and then defected to the South in 1997, knowing that the regime would send his children and grandchildren to the gulag. Hwang had been Kim Il Sung’s man, when the Great Leader was in his pomp. Under Kim the First, he rose to the fringes of power, created Jucheism, and lived a good life. As Kim Jong Il’s life force slowly seeped through the corridors of power, Hwang was demoted and, first gently, then not so gently, moved aside. He is, naturally, a hostile witness.

Why did he defect? It’s not clear. The sense you get from reading his essays and thoughts is that he had to, that his mind would have broken in two had he stayed any longer, genuflecting before a god he despised. It’s possible to read Hwang as a materialist, out for number one, who prospered under Kim Il Sung but fell from grace under his son, and decided to quit. But that’s not how I read him. Rather, he was a sincere and moral man, who had, somehow, been able to justify his actions under Kim the First, but that stance became increasingly difficult under Kim the Second. Once he decided to escape, he knew for certain what would befall his family, and a feeling of melancholy surrounds his observations. As someone who has tried to grapple with the reality of North Korea, not the fog, I feel profoundly grateful that he did defect, and spell things out to the world. At the same time, one cannot help but feel immense sorrow for his children and grandchildren, as the doors on their futures slammed shut against them.

Hwang’s primary verdict is against the father, Kim Il Sung, for allowing his vanity to be the master of his judgement, and promote
an obviously flawed son to take command. But few dared tell the Great Leader that his son was sly and bitter and twisted. Every single person who fell inside the Kim dynasty circle knew that their survival and that of their children, unto the third generation, depended on its continuing blessing. The mind-fuck for the Great Leader, then the Dear Leader and now the Fat Leader, is that if you tell the tyrant bad news, you risk losing your head; but if the only news you ever receive is good, you risk not knowing what on earth is going on. So power passed from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il, with the father only dimly aware of who his son really was. And the handful of old warriors who dared to stand up to him were squashed flat like bugs under the thumb.

Hwang says that in the seventies, Kim II Sung’s old guard tried to fight against Kim Jong Il’s succession. The vice prime minister, Nam II, raisedconcerns: he was crushed to death in a road accident, when a lorry ran out of control.
⁹
(Author’s note: there are no real road accidents in North Korea.) Four others also signalled their opposition. They were, according to Gause’s report on state terror for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Pak Kum Choi, secretary to the KWP secretariat; Kim Kwang Hyop, former defence minister; Ho Pong Hak, a former four-star general;and Yu Chang Sik, a former senior official. By 1982, all four, according to a defector, were in the gulag.
¹⁰

Kim Jong Il loved a racy, capitalist version of the good things in life: fine wines, Hennessy cognac, human beds – mattress and frame constructed of entwined naked concubines. Hwang was
something of an old-guard puritan, and clearly disapproved. But its one thing to enjoy a good party, another to have someone shot for dobbing you in to your old man. The story Hwang tells of one such hapless tell-tale is grim beyond belief. A woman professor at Kim Il Sung University wrote an anonymous letter to Kim Il Sung complaining about the drinking and whoring at one of Kim Jong Il’s parties; she was worried about her husband’s attendance. It never got to the Great Leader but was intercepted by the secret police, whose master was the Dear Leader. A gruelling investigation began to hunt down the mole. Eventually, she was caught. Her husband volunteered to shoot her, to show his loyalty, and the Dear Leader granted permission. Soon after, the husband-executioner married a new woman, selected by Kim Jong Il.
¹¹
The lesson for everyone in the palace was simple: do not raise your hand against the Dear Leader.

Kim Jong Il became obsessed with the idea that people would not tell him ‘the truth’, knowing that his hangers-on only told him what he wanted to hear. Hwang’s biographers tell the story of Kim Jong Il lecturing the Chief of Police and his acolytes about giving false or too rosy reports. Kim Jong Il said: ‘I like accurate, true reports. All of you know Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the SS during the Nazi era. When he made his reports to Hitler, he was always simple and accurate. At times when Himmler, the number two man, exaggerated or altered any information on behalf of Hitler, Kaltenbrunner would correct his superior. I want you to be like Kaltenbrunner.’
¹²

He was not, exactly, a perfect role model, as his fate suggests. Kaltenbrunner indulged Hitler’s fantasies to the very end, and though less absurd than Himmler, was no less deluded. He was
hanged in 1946. Odd, one might think, for Kim Jong Il to know so much about Hitler’s inner circle, but tyrants are fascinated by other tyrants. One of the entries in the visitors’ book for Stalin’s dacha in Sochi, southern Russia, now a creepy hotel where you can sleep in Stalin’s bed – I did once, and had a terrible night’s sleep – was Saddam Hussein. In Baghdad, a Kurdish leader negotiating with Saddam noted that his bookshelves were full of books about Stalin.
¹³
But Kim Jong Il’s fascination with Kaltenbrunner, the honest Nazi, speaks exactly to the primary problem of the North Korean dictatorship: information necrosis.