Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (39 page)

Of course, China was another communist country where the authorities had sought to exert totalitarian control. Partly because it was such a big country, though, Big Brother could not indoctrinate and monitor the people there as thoroughly and efficiently as in North Korea. Indeed, life in China had already started to change. Mao Zedong was dead and, with him, his catastrophic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Although I did not yet know it, the vitality I saw was to power the amazing changes that were about to come to China under Deng Xiaoping’s reform-minded rule.

At the time, though, if I could credit what my eyes revealed in terms of economic development, the comparison between North Korea and China seemed much more startling than any that could be made between North and South Korea.
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That seemed a likely partial explanation, at least, of why the Pyongyang regime contemplated only minor deviations from past practice. Perhaps the North’s leaders themselves were lulled by the evidence of their successes, taking reports of the South’s advances less seriously than they might have if their own system had less to show for it.

Kim Il-sung took the role of father of the republic literally. Easily adjusting to and expanding upon the enormous power that went with the job of top leader in a Stalinist state, Kim lived a life of increasing—eventually almost unimaginable—luxury in mansions and villas built for him by subordinates who competed for his favor. There he sired biological children with mistresses and concubines, not to mention his two officially recognized wives. He arranged for special schools to bring up “war orphans to think of themselves as his children.

The patriarch Kim ran the country as a family enterprise, filling high offices first with assorted members of his Kim and Kang clans and later with the youngsters, now grown up, who called him father or uncle. Capping this policy-was his decision to name Kim Jong-il, his eldest acknowledged son, as his successor, creating the communist world’s first dynastic succession.

Kim Il-sung published prolifically on almost every other subject but had remarkably little to say about his relationships with women. While still an active guerrilla, Kim “had many comrade women who were his girlfriends,” a former elite official of the regime told me. The woman who became his first officially recognized “wife, Kim Jong-suk, was the one who happened to be with him when he fled to the Soviet Union. “Otherwise it could have been any one of those women.”
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Kim Jong-suk, a member of the guerrilla women’s unit, gave birth to Kim Il-sung’s first three acknowledged children. The eldest, Kim Jong-il, is believed by most outside analysts to have been born in the Soviet Union.
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The regime gives his date of birth as February 16,
1942,
but claims he was born in the foothills of Mount Paektu on the Korea-China border. A brother was born in 1944. Jong-il was called Yura, the nickname of a brother of a famous Soviet war heroine. His little brother was called Shura. (Among Russians, Yura is the pet name for someone named Yuri while Shura is short for Alexander.)
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Kim Il-sung’s Russian-language interpreter in those days recalled that the two boys’ mother “was a good cook and a very warm-hearted individual.”
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After liberation she followed her husband to Pyongyang. There she had another child, daughter Kyong-hui. Her second son, Shura, drowned in 1948 while playing in a pond and Kim Jong-suk herself died in 1949. She is described as having been short of stature, freckled of face, “an illiterate with a dogged character.”
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Immediately after liberation, Kim is reported to have commissioned a search for Han Song-hui, his former wife, and, after many months, to have located her in remote Kangwon Province. She had resumed communist political activity and was serving as vice-chair of the Provincial Women’s League.
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Kim established Han and her children, at least some of them his, in a mansion near Shinmiri, between Pyongyang and Sunan.
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Around that time, Kim spied Kim Song-ae, a “cute and especially charming” typist working in the defense ministry, and arranged for her transfer to work in his office.
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During the period when the country’s new leader was resuming relations with Han Song-hui and beginning an affair with Kim Song-ae, he was still married to Kim Jong-suk, who had been one of Han’s subordinates in the partisan women’s unit and like a younger sister to Han.
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Perhaps thanks to Han’s clear seniority, there are no reports of jealous strife between those two female comrades. Rather, both seem to have focused their jealousy on Kim Il-sung’s new relationship with his secretary. Eventually the revived relationship between Kim Il-sung and Han Song-hui cooled on account of the new office affair.
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Some years following Kim Jong-suk’s death, Kim Song-ae, twelve years his junior, would be recognized officially as Kim Il-sung’s wife and the first lady of the country—once again, it appears, without benefit of a public wedding ceremony.
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Whether or not it is true that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, certainly Kim Il-sung’s newfound political power did not go just to the young ruler’s head. Kim quickly began taking advantage of his position to arrange numerous liaisons with other women in addition to the three who had been or were to become his wives.

If Kim or his female conquests thought he was Heaven’s gift to women, perhaps that was no wonder in view of his already extravagant but ever-intensifying personality cult. But whatever institutional help he could call upon, Kim Il-sung also brought to his pursuit of the opposite sex considerable personal charm that only increased with age and experience. Official biographer Baik Bong refers to Kim’s “peculiarly moving smile,”
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and such references seem to reflect more truth than propaganda. I think of Kim when I see and hear the dignified, deep-voiced James Earl Jones in the role of an African absolute monarch, father of Eddie Murphy’s Prince Akeem, in the Hollywood movie
Coming to America.

“Kim Il-sung is charming,” a defector who knew him personally told me in an interview while the North Korean ruler was still alive. “He has been a politician for fifty years. When you dine with him, he’s very generous and warm. He’s a good-looking man except for that lump on his neck. His voice is very special. Most people talk from their throats. He talks from his belly like an opera singer.”
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Armed with such an arsenal, the premier “seduced the wife of a high-ranking Korean People’s Army officer and dispatched her husband to the Soviet Union for overseas study,” Yu Song-chol said. At the offices of the Interim People’s Committee, a typist named O Chan-bok slapped Kim’s face when he tried to kiss her.
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The 1946 reforms included a law granting equality to women. Prostitution and concubinage were outlawed, along with female infanticide. Pyongyang encouraged North Koreans to feel pride at having put such social evils behind them. They were urged to feel especially irate at the thought of American soldiers violating Korean women in the South.
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For the premier, however, rules were to be skirted, not followed. To head off discontent among more straitlaced subordinates, Yu said, Kim arranged for secret love nests to be set up with code names “Number One” and “Number Two,” and “summoned pretty young women there for secret rendezvous.”
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Over the years, rumor among the Pyongyang elite had it that Kim had sired a number of children by women other than his deceased former wife and her successor as first lady. Besides unacknowledged wife Han Song-hui, “so many more had his children,” one high-ranking defector told me.

Sometimes, as in the case of Han, Kim set up his children’s mothers in their own households. In other cases the women married men who gave the children their names. Regardless, Kim continued to take an interest in his offspring from liaisons old and new. Because inquiring into the Fatherly Leader’s personal lifestyle was an absolute taboo, “only the children of his two official wives are known,” said the former official. “Even high officials don’t know the head count of youngsters being brought up privately in the mansions.”
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It should come as no surprise that such an enthusiastic patriarch would become one of the world’s premier nepotists. Kim Il-sung provided jobs for a stupefying number of relatives in addition to his offspring. His female cousins on his father’s side did “well in the regime, for example, as did their husbands. Cousin Kim Jong-suk (same name as Kim’s second “wife, but a different person) became vice-chair of the Korean General Occupational Federations and chief editor of
Minju Choson,
organ of the administrative council. Her husband was Ho Dam, who served as vice-premier and foreign minister. Kim Il-sung’s cousin Kim Shin-sook became deputy director of the Academy of Social Sciences and an official of the Democratic Women’s League. Her husband, Yang Hyong-sop, rose to become a member of the party politburo and secretariat and chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly— the parliament.
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Kim Il-sung gave a vice-presidency of the country to Kang Ryang-uk, the former Methodist minister who was a cousin of his maternal grandfather and who had taught him at Changdok School. In the united-front facade that Kim erected early in his rule, Kang was supposed to represent the moderate, noncommunist forces that had allied themselves with the communists. Besides heading the token opposition Korean Democratic Party, other assignments before his death in 1983 included a vice-chairmanship of the General League of Trade Unions. Joining Kang as a vice-president was Pak Song-chol, who was Kang’s son-in-law. Thus, of three vice-presidents serving during that period, only one was
not
a relative of Kim Il-sung’s. Pak was also made a member of the party politburo and chairman of the Central People’s Committee.
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Kim Il-sung’s first cousins included Kim Chang-ju, who rose to become vice-premier, and Chang-ju’s brother Bong-ju, who became chairman of the Profession League Central Committee. They were the sons of Kim Il-sung’s uncle Kim Hyong-rok—his father’s younger brother, who had stayed home to farm, taking over as head of the Mangyongdae household. Hyong-rok’s third son, Kim Won-ju, was a State Security Department officer whose assignments included rooting out disloyalty to the regime among students at the ultra-elite Mangyongdae School. Won-ju’s son Myong-su became a State Security official; Myong-su’s brother Myong-ho, a colonel in the People’s Army. Kim Byoung-il, another State Security official (in charge of inspecting the evidence brought in by investigators in loyalty cases), was married to a niece of Kim Il-sung.
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It was an exaggeration but not too far from the truth to say, as did one high-level defector, that “the topmost officials have to be relatives,”
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Son Sang-pil, who was ambassador to Moscow, was a relative on Kim Il-sung’s mother’s side. Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s sister, became a member of the
party Central Committee and the Supreme People’s Assembly. Her husband, Chang Song-taek, also became an influential official who carried out sensitive missions for his brother-in-law.

Kim Il-sung’s last wife, Kim Song-ae, became chairwoman of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union. Kim Song-ae gave birth to Kim Il-sung’s second set of acknowledged children. Her eldest child, daughter Kim Byong-jin, married Kim Kwang-sop, who became an ambassador to, among other countries, the Czech Republic. Kim Song-ae’s first son, Kim Pyong-il, became ambassador to Bulgaria, Finland and Poland.

Hwang Jang-yop, the highest ranking North Korean defector, wrote of his great respect for Kim Il-sung during the years 1958–1965, the period when Hwang was working directly under Kim as party secretary for ideology. Kim “was cruel to his political enemies but generous to his colleagues and subordinates,” Hwang said. “The only thing I felt uncomfortable with was that he put too much trust in his relatives and too much value in their opinions.”
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Kim Il-sung’s closest guerrilla comrades also were entitled to practice nepotism. Choe Yong-gon and Kim Il, before they died, were numbers two and three in the regime, and their wives were then party Central Committee alternate members. So was Choe’s cousin, Choe Chong-gon, who also became director of the air force’s General Political Bureau.
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Kim Il-sung himself, during the purge of Pak Hon-yong’s followers in 1952, attacked as “petty bourgeois” the formation of factional groupings based on “kinship, friendship, connections with the same school or common regional origins.”
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But a more tolerant take on nepotism is made to issue from the mouth of no less a figure than Kim Jong-suk, Kim Il-sung’s beatified second wife and the mother of Kim Jong-il. As a young, still unmarried woman in the guerrilla band, she supposedly opined that it was inevitable, at least at the village level, for relatives to work together. The important thing, she was quoted as having instructed a communist youth group, was to keep such kinship relations from influencing one’s work.
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