Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (98 page)

The Kims brushed aside soldiers’ private reservations. In December 1991, Kim Jong-il took over as supreme commander of the People’s Army. In April 1992, he was named to the top military rank of marshal alongside only one other soldier of that exalted status, O Jin-u. (His father was promoted that year from marshal to a newly created super rank translated as generalissimo or grand marshal.) That day, said Lim, Kim Jong-il “was supposed to wear a marshal’s uniform, but he declined. O Jin-u told him, ‘You should wear it!’ But Kim Jong-il said, ‘It’s not suitable for me to wear a clean marshal’s uniform. That uniform should be torn with shrapnel.’” Lim related this bit of army lore (which I also heard from another former military man) explicitly to illustrate the new marshal’s bellicosity. But the anecdote also suggests that Kim Jong-il felt—or wanted to be perceived as feeling—something akin to modesty.
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On April 25, 1993, the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Army, Kim Jong-il became chairman of the party’s military commission. Reviewing a military parade that day, he had to give a short speech before an assembled multitude. Although he uttered just a single sentence invoking glory upon the armed forces, delivering a message in person to such a vast audience was an unaccustomed task. One former high official who watched the event on a videotape in Seoul told me, “I saw Kim Il-sung turned toward Kim Jong-il with an expression of concern—could he make it through his phrase?”

The younger Kim did make it through, smoothly enough. But rumors spread that he had a speech problem, a former army sergeant, Lee Chong-guk, told me. Even if that was the case, however, public speaking may have been the least of Kim Jong-il’s problems. “Kim Il-sung was idolized,” Lee said, “but for Kim Jong-il, there are only bad rumors, like the
kippeunjo.
Although there were rumors that Kim Il-sung had a five-year-old son, he was idolized anyhow because of his role in the anti-Japanese struggle and the Korean War. As for Kim Jong-il, it’s rumored that he sleeps in the afternoon, parties at night and has affairs with actresses. Nothing good is said about Kim Jong-il.”

“At first, Kim Il-sung made a conscious effort to hand over power to his son,” said former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop. “But as Kim Jong-il began to take control of every area of the government, there was nothing Kim Il-sung could do to control his son anymore. By the 1990s, Kim Il-sung was merely an advisor to his son. But they were father and son, with father having an
interest in passing his power down to his son and son having an interest in using the authority of his father. So any conflict between the two did not surface.” Kim Jong-il’s promotion to commander in chief of the People’s Army in 1991 signaled “the end of the transition of power from father to son,” according to Hwang. “The entire party and nation of North Korea must swear unconditional obedience to the commands of the People’s Army commander in chief. Eventually things came to the point where Kim Il-sung actually had to suck up to his son. On Kim Jong-il’s fiftieth birthday in 1992, Kim Il-sung wrote a ridiculous ode of praise about a king honoring his royal heir, proving once again the cold-hearted political theory that power defines everything.” The poem:

Heaven and earth shake
With the resounding cheers
Of all the people
United in praising him.
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Kim Jong-il proceeded to use his chairmanship of the military commission to change the North Korean system from a party dictatorship to a military dictatorship. “In the army” said Hwang Jang-yop, “there is the Defense Headquarters, which is under the direct supervision of Kim Jong-il. Agents of this Defense Headquarters are stationed at every level of the military right down to the platoon, and are in charge of monitoring the movements of the soldiers. The Defense Headquarters has enormous power, authorized to arrest even civilians if necessary. In this regard, even the Ministry of State Security and Defense is under the surveillance of the Defense Headquarters. In recent years, as the North Korean economy faced bankruptcy and food rations got cut off, the regime could no longer maintain its tight control over the people through the old methods alone. So the North Korean rulers are committing armed forces to the effort to maintain the dictatorship of the Great Leader.” Calling the results a “blatant military dictatorship,” Hwang said the army began “keeping law and order in all the agricultural cooperatives, factories and markets in North Korea.”
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Starting in May 1992, Pyongyang permitted some international inspections at Yongbyon. In view of its economic straits there was reason to hope it might soon decide the price was right to accept a complete inspection program or otherwise relinquish its nuclear card. South Korean companies hoping for a breakthrough on the nuclear issue continued to prepare to act quickly once the ban on dealing-with the North should be lifted. Executives of the Daewoo, Samsung and Lucky Goldstar conglomerates had meetings with North Korean Deputy Premier Kim Dal-hyon in Beijing as late as December of 1992.
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On March 8, 1993, though, Kim Jong-il announced that he was placing the nation on a “semi-war” footing during the U.S.–South Korean Team Spirit exercise. At rallies, North Koreans pledged loyalty to Kim Jong-il. “If the enemies trample upon an inch of land or a blade of grass of our country we will become bullets and bombs to annihilate them,” one participant said.
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In the capital, where soldiers from elite families tended to be posted, Sgt. Lee Chong-guk joined 5,000 comrades rallying in a gymnasium. “All heads were shaved in the army; I thought war was coming soon,” Lee said after his defection to South Korea the following year. A small man, looking younger than his twenty-five years, Lee when I met him was no longer shaven-headed; he had let his hair grow long according to Southern fashion. He described the atmosphere of hysteria among those rallying in the gym and elsewhere in North Korea: a widespread feeling that North Koreans had nothing more to lose and might as well embrace their fate, fight to the end and be done with it. “I felt isolation,” Lee recalled. “I believed North Korea was on its own, without allies. In the case of East Germany, the high-ranking people hadn’t done well after reunification. I thought change was not good for us in the elite class. We were singing and waving red flags.” By that time, Kim Jong-il’s name had replaced Kim Il-sung’s in military slogans and songs; soldiers were studying the “revolutionary history” of the younger Kim. Lee recalled the verses of the song the soldiers had sung that day, “Without You There Is No Country”:

Pushing away the fierce cyclone,
Marshal Kim Jong-il gave us faith.

(Chorus) Without You there is no us,
Without You there is no country.

Takes care of our future and our hopes,
Our nation’s fate: Marshal Kim Jong-il.

Even though the world is overturned a hundred times,
Still the people believe in Marshal Kim Jong-il.

“We were crying together at our fate,” Lee told me. “Kim Jong-Il attended, without saying anything—but then Kim Jong-il never says anything in public. As we sang about the world being ‘overturned a hundred times,’ we were thinking that
our
world would be overturned and it would be bad for
us.
We were crying for ourselves.” Soldiers in Pyongyang normally were not supplied live ammunition, presumably for fear they-would mount a coup, Lee said, but on that occasion bullets were issued even to troops in the capital.

They were told to don helmets. The government announced a curfew, and residents who did not already have bomb shelters began digging them.

Lee had been assigned as a noncommissioned officer to the Bureau of Nuclear and Chemical Defense since 1990. “Since the enemy is the United States and the United States possesses nukes, North Koreans feel they should also possess them,” Lee told me. “I believe they’d use them if war broke out.”

Lee believed that war was imminent and that it would be cataclysmic for all Koreans, North and South. In that regard, he had more to say about chemical than nuclear weapons. One of the privileged young men permitted formal study beyond high school, he had majored in biochemistry at Pyong-song University before enlisting. His military job was translating foreign journals. Following his arrival in Seoul in 1994, he warned publicly that his military superiors had claimed that North Korea had the capability to wipe out the South Korean population with chemical weapons as well as wreaking havoc on Japan.

I asked Lee how his superiors justified their talk of killing 40 million South Koreans. “They’re saying every South Korean is full of anti-communist ideology,” he explained. “When we reunite the country-we can’t make them communists, so we should get rid of them.” One officer in Lee’s unit, Lieutenant Colonel Hwang Chang-pyong, had made clear that genocide was on his mind when, in August 1993, he taught in an ideology course that “not only the U.S. army, or the South Korean army—everybody should die.”

Lee was less than a true believer by the time he heard those chilling words. “I had started having doubts about the regime when I was in the university,” he said. “I wondered if capitalism was better.” He failed to buy Hwang’s argument, believing that fighting American and South Korean soldiers was one thing; massacring civilians, quite another. He kept silent, though—“It’s hard to voice your opinion,” he said—and had no idea how many of his comrades agreed with the officer.

Lt. Col. Hwang, who from Lee’s description sounded to me like Pyongyang’s version of Dr. Strangelove, was “one of the North Koreans most intensely loyal to Kim Il-sung,” Lee said. “He graduated from three universities and is a very important person in the development of nuclear and chemical weapons in North Korea. The development wouldn’t take place without him. Kim Jong-il during his birthday celebration personally thanked Hwang and gave him a commendation.”

Lee explained the structure of chemical weapons development. “The Thirty-second Division is involved in making chemical weapons in Sakju, North Pyongan province, and Kanggye in Chagang province,” he said. “The
products are sent for storage in Yongsong Maram in Pyongyang, also to Ji-hari Sansa in Anbyon County and to Anbyon County in Kangwon Province. Then they are distributed to each army section. There is a training and experiment site in Sokan-ri, Pyongwon County, South Pyongan Province. The nuclear and chemical Eighteenth Division is there.”

Next to the Eighteenth Division, Lee added, “there is a cemetery for victims of experiments gone awry, and of accidents. Soldiers are trained for chemical war, but even though they wear gas masks some of them die accidentally. Often they die inside the tanks, even with their masks on. They basically think that inside the tanks they are safe.”

Quoting North Korea’s warning that it could turn Seoul into a “sea of fire,” Lee said he believed it was possible and believed that the North had delivery systems sufficient to ensure that chemical weapons could figure in a major way in such an assault. While he was in North Korea, he said, he had expected “a nuclear war, spreading chemical weapons, in which the South Koreans would all be killed.” But death would be the lot of the Northerners as well. “It wasn’t a matter of winning or losing. If war broke out, everyone would die, North and South. Everybody else in the North also believes it.”

When I asked him to reconcile that assertion with his earlier statement that North Koreans actively wanted the war to start, he explained, “Even though they knew the outcome, they were so starved. It’s either die of starvation or die in war.” Lee, who as a member of an elite unit was not starving, did not want war and, he told me, believed it was up to him to do something about it. Because his parents were dead and thus out of the regime’s reach, “it was easier for me than for others to decide to defect and tell South Koreans about the current situation with chemical and nuclear weapons.”

Contributing to Lee’s sense of urgency, Kim Jong-il had told the military to plan on achieving reunification by 1995, which the Dear Leader believed—mistakenly, as it turned out—-would be in time for his father to see the promised land before his death. “I believed that I had to warn South Koreans about these weapons,” Lee said. “I didn’t want either North or South to be destroyed.” He rode by train to the North Korean side of the Yalu River, managed to cross the river and, in China, met some South Koreans who helped him get to Seoul via a third country. When I met him he had not yet made plans for a new career.
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On March 13, 1993, Pyongyang stunned the world with an announcement that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) The statement complained that proposed International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of two secret North Korean sites—-which it called non-nuclear military installations—-would be an unjustified intrusion on sovereignty. It also cited the U.S.–South Korean military exercise Team Spirit, then in
progress, calling it a rehearsal for a nuclear attack on the North. If not reversed, Pyongyang’s withdrawal could seriously undermine the global NPT system and set off a nuclear arms race among the two Koreas and Japan. Thus it triggered a flurry of consultations in world capitals.
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Pyongyang went out of its way to let it be known that the decision to withdraw from the NPT had been made by Kim Jong-il. The implication was that he had so fully taken over the reins of state from his father that he could make such an important decision on his own. Advertising his take-charge role seems to have been part of the decades-long process of making his succession a fait accompli.

Assuming that he did make the withdrawal decision himself
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what was Kim Jong-il thinking? Consider some of the background to the presumed decisions to begin and then to continue work on nuclear weapons. For many years the obvious trend had been toward a reversal in the military balance, from Northern to Southern superiority. Then, the Gulf War had shown Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il two important facts. First, the U.S. military had conventional forces so potent, thanks in part to new weapons systems, that they could all but wipe out the Iraqi military in a matter of a few days—and probably would have a similar conventional-war advantage over North Korea. For Pyongyang that emphasized the need to develop an equalizer. The second thing Pyongyang learned reinforced the lesson: Despite all that the United States and its allies threw at him in 1991, Saddam Hussein nonetheless hung on to power, thumbing his nose at Washington and at international nuclear inspectors.