Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (99 page)

There is another factor that must have figured in Pyongyang’s ferocious reaction to Team Spirit. Kim Jong-il would have recognized that elements in the North Korean military might use a future exercise and their own responsive maneuvers as, respectively, pretext and cover for a coup d’etat.

By March of 1993, in South Korea, a new president with a totally civilian background, Kim Young-sam, had taken office and begun immediately to dismantle the remaining police-state apparatus instituted by his army general predecessors—making Pyongyang look even worse than before by comparison.

Talks with Japan finally had been suspended in November of 1992, after North Korea had objected that Tokyo was making nuclear inspections a condition for establishing diplomatic ties.
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Pyongyang’s main ally in wringing money out of Japan, Kanemaru, had lost his post as ruling party boss and fallen so low as to be indicted, in March of 1993, for massive tax evasion. With Japan, the United States and South Korea united in insisting that the North prove itself atomically clean before receiving any aid, it was hard to find the leverage to work out a favorable deal.

Subsequent events suggest that Pyongyang never had really reconciled itself to the idea of giving up whatever nuclear capability it had developed,
but reasoned that the bomb was useful insurance and hoped to hang onto it through subterfuge while pretending to submit to NPT restrictions that had been less than effective in deterring other countries from bomb programs.

Under such circumstances, when the International Atomic Energy Agency set a deadline for the stringent new inspections and forced his hand, Kim Jong-il may have figured he had little to lose by raising the stakes for Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. Possible gains could include the direct high-level negotiations with Washington that Pyongyang had sought for years, focusing on both economic incentives and security inducements for Pyongyang to drop out of the nuclear club. As a bonus, the move would shock Kim Young-sam’s fledgling administration, perhaps contributing to the political instability that Pyongyang liked to see in Seoul. And the decision gave Kim Jong-il the chance to swagger on the world stage and impress his own people.

Citing Team Spirit as justification for the North Korean move might have seemed at first glance largely a rhetorical flourish. The exercise was an otherwise annual one that Washington and Seoul had suspended the previous year as an inducement to the North to settle the nuclear and other issues. Even after resuming it they invited Pyongyang to send observers so they could see for themselves that it was a “purely defensive” exercise.

Former North Korean diplomat Ko Young-hwan told me the leadership whipped up the “threat” for popular consumption. “Up to now,” Ko said, “Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung know that Team Spirit will not be an invasion. But they used that kind of mentality to manipulate North Koreans’ feelings. They’re still using that mentality. Most people believe that it is true. You might speculate as to how the citizens of North Korea actually believe in the Team Spirit threat. You can’t understand it unless you’ve lived in North Korea. They have regular civil-defense exercises, black sheets over the windows. Such frequent practice makes people believe in the threat. From all ranks, up to higher officials, people still blame Americans and South Koreans for their problems. If some have a different view, they are probably diplomats or others who have traveled abroad.”

On the other hand, Pyongyang’s own war plans for achieving surprise in the invasion of South Korea in 1950 had emphasized the use of mock military exercises as a cover for hostile troop movements. “We had put a particular amount of effort into concealing this large-scale troop movement as training,” Yu Song-chol, one of Pyongyang’s Korean War planners, told a South Korean interviewer in 1990. “To do this, we passed bogus mobility training plans not via encoded communications, as is normally done, but rather through plain-text wire communications. Even training evaluation reports were passed in plain text via wire. … Of course, the South had monitored such exchange of messages.”
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Thus Pyongyang’s perennial complaints that Washington and Seoul could use Team Spirit in just that way did represent the voice of experience.

But Pyongyang’s shrillness on the Team Spirit question if anything had increased. Besides apprehension of a threat of an invasion from the South, that may have involved new factors that had surfaced domestically. One such factor, often noted, was the severe fuel shortage: Cranking up tanks and trucks and planes to shadow the other side’s troop movements during Team Spirit—just in case they might turn into actual aggression—must be paid for with further reduction of economic activity. Also, Kim Jong-il had personally taken credit for the suspension of Team Spirit in 1991. Thus, as South Korean Foreign Minister Han Sung-joo told foreign correspondents,
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Kim would have felt when the exercise was resumed that he needed to regain face that he had lost.

Lt. Lim Yong-son offered another bit of army scuttlebutt describing a meeting among Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Marshal O Jin-u and Prime Minister Kang Song-san in which the Great Leader asked what would happen if-war broke out and North Korea lost. O and Kang agreed: “We would never lose.” Kim Il-sung then asked Kim Jong-il;
“But,
what would happen if we
did
lose?” Kim Jong-il’s reply: “If-we lose, I will destroy the world.” According to the story, Kim Il-sung thereupon said, “You’re very brave and it’s good thinking. You’re definitely talking the way a marshal should talk.”

How dire was the situation of North Koreans as the first nuclear crisis played out? Kim Dae-ho, the former teenage gang fighter whose job was treating water that had been used for uranium processing, received good material benefits by North Korean standards, he told me—but only until 1993. “To be able to work in an industry like this means you’re better off than other North Koreans,” he said. Beginning in 1993, however, “my ration was delayed just like others. In that atomic industry facility at Namchon there had been a great commissary. We had received rations like cooking oil and 80 to 100 grams of candy a day. Starting in 1993 those rations were cancelled and we didn’t get any. In May of 1993, the grain ration was delayed. In September of 1993, the commissary was closed. Since 1986 the government had been giving reasons for delayed rations. Every year they had given the same reasons. Now they just said, ‘We don’t have it so we can’t give it to you.’” Kim Dae-ho defected in February 1994, in his thirty-fifth year.

Outsiders knowledgeable about the North could not help speculating darkly about some act of back-to-the-wall desperation, something that might feel good to the Pyongyang leadership at the time and distract the people from their very real and increasing problems. Pyongyang was likely, some thought, to lash out externally; the NPT withdrawal and the “war footing” could be seen as precursors. One Japanese Korea-watcher speculated that
the fallback position was for Pyongyang, following imposition of international sanctions, to announce it had the bomb—and then actually threaten to use it, on South Korea or on Japan. A British defense expert, Paul Beaver of Jane’s Sentinel intelligence database, said Pyongyang still lacked the delivery system but had a bomb—so “the only thing they could do at the moment is blow themselves up.” Beaver added that he couldn’t rule out a suicidal gesture.
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North Korea, thanks to the Kims’ reluctance to change, seemed to offer the perfect example of-what Yale University historian Paul Kennedy had begun referring to as a “failed state.”
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That only accentuated the questions of sanity and judgment asked about the Kims for decades. Thankfully, however, ever since 1953, Kim Il-sung’s military behavior had been more or less in his regime’s rational self-interest. And while Kim Jong-il was much less of a known quantity, his NPT withdrawal was not irrational. In the end it would have to be counted a shrewd ploy that increased his negotiating leverage and his regime’s short-to-medium-term security.

But the pressure was on Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in a way it had not been on European communist leaders who failed to foresee their fate. The Kims knew the Europeans and had already seen the fate of, for example, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator and his wife who were executed by a firing squad during the December 1989 anticommunist revolt.
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Their own symptoms of megalomania aside, the Kims were busily inducing paranoia in people loyal to them. During the “semi-war” footing in March of 1993 Pyongyang reported that some 1.5 million people volunteered to join the army, and many signed oaths in blood declaring their readiness to fight with their lives for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in a “sacred “war of reunification.’’
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The thought of millions of Kim-worshipping youngsters willing to make themselves cannon fodder troubled outsiders who were aware of what was happening. The timing was eerie. Even granting a Russian expert’s contention that the rate of fanaticism among adult members of the elite was as low as 10 percent,
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there were grounds to worry that North Korea in the worst case might come to resemble what authorities in Waco, Texas, were facing at precisely the same time in dealing with the Branch Davidians. That was a cult not so very different, except in scale, from the North Korean cult of Kim and Kim. But waiting out Pyongyang would be many, many times more harrowing. After all, David Koresh was not thought to have stocked an A-bomb in his compound.

Speculation centered on how long the junior Kim could last in power before being challenged by elements in the elite party bureaucracy or the military, and on what sort of regime would emerge and how it would approach the South. In the Gang of Four scenario, which appealed to some foreign analysts, the younger Kim and others who had been close to his father could be
blamed for the excesses of the elder’s regime—recall how Mao Zedong’s reformist successors had jailed his widow and top ideologues for having orchestrated the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Some Pyongyang watchers, on the other hand, still hoped the junior Kim could turn out to be a credible reformer in his own right, a Korean Gorbachev. Others suggested that elements in the North Korean military might inaugurate a new development-oriented regime modeled on the highly successful, albeit authoritarian, government that General Park Chung-hee had established in the South in 1961.
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“If the teenagers wail and lament at the chaos of reality, and bear a grudge against their parents, people in power and the world in general,” Kim Il-sung wrote in a volume of his memoirs published in the early 1990s, “then the revolution of that country has no future or its prospects are at best gloomy”
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Former diplomat Ko Young-hwan had told me that the Team Spirit invasion threat was hyped for popular consumption. I asked Ko whether Kim Il-sung saw the real threat as an internal one. “Based on his actions I think he knows the threat is internal,” Ko said. “The formation of the secret police could reveal his fear of internal foes. When I say secret police I mean State Security, formed in the 1960s, whose power has been ever increasing. This shows Kim Il-sung’s concern.”

Although the education system up through high school and the military still produced fanatics, Ko added, “the 22–29 group is a threat to Kim Jong-il because they know only his [poor] rule. The 30s-to-50s group still has nostalgia for the Kim Il-sung days, which they can remember. There’s so much reform all over the world. The young ones hear the news and look for a change in North Korea, too. In the meantime the regime is emphasizing reeducation of the youngsters regarding ideals. It fears they are caught up in bourgeois ideas and think that poses a great threat.”

There was considerable evidence during the period of that first nuclear crisis that the Kims, father and son, were afflicted with a serious case of the jitters. According to Lt. Lim Yong-son, Kim Jong-il early in 1991 ordered State Security political officials to be “owl-eyed” and to step up regulation, in order to preserve the regime. “When selecting party members, diligence and loyalty had been the most important criteria but that changed to family background,” Lim said. “In the past about 80 percent of KPA members had been able to enter the party, but now only around 10 percent get in.”

In 1992, Lim said, “Kim Jong-il issued another order, number 0027, to all soldiers in the People’s Army, saying we must increase our struggle against the nonsocialist forces and build a revolutionist and belligerent state.

In the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces they increased the State Security presence and changed the structure some. All leaders in the army especially those known to be political dissidents and those who had taken bribes, were subjected to intensified telephone bugging. It was the same on our base. I heard this from the person in charge of the communication department. General officers were bugged. Starting in October 1992, any army officer against whom there was evidence of opposition to the regime, bribery or improper use of government property-was expelled. I guess that was because of what had happened in the eastern European countries. Kim Jong-il feared outside influences and wanted to strengthen the regime.”
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Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of Prime Minister Kang Song-san, recalled that the fearful atmosphere affected members of the elite in general. “People would always get together and ask, ‘Can North Korea survive this year? Should we defect to Europe or the United States?’ In 1992 and 1993, the leaders’ apprehension was more severe than South Koreans thought. They became more distressed when East Germany, Hungary and the Soviet Union collapsed. The biggest shock-was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The worst year was 1993. The harvest was bad and there wasn’t enough food. As people became distressed, lots of them secretly prepared to defect. They hoped to get their children out first, in foreign study programs. Also, they accumulated lots of dollars secretly. Even Kim Jong-il was sort of scared. He has special armed teams around him, a Swiss bank account with maybe a couple of billion dollars. He appointed an honor guard in case of coup d’état and kept them armed even as he prepared for exile in that contingency. Near Pyongyang he has a special airstrip with planes kept in case he needs to make a getaway.”