The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (86 page)

That was the secretary’s public line, and she was going to stick to it. “The North Korean regime is still the North Korean regime,” she had said earlier in a briefing in Washington, “and so I don’t think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea.” In Washington on the day of the concert, the State Department’s spokesman noted US support for private cultural events such as the one in North Korea, but—referring to public remarks on the subject by Secretary of State Rice—went on to say, “You have to be realistic about what kind of impact such things would have on the leadership of the country and its policies.”

This dismissive treatment was wide of the mark and may even have gone against Rice’s better instincts. The US government might publicly portray the concert only as a private cultural event, but those involved in the State Department—including the secretary of state—knew Pyongyang had freighted it with considerable significance and lavished on it top-level attention. Days in advance of the orchestra’s arrival, North Korean media announced to the population news of the planned concert and, in an unusual step, even provided background on the orchestra.

The real issue was not what impact the performance might have on the North Korean leadership, but rather what impact the North’s leadership intended the orchestra’s Pyongyang trip to have on Washington, and what signal the regime might be sending to its own people as well. Pyongyang’s handling of the visit had all the signs of a major effort by Kim Jong Il to put things back on track with Washington. In February 2007, with the
Bush administration suddenly open to dealing with the US Treasury financial measures, and then in the summer with movement toward inter-Korean summit talks, Kim may have felt he was making the sort of multifront progress that had not been possible for many years.

There was a confluence of events in October 2007—exactly a year after the North’s first nuclear test—that was uncanny, marking one of those moments when the streams of history flow into each other in weirdly improbable ways. On October 3, a new six-party implementation agreement emerged; on the fourth, ROK president Roh left Pyongyang after the two-day North-South summit; and on the sixth, the first planning team for the New York Philharmonic arrived in North Korea.

The streams did not flow together for very long. The foundation for the six-party implementation process was shaky from the start and started to crumble within months, South Korean presidential elections in December essentially negated the results of the October North-South summit, and the unexpected opening provided by the concert in Pyongyang quickly vanished when Washington proved unsupportive of the Philharmonic’s visit. As propitious as the diplomatic environment was for the North’s initial invitation to the orchestra in August 2007, by the end of that year storm clouds were beginning to gather. To those few in Washington who—like Rice—favored the diplomatic track for dealing with North Korea, signs of trouble on the negotiating front dictated a need to protect one’s bureaucratic flanks and be seen as aloof toward Pyongyang. Hence Rice’s public line: a concert, after all, is just a concert.

After the concert, the North pressed for a reciprocal visit by its State Symphony to the United States. The persistence with which it made the case suggested either that the idea was Kim Jong Il’s or at least that it was one he very much supported. There was little appetite in Washington for proceeding down this path, however, and even less when the six-party process started coming apart in earnest later in 2008. Despite private efforts in the following years to bring the North Korean orchestra to the United States, it was impossible for them to get visas.

SIGNS OF SUCCESSION

If Kim Jong Il watched the Philharmonic concert on television,
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his third son and eventual successor, Kim Jong Un, could well have been sitting beside him. By February 2008, the political succession may already have been in its initial stages. According to a North Korean defector with ties
to the country’s police, as early as February 2007 Kim Jong Il had told his security services that they were to support Kim Jong Un. Whether this meant the elder Kim had by then decided on his youngest son as successor, or was just starting the grooming and testing process, is not known. But looking back, there is tantalizing evidence that several years earlier, the younger Kim’s fortunes had already begun to rise.

In 2004, after a long battle with cancer, Kim Jong Il’s consort and Kim Jong Un’s mother, Ko Yong-hui, died. Ko had been with Kim Jong Il since at least the mid-1970s, and sources with knowledge of the North Korean leader described the two as very close. Born in Japan, Ko came to North Korea with her parents in the 1960s as part of the large migration of Koreans in Japan back to the North. She became a leading dancer in the Mansudae art troupe, which was under Kim Jong Il’s personal direction. The couple had two sons and a daughter, all of whom were briefly educated in Switzerland in the 1990s, where they were looked after by the North Korean ambassador to the UN organizations in Geneva, Ri Chol.
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In the later years, Ko apparently traveled abroad frequently, sometimes with her children, seeking medical help.

Ko was reportedly popular with the North Korean military leadership, and in 2012 the regime released for internal use a film showing her accompanying Kim Jong Il on inspections of army units. Already by 2001, there were signs that she was working to ensure that one of her sons be named successor. Perhaps not coincidentally, in May 2001 Kim Jong Il’s oldest son, Kim Jong Nam, was stopped at Japan’s Narita Airport, traveling under a false passport. Despite a widespread belief outside North Korea that Kim Jong Nam was being groomed as the successor and that after the airport incident he was discarded, Kim had probably never been tapped by his father to be next in line. For sure, no one actively being groomed as the North Korean successor would have been traveling in mufti to Japan.

According to some sources, in 2005, the year after Ko Yong-hui’s death, several senior generals approached Kim Jong Il to suggest he consider the youngest son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor. The elder Kim is said to have waved them away, protesting that the boy was still too young. Only a few years later, however, the grooming and testing phase for Jong-un appears to have begun.

Sometime in mid-August 2008 (his last public appearance was a visit to a military unit, publicized on August 15), Kim Jong Il suffered a severe stroke. Foreign doctors were urgently summoned, chief among them a French brain specialist, Dr. François-Xavier Roux, whom the North Koreans
had consulted years earlier after Kim fell from a horse. According to Dr. Roux, Kim’s own doctors were too nervous about treating their Supreme Leader in a life-or-death situation, and Kim was very close to death. In a 2011 media interview, Roux said that Kim had been “in intensive care, in a coma, in a bad way. . . . He was in a life-threatening situation.”

Kim’s condition was kept a tight secret within the country, though it did not take long for American and South Korean intelligence to realize that a major medical emergency had occurred in the North. Key individuals in the North’s elite Guard Command, the military unit charged with Kim’s personal security, certainly knew what had happened, as did his immediate family—most important, Kim Jong Un, who Dr. Roux says often came into the room at the Red Cross Hospital where his father lay.

Kim Jong Il’s sister, Kim Kyong Hui, also knew of her brother’s stroke and according to some sources played a key role bolstering the regime while Kim was incapacitated. Brother and sister had always been close, and Kim Jong Il often made an effort to praise her in front of other officials, even though it was well known that, for health reasons, Kim Kyong Hui had not been active in fulfilling her formal duties for some time. After the stroke, as Kim regained his strength and gathered those he thought he could trust close around him, he made sure to raise his sister’s profile. Beginning with a visit to one of the country’s model farms on the east coast in June 2009, Kim Kyong Hui would begin to appear more frequently in public with her brother. In September 2010, he would elevate her to the party’s ruling Political Bureau and appoint her—somewhat improbably—a four-star general.

The long-term prognosis for someone with a stroke of the magnitude Kim suffered, especially for someone with his other ailments (rumored to be diabetes, hypertension, and possibly heart disease), was not good. How well Kim grasped that danger is not known, though Dr. Roux said that once Kim could talk, he asked questions that suggested he understood the gravity of his condition.

Gravely ill or not, Kim’s recovery period would, of necessity, be abbreviated. No country, especially one so focused on the top as North Korea, can afford to have the Supreme Leader out of sight for an extended period. Kim’s absence from the celebration of the country’s sixtieth National Day, on September 9, was glaringly obvious both in North Korea and to foreign observers. It was imperative to get him into view again. The first North Korean mentions of Kim appearing in public came in early-October 2008, less than eight weeks after his stroke, when he was reported to be at a university soccer game. The first pictures of Kim appeared in North Korean media a few weeks later at a military unit, but at the time South Korean analysts suggested that, judging from the background foliage, these were actually taken earlier in the year. More pictures, apparently
genuine, waited until early November, when Kim showed up at another soccer match, this time between army teams. For many months after he reappeared in public, Kim looked gaunt and alarmingly frail. The explanation presented to the population was that he had gone on a diet and that the diet medication had been too extreme. Given the North Korean rumor mill, however, it would not have taken long for people to hear that something more serious had happened. In Pyongyang wives frequently learned through their own channels what their husbands were supposed to keep as closely guarded secrets.

Watching soccer matches was not Kim’s normal activity, and over the next three years, once he had recovered more fully, the Supreme Leader threw himself into his work to a degree that suggested he realized his time on earth was rapidly coming to a close. From late 2008 until his death in December 2011, Kim would make well over three hundred public appearances, including on-site visits throughout North Korea and four long train trips out of the country—three to China and one to Russia. The stroke appears to have affected Kim’s motor functions but not his cognitive abilities. Despite rumors in South Korean media, fed by official sources, that Kim’s mental faculties had seriously deteriorated, foreigners who met him over the several years between his stroke and his death seemed to think he was still capable of clear thought and effective verbal interaction. He was also in better physical shape than they had expected. There were stories of bouts of depression and crying jags. If so, these could have been the side effects of medication prescribed for his other ailments.

Yet even with the special care Kim undoubtedly received from a brigade of doctors, nutritionists, therapists, and others, it was an exhausting schedule and not one recommended for a man in his condition. Besides his busy schedule, he drank, smoked, and regained weight—risky behavior for someone who had suffered such a massive stroke. Although Kim had rebounded for the moment, no one close to him in the DPRK, certainly no one who had seen him in the hospital room in August 2008, could have any illusions that his days were anything but numbered.

DIPLOMATIC DOWNTURN

As Kim Jong Il slowly recuperated, the situation on the diplomatic front took a major turn for the worse. Through much of 2007, there had been sustained, almost giddy, progress on implementation of the six-party joint statement, giving rise to hopes that after four rough years, the process of negotiations was at last on solid ground. In July 2007, the North had shut down Yongbyon; in September representatives from the other five parties visited the nuclear center, and work started on “disabling” key facilities. In a development that probably surprised Pyongyang, the early-September
bombing by the Israeli Air Force of a nuclear reactor in Syria built with North Korean assistance did not slow activity on the six-party front. On October 3, in the midst of the second inter-Korean summit, the six-party representatives released an agreement on the next stage of implementations calling for completion by year’s end of the disablement of Yongbyon’s reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication facility and a “complete and correct” declaration by the DPRK of “all its nuclear programs.” In return, the United States reaffirmed, in vague language, its willingness to remove the DPRK from Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism (a goal of the North since it signed a joint statement on terrorism with the United States in October 2000) and to “advance the process terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK.” Also, the North would be provided with “economic, energy and humanitarian assistance up to the equivalent of one million tons of HFO.” The parties put off what might have been a key step—holding a six-party ministerial meeting—until an “appropriate time.”

Then, abruptly, the situation became confused again. Despite Washington’s efforts to keep the six-party structure intact, it was too frayed and in some sense cobbled together to withstand the various pressures placed on it. Deadlines for implementation (both by the North and by the other five parties) were pressing, while the issue of verification, always a sensitive point in dealing with the North, again blocked the way forward.
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Secretary Rice and Ambassador Hill moved as fast as they could to secure enough progress to keep the process ahead of the critics—in and out of the administration—who continuously snapped at it from behind.