Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (76 page)

Eventually, I started asking former elite North Korean officials about the country’s backdoor royalty. Only one admitted to having heard details, and he told me, “If anyone in North Korea talks about it, it’s immediate death.” He was reluctant to say more at first. But finally he said that among high
officials in the know, Kim Jong-su—for that was the man’s real name—-was considered to be the most powerful of Kim Il-sung’s unacknowledged sons. His mother’s home was in Sosong, an elite Pyongyang neighborhood. His influence derived not so much from his ancestry as from his real job, which was at a considerably higher level than his formal titles would suggest. “In North Korea we have a dual system, official and unofficial rank,” my source told me. “Kim Jong-su is part of the party’s intelligence organization, so his rank should never be known. People who don’t know the inner workings of the system might think his rank is not so high. But in fact he’s much, much higher than most people. He has the authority to contact Kim Jong-il by phone—so you can assume he’s more powerful than a minister. Kim Jong-il knows their biological relationship.”

If the age that Bai/Kim gave me—thirty-nine in the spring of 1979—-was correct in Western terms, he was actually Kim Jong-il’s elder. Even if he was giving me his age the way Koreans traditionally figured it—you are already one year old the day you are born—he was around the same age as Jong-il. That suggested his mother might have been one of Kim Il-sung’s companions in the guerrilla days or early in his exile in the Soviet Union, between his first two marriages, or overlapping one or both of them. The source who told me Bai/Kim’s identity said the mother was one of Kim Il-sung’s favorite mistresses, a woman who became famous as a dancer after liberation. She eventually married another man, who was considered Kim Jong-su’s official father, he said. The orphan story that Bai had told me was “the story that everyone gives to foreigners to explain his faithfulness,” this source explained.
¹⁴

I wished that I could find other people who could tell me they had heard it in Pyongyang, to confirm that this version of Kim Jong-su’s paternity was indeed a rumor that spread among some members of the elite. Although my source’s information on other matters generally checked out, I could not absolutely rule out the possibility he had made up this story. And even assuming that the rumor about Kim Jong-su did circulate, it might have been baseless in fact.

All I could conclude with reasonable certainty was that Kim Jong-su was not the person(s) he pretended to be. His diplomatic appointments and his brief incarnation as a scholar, two former officials told me, were cover for intelligence work. Former career diplomat Ko Young-hwan, who defected to South Korea in 1991 after postings in Africa, told me he did not know about the ancestry question. Ko said, however, that “Kim Jong-su is not a true diplomat like Ho Jong”—-who was number three in the UN mission in the late 1980s and early 1990s, also with ambassadorial rank. Rather, Kim Jong-su “was sent to the United Nations as a spy. He’s in that department. I assume he went to Mangyongdae School. He never went to the foreign language schools that most diplomats have attended.”

In his diplomatic postings (prior to the one at the United Nations, at
least) Kim Jong-su “was there to make sure false reports were not made and to watch the ambassador, in case he should work as a channel for right--wing members of the host-country government to be in touch with anti–Kim Jong-il forces,” another former official told me. “When other North Koreans came from Pyongyang, people in that position reported on anything the ambassador might try to hide.”

I tried to contact Kim Jong-su at the United Nations in the summer of 1994 when I wrote a note of condolence on the death of Kim Il-sung, the man whom, as I noted he had told me, he had grown up considering his father. As I was writing this bookI mailed, to the address I had for Kim Jong-su, draft versions of chapters 2 and 3, about the young Kim Il-sung, and requested his help in arranging for me to do further research in Pyongyang on the Great Leader’s life. He did not reply to my overtures.
¹⁵

After each of my visits a major question remained in my mind: How effective, really had all the indoctrination been? Had it produced a population filled with individual examples of the ideal communist “new man,” an altruistic citizen devoted to the welfare of his countrymen? Were people truly fanatical in their loyalty to—or worship of—the leaders? Were they ready to follow orders, no matter what? Even as early as
1979,
I was to learn, people had been hungry—but they had lied with alacrity to foreigners like me, boasting of full stomachs. “My country was very poor before, but thanks to the wise leadership of our Great Leader the country became a powerful state,” a hothouse manager had told me. “Now we are leading a happy life.”

Fear of the consequences if they should fail to play their roles was part of the reason they showed the face they did. But I don’t believe that was the only reason. I think the people for the most part genuinely revered Kim Il-sung. They wanted to praise him and his works. They had expected their lives to improve based on his policies and decisions. If North Korea was not yet the paradise that they tried to convince me it was, many still believed or wanted to believe in the ultimate vision. I came to that conclusion after interviewing a number of defectors who told me they
still
revered Kim even after having fled to South Korea. Appearances, I realized then, were by no means totally deceiving. Many defectors’ statements confirmed that the feeling of religious awe was real.

Take Kim Jong-min, who defected in 1988 after reaching a high rank in
the Ministry of Public Security. Before I met him, he told a South Korean interviewer that, even after arriving in Seoul, he had found himself “unable to denounce Kim Il-sung for the first year.” True, that was partly because “the thought that someone might be listening was too deeply rooted in my consciousness,” he acknowledged. But “even if I had thought of hating a person whom I had only worshipped for forty years, there was no way to really express it.” He explained that “there is no one in North Korea who would say Kim Il-sung is bad.”
¹
North Koreans were taught to believe that “through his anti-Japanese activities, the nation was saved, and through land reform a state centered around the people was established. He established a party which directs the state, and led the country to victory in a war with the United States. He remodeled socialism. The taxation system and social welfare system were completely realized under him. All of this was said to be done by Kim Il-sung, so who would dare to call him bad?”

Kim Jong-min had found reason, where his personal life intersected with public life, to abandon the regime and throw in his lot with the enemy. That made his confession of loyalty to Kim Il-sung all the more believable. After all, the South Korean authorities of the period were not urging him and other defectors to go easy on Pyongyang in their comments for publication. (That form of manipulation would be left for the Kim Dae-jung administration, 1998–2003, and its successor, which did try to mute or silence some defector testimony that might challenge the government’s “sunshine policy” of North-South detente.) Consider also that the defectors were among the tiny minority of citizens who had found the situation back home so intolerable they were moved to risk their lives to escape. The vast majority had stayed behind. Those who stayed behind would have tended to be, if anything, even more devoted.

Andrew Holloway a British social worker and socialist who lived in the country in 1987–88 while working to revise English translations of the regime’s propaganda, paints
in A Year in Pyongyang
an affecting picture of an apparently sincerely felt socialist spirit that he found displayed then in the lives and deeds of Pyongyang residents with whom he came in contact. It can easily be argued that those capital dwellers were an elite group by official decree, people who got to live in Pyongyang partly thanks to their ability to act as exemplars. One could also note that they had little freedom of thought (virtually none on the larger issues) and had been misguided regarding the long-term efficacy of the Kims’ policies. Nevertheless, I think, readers of Hollo-way’s book who were not consumed with knee-jerk loathing for socialism might be hard-pressed to adjudge as evil beyond redemption a society so apparently successful in inculcating values such as kindness and modesty.
²

Still, altruism and loyalty do not exist in a vacuum. The fervor of North Koreans who bought into the system totally could not but be tested severely once food problems became endemic. For the regime it had been an article of
faith that without near-complete isolation,
juche
could not go unchallenged. As eye-opening contacts with the outside world became more frequent, results proved the correctness of that calculation.

One North Korean who turned from zealot to critic was Dong Young-jun, who studied transport economics in Poland at Gdansk University until he defected from there in May 1989. When I met him I found a pleasant-looking fellow with a long-jawed—I would say horsey—face topped with springy hair. Married, with one son, he was studying economics at Seoul’s Korea University. He was an English-speaker, and had made a Western fashion statement by wearing to our meeting a Lacoste sweater with embroidered crocodile logo. He carried a gold-plated lighter with leather inlays to light his Marlboros. In chapter 12 we heard Dong’s account of the gang fights of his youth—fights he participated in, even though this son of a State Security official as a junior and senior middle school student was by his own description a “fanatic” regime loyalist. By the time of his graduation, he had settled down and become a good enough student to go straight to college, with six months of military training replacing the usual decade of service.

Dong told me about the ideology courses he had taken during his student days at Pyongyang Engineering College. The classes required students to memorize Kim Il-sung’s main ideas and then “think of the best way to put them into effect.” Were those classes interesting? I asked him. “I cried often,” he replied. “I was so touched by the consideration Kim Il-sung showed for his people.” Dong related an example of the Great Leader’s concern. “Kim Il-sung passed by a workplace one cold day and saw women removing the row from fish, blowing cold vapor from their mouths. He took a knife and started gutting fish himself, and he asked, ‘How can I improve your lives?’ Kim Il-sung then sent an order to our university, saying, ‘Make a machine that can do this work.’ Even to this day, it really touches me when I think of it and I feel like crying. When I thought of my mother making
kimchee
during the cold winter, it didn’t affect me. But when I thought of the Great Leader touching the smelly fish with the dangerous knife, that got me very emotional.”

Dong was assigned as a member of a group of students who were ordered to dream up the fish-cleaning machine. “In one and a half years we succeeded. The machine we made was very good, had hardly any flaws and didn’t make any mistakes. We made it with fanatic devotion. I heard a saying then, ‘If your mind is at the highest state, your product is at the highest state also.’”

Kim Il-sung made a stop on campus to commend the students who had produced the machine. Dong was not one of those who were notified in advance they would be permitted to talk with the Great Leader, but he was
thrilled nonetheless. “When Kim Il-sung visited us at the university, I realized for the first time that he traveled in an American Ford limousine,” Dong said. “I was very proud. There’s an amusing story about Kim Il-sung and foreign cars. In the mid-1970s he met with foreign reporters. Someone asked him, ‘You hate the United States so much, how can you ride in an American car?’ He replied, ‘I’m not riding in it. I’m
driving
it.’ Just seeing him in it made me proud. I was three or four meters away.” However, Dong confessed, “Now that I have come to South Korea, I’m used to free thinking. I feel a discrepancy
between juche
and his riding in a foreign car.”

I asked whether he believed the story about Kim’s gutting the fish and deciding on the spot to do something for the workers. “He may have done it for show, for effect, but I still believe it actually happened,” Dong replied. “There were people who saw Kim Il-sung do this and wrote books about it.”

Dong’s loyalty to the regime and its leaders was a complex feeling, not all positive, he acknowledged. “Once when I was a junior at the University, I went to a friend’s birthday party. At the party my friend, the host, said, ‘There is something wrong with the Kim Il-sung regime.’ I replied, ‘How could you say that?’ When I think about it now, I was reacting not only out of fanaticism but also out of fear and apprehension. A big reason why I tried to shut him up was that I was afraid he would say it somewhere else, be put under surveillance, get caught and confess that he had made the same remark at his birthday party. Then they would ask, ‘Who else was at the birthday party?’ State Security would ask me why I hadn’t reported it. I was afraid of being punished. I was also concerned because once every three months they would have a big meeting of all the students. There they would make a show of expelling at least one or two students on the basis of State Security’s findings.”