Nuclear Bombast
Is North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il ready to trade away his growing nuclear arsenal, or is he just playing for time?
The "Dear Leader" was furious. Someone had used his ashtray in an elevator reserved exclusively for the future ruler of North Korea. The offender was a bodyguard Kim had known since boyhood--but no matter. The guard and his family were hauled off to North Korea's gulag, where he died after a pummeling by fellow prisoners.
Kim Jong Il, say those who have served him and lived to tell the outside world, is a quick-tempered tyrant who brooks no disobedience. Born to privilege as the eldest son of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, the younger Kim pushed aside rivals to create communism's first dynastic succession. "He acts like an emperor, like a born god," says Lee Young Kook, an ex-bodyguard of Kim's who escaped to South Korea and retells the ashtray incident. "But he is nervous and fearful because of what he does to people."
The 62-year-old dictator has good reason to stay nervous. With the capture of Saddam Hussein, Kim rises yet higher in the Bush administration's pantheon of "evil," surpassed, probably, only by Osama bin Laden. And threats to Kim's totalitarian hold on his country of 23 million are not just external. Starvation, poverty, and repression all have sown a risk of upheaval should Kim come to be seen as vulnerable. For now, though, his reign seems secure. "We are unaware of any opposition or plotting to overturn the current leadership," says a State Department intelligence assessment.
The Bush administration will have to reckon with Kim if North Korea's drive for nuclear weapons is to be stopped short of military conflict. A decisive chapter may play out in 2004, with a diplomatic campaign to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear weapons programs and what U.S. intelligence believes are at least two and perhaps several nuclear bombs. Kim's hard-nosed brinkmanship has kept Washington guessing about whether he can be dissuaded from fielding atomic arms, with or without a negotiated deal. Inside information on Kim's intentions is in chronically short supply. "It's the longest-running failure in the history of American espionage," concludes Donald Gregg, a former CIA station chief and later U.S. ambassador in South Korea. "They [spies] were very, very hard to recruit and communicate with."
Kim was once dismissed as a hard-drinking playboy smitten with race cars and beautiful blonds. The juicy tidbits that filtered out read like a novel: that he was the world's No. 1 customer for Hennessy cognac, that he and his cronies partied with female "pleasure teams," that he was too incoherent to rule for long. That was the image once promoted by South Korean intelligence--and lapped up in Washington.
High living. No doubt, Kim is an erratic and indulged figure. His personal wealth is estimated at $4 billion, amassed in part, U.S. officials say, through drug and missile sales and counterfeiting. He has several wives and children, one of whom is apparently being groomed for eventual succession. And he lives large. On a one-month train journey across Russia in 2001, Kim used silver chopsticks to feast on fresh lobster, sushi, and other delicacies, washed down by Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines. For amusement, he screened films and basked in the company of four "lady conductors," who belted out old Soviet tunes.
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