Nuclear Bombast
Is North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il ready to trade away his growing nuclear arsenal, or is he just playing for time?
Yet in policy terms, Kim is now seen, in the words of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, as a "canny character" who "has played a weak hand very well." Another top official surmises that "power may have sobered him up."
The revised view of Kim took root in the last administration, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright led a mission to Pyongyang. No diplomatic deal was consummated, but the 12 hours of face time with Kim impressed the visiting Americans. Wendy Sherman, then the top State Department adviser on North Korea, met with psychiatrists and analysts from U.S. intelligence in preparation. "Most of it was wrong," she now says. "He is very smart. He may have irrational moments, but he's not irrational." He can even try to be charming--chatting about basketball and Hollywood movies (his tastes range from shoot-'em-up westerns to Daffy Duck). When Albright submitted written questions on security issues for Kim's advisers, he grabbed the list and began answering them himself. Says Gregg, "He's far more than a voluptuary or a playboy. He's a formidable repressive leader."
Kim invited his guests to Pyongyang's May Day stadium for a spectacle reminiscent of the Nazis. The silent masses broke into cheers, jumping up and down, as he took his seat. More than 100,000 danced in precision or flashed cards portraying revolutionary themes, including the launch of a Taepo Dong missile like the one fired over Japan two years earlier. Kim then turned to Albright and Sherman to say, "That was our first missile launch--and our last." The choreographed fervor, recalls Sherman, was "heart wrenching," but the message was clear: "Look at the control I have."
Showmanship of a sort has long been a passion of Kim's. He began his training for power in the Communist Party's agitprop department, overseeing production of films that fostered a cult of personality around his father and later himself. He brags of owning every Academy Award winner among his library of 20,000 videos. He even ordered the kidnapping of a South Korean starlet and her director husband to energize North Korean cinema. The couple escaped with a secret tape-recording of Kim admitting to the kidnapping.
The official hagiography depicts Kim as a peerless genius who produced many films and authored 1,500 books. North Koreans are told Kim is their "lodestar," the "Great General" who stands between them and U.S. imperialists. When he was born in a cabin on sacred Mount Paektu, lightning bolts flashed, and a star appeared in the sky. (He actually began life in a refugee camp in the Soviet Far East.)
Kim manages his grip on power zealously, working, he maintains, until 4 a.m., surfing the Internet on one of three computers, and watching foreign TV news. Aides shuttle in and out, bowing until, almost imperceptibly, he acknowledges their presence. Orders are shot out rapid-fire. Often, the Great General is too busy to bother finishing his sentences. "It always felt as if I was working under a high-voltage line," Hwang Jang Yop, the North's top ideologist and a Kim adviser who later became its highest-ranking defector, told U.S. News. "He feels he is the center of everything . . . the owner of everything."
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