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.
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."
Kim believes his radiance shines beyond the frontiers of North Korea. "Why should I pay visits to large nations when they come to see me in Pyongyang?" he asked South Korean media executives. The pudgy strongman also revealed he has become health conscious. He has cut back on his drinking, and for exercise he swims and rides sturdy Orlov Trotter horses from Russia.
Still, Kim conceded that "my power derives from [the] military." With the officer corps the only conceivable source of a coup, Kim set about placating them with a "military first" policy, funneling precious resources into their coffers. He doles out Mercedes-Benzes, TVs, and fine liquor to loyal officers. It seems to work. Senior generals showed no hint of indignation when told to pour drinks for Albright's entourage. "They were snapping to as though they were privates," says Jack Pritchard, who attended the banquet and was later a special envoy to North Korea. "This is a man of unquestioned authority."
Misstepping. But Kim is not a man of unquestioned judgment. Recent missteps may have hurt his standing inside the military and the party. To curry favor with Japan, he admitted that his agents kidnapped Japanese citizens in the past; the revelation prompted a backlash in Japan, disrupting moves toward rapprochement. He named a Chinese-born tycoon to run a free-trade zone on the North Korea-China border, only to be snubbed when China arrested the man on fraud charges. His diplomats admitted to a clandestine weapons program to enrich uranium, hoping to force direct talks with the United States, but President Bush refused to negotiate without other countries. "All three moves failed," notes Lee Hong Koo, a former prime minister of South Korea. "In North Korea's desperate situation, the only thing remaining in its arsenal is the nuclear threat."
Some analysts detect a streak of insecurity beneath the chatty confidence Kim exudes with visitors. He stands just 5 feet, 3 inches tall, using lifts in his shoes and a bouffant hairdo to raise his stature. "Small as a midget's turd, aren't I?" he asked the kidnapped South Korean actress. She must have replied with great care. Kim, by some accounts, was also stung when Bush consigned him to the "axis of evil" and later added that he loathes Kim for presiding over starvation and political prisons. U.S. officials link Kim to terrorist bombings against the South Korean cabinet and a civilian airliner in the 1980s, and hawks hanker for the fall of his regime, perhaps with a U.S. nudge.
Kim ducked out of sight for 49 days around the time of last spring's war in Iraq, possibly fearing a U.S. pre-emptive strike. "I think he thinks we're going to try to take him out," observes a senior U.S. official. Kim again dropped out of sight from September 9 to October 21. This time, U.S. News has learned, the CIA believes he was battling an illness. Its type and severity are unclear, but he has privately made reference to throat surgery. Back in June, says an official, Kim assembled regime elites to demand they stop speculating about his demise. "I will rule until I'm 80!" he thundered.
Past rumors of sickness have not panned out, and Kim has disappointed U.S. officials before with what one concedes is "remarkable resilience." If he keeps his drinking down and his exercise up, his prediction might prove right.
This story appears in the December 29, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.