Kim Jong Il: 'Dear Leader' or demon?

It is difficult to know North Korea's intentions when its leader is so reclusive, but perhaps that is by design

By Carol Clark
CNN Interactive

Reclusive leader Kim Jong Il (above) assumed power in North Korea after the death of his father, President Kim Il Sung

(CNN) -- He wields absolute power over the world's fourth-largest army in one of the most volatile regions on the planet. But the personality and character of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are hidden in a fog of propaganda and rumor. Even scholars of the Pyongyang regime are unsure what lies behind the two-dimensional figure the public occasionally glimpses.

The reclusive dictator of the "Hermit Kingdom" has made only three known trips abroad, including a recent secret visit to Beijing, and he rarely receives outsiders in his own country. His voice has been broadcast only once, eight years ago during a Pyongyang military parade, when he said, "Glory to the Korean People's Army."

A short, pudgy, bespectacled man with a pompadour, he looks unimposing in photographs, and yet he pulled off the first communist dynastic succession in history.

"He's a mysterious person -- I think by design. Mystery is a source of leverage and power. It's maintaining uncertainty," said Han S. Park, director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia and a frequent visitor to North Korea.

Rising 9,022 feet above sea level, Mount Paektu is the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula and the site where, according to legend, the Korean nation came into existence

The South Korean Central Intelligence Agency has portrayed Kim as an unstable madman, a cognac-swilling playboy serviced by a team of women known as the "Pleasure Squad" when he is not watching Daffy Duck cartoons.

But since South Korean President Kim Dae-jung announced plans for a June 2000 summit with the North Korean leader, the rhetoric over Kim Jong Il has changed considerably. One senior South Korean official was recently quoted as saying that Kim Jong Il possesses a genius IQ, and intelligence sources are now calling him a "computer wizard."

"It's important for us to try to see him as he is, rather than a distorted version," said Dae-sook Suh, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii who specializes in the Pyongyang government.

"He's the person who rules half of the Korean peninsula and one-third of the Korean people. He's a very powerful person, there's no doubt about that, and he's definitely not a crazy person."

'Flashes of lightning and thunder'

North Korea gives Kim's official birthplace as sacred Mount Paektu. The peak, on the northern border with Chinese Manchuria, is the highest on the peninsula and the site where Korean legend says the nation came into existence 5,000 years ago.

"At the time of his birth there were flashes of lightning and thunder, the iceberg in the pond on Mount Paektu emitted a mysterious sound as it broke, and bright double rainbows rose up," according to the official line.

Researchers who are more objective place Kim's birth in the Far Eastern region of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942. His father, Kim Il Sung, had fled to the Soviet Union when the Japanese put a price on his head for guerrilla activities in occupied Korea. The family returned to the northern part of the peninsula after the Japanese surrender in World War II, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin anointed Kim Il Sung as the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Kim Jong Il's younger brother drowned as a child and his mother died when he was 7 years old. Shortly after, in 1950, the Korean War broke out and he was sent to Manchuria, returning three years later when it ended.

Despite these hardships, Kim Jong Il was presumably surrounded by luxury and privilege for most of his upbringing. As the first-born son of an iron-fisted dictator, "the doors were likely opening for him from a very young age," Dae-sook Suh said.

Bizarre kidnapping

After graduating from Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University in 1964, Kim Jong Il took on the role of culture czar for the Workers Party, focusing on producing plays and films.

South Korean actress Choi En-hui and her husband, director Shin Sang-ok. The couple said they were kidnapped, held captive for eight years and forced to make films for Kim Jong Il. Kim says they worked for him willingly.

His obsession for movies led to one of the strangest incidents associated with him: The 1978 kidnappings of South Korean actress Choi En-hui and her director husband Shin Sang-ok. The couple's account of their ordeal, given after they escaped North Korea in 1986, sounds like a B-movie script.

They said Kim Jong Il held Choi under house arrest and imprisoned Shin for four years for a failed escape attempt. Kim then forced them to work in the North Korean film industry, paying them handsomely while keeping them in the gilded cage of his artistic and social circles. Although the country was having problems paying its debts, Kim lived extravagantly and spent tens of millions of dollars on their film productions, according to Choi and Shin.

The couple told Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer that Kim was a "micro-manager" who made all the major decisions in North Korea because of his father's ailing condition. Shin described Kim as "very bright," but said that he had no sense of guilt about his misdeeds "due to his background and upbringing."

South Korean women grieve for the victims of the 1987 Korean Airlines bombing

Brutal bombings

In 1980 Kim Il Sung formally designated his son as his successor. Kim Jong Il was given senior posts in the Politburo, the Military Commission and the Party Secretariat. He took on the title "Dear Leader" and the government began spinning a personality cult around him patterned after that of his father, the "Great Leader."

The younger Kim has been accused of ordering two bombings by North Korean agents. One in 1983 in Rangoon, Burma, now known as Yangon, Myanmar, killed 17 visiting South Korean officials, including four Cabinet members. Another in 1987 killed all 115 on board a South Korean airliner. No evidence directly links Kim Jong Il to the bombings, however, and some analysts believe his father was still firmly in control of international activities throughout the 1980s, while giving his son more power over domestic affairs.

In 1991 Kim Jong Il became commander-in-chief of North Korea's powerful armed forces, the final step in the long grooming process.

'A peculiar government'

Three years later, when Kim Il Sung died suddenly from a heart attack at 82, most outsiders predicted the imminent collapse of North Korea. The nation had lost its venerated founding father.

Just a few years earlier, its powerful alliances had evaporated with the fall of the Soviet bloc and China's move toward a market-based system. The economy was on the rocks and energy and food were in short supply. A series of weather disasters, combined with an inefficient state-run agricultural system, further eroded the food supply, leading to mass starvation.

The timing could not have been worse for replacing the only leader North Korea had known.

North Koreans pay homage to the memory of President Kim Il Sung

"Heaven didn't smile on Kim Jong Il," said the University of Hawaii's Dae-sook Suh.

After his father's elaborate public funeral Kim Jong Il dropped out of sight, fueling rumors, but he soon managed to consolidate power. Under his newly organized government, his father's presidential post was left vacant and Kim took the titles of general secretary of the Workers Party and chairman of the National Defense Commission -- a group of 10 men that includes the heads of the air force, army and navy, who are now considered the most powerful in the country.

"It's a peculiar government to say the least," Dae-sook Suh said. "He honors the legacy of his father, but the new government is a Kim Jong Il government. It's quite different from his father's."

Kim Il Sung's unique style of Stalinism, suffused with the Korean "juche" philosophy (roughly translated as "self reliance"), was subordinated to the more militant theme of Kim Jong Il's "Red Banner" policy, introduced in 1996.

Military buildup 'exceeds imagination'

The changes afoot were dramatically illustrated in 1997 by the defection of Hwang Jang Yop -- the architect of the juche philosophy and the first high-level official to seek asylum in South Korea.

Hwang Jang Yop was a key figure in the North Korean government until his defection to the South in 1997.

Hwang, who was 74 at the time, had been a key figure in the Pyongyang government -- a member of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly. He was also Kim Jong Il's mentor, taking charge of his education when he was a student at Kim Il Sung University and serving as his confidant.

It appears that Hwang's influence had waned considerably and that he was on the verge of forced retirement when he fled, leaving a wife and three children behind.

In a news conference after his defection, Hwang warned of a growing possibility that his homeland might launch an attack. "The preparation for war exceeds your imagination," he said.

Hwang described Kim Jong Il as a strong-willed dictator who is short-tempered and ruthless when it comes to punishing anyone who questions his policies.

Many outsiders viewed the flight of Hwang as another sign that the North Korean regime was on its last legs, but once again it weathered the storm, perhaps even benefiting from the fears of war heightened by Hwang's warning.

'Perception is reality'

Despite sending a test missile over Japan in June 1999 and other such incidents, North Korea under Kim Jong Il also has sent signals that it is open to new alliances after decades of isolation. Billions of dollars in international aid has poured into North Korea, which has had to do little in return.

Many analysts conclude that Kim Jong Il has played a poor hand of cards skillfully.

"I tend to disregard rumors that he's irrational, a man that nobody can do business with," said Alexander Mansourov, a longtime Korea scholar and a former Russian diplomat who was posted in Pyongyang in the late 1980s. "I believe that he is smart. He's pragmatic. And I think he can be ruthless. He's a man who will not loosen his grip in any way on the people around him."

At this stage, Kim Jong Il is displaying only short-term thinking, Mansourov added. "Survival is critical. I don't detect signs of a long-term strategy. But I think that will change. The economy seems to be improving -- or at least that's what [the North Koreans] want us to believe."

It is easy for outsiders to demonize Kim Jong Il, a dictator who spends an estimated 25 percent, or more, of his country's GNP on the military while many in his country go hungry.

But in North Korea, closed off from outside influences, fearful of threats from its neighbors, and subjected to decades of political socialization on top of a long tradition of a strict hierarchical system, Kim Jong Il is viewed positively by most people, said Han S. Park of the Center for Study of Global Issues.

"The level of reverence for Kim Jong Il in North Korea is quite underestimated by the outside," Park said. "He is regarded by many as not only a superior leader but a decent person, a man of high morality. Whether that's accurate is not important if you want to deal with North Korea. You have to understand their belief system. Perception is reality."

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