Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  His policies of Juche—self-reliance (actually isolation)—coupled with Songun—Military First (which meant maintaining a million soldiers, a nuclear program and engaging in brinksmanship through murderous military skirmishes with South Korea)—led to famine amongst his people in the 1990s: one million, or 5 percent, died. He ruled by brutal repression and terror. One in twenty of his people have been incarcerated in concentration camps, while 200,000 toiled within them at any given time.

  Yet he was no buffoon, rather a skillful and ruthless manipulator. His acquisition of a nuclear device in 2006 allowed him to force the Americans into negotiations for food aid in order to save his regime. He ended the talks when he had extracted maximum concessions and supplies from his enemy, only to restart them again later when his authority looked to be under threat. By 2004, the dictator started to suffer strokes or coronaries and in 2010 he chose his youngest son Kim Jong Un as heir apparent. In December 2011, the Dear Leader died of a heart attack on his train. He was hailed as Great Saint Born of Heaven and his son, at just twenty-seven years old and with no political experience, was chosen as the Great Successor and appointed supreme commander and general secretary of the party.

  Kim Il Sung and his successors are among a mere handful of dictators who have managed to transform socialistic republican autocracies into hereditary monarchies in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is the dream of every dictator to die in his bed, having chosen his successor. In Syria, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, who came to power in 1969, managed to achieve the succession of his son Bashar in 2000; in Azerbaijan, Gaidar Aliev was succeeded by his son Ilhan in 2003; in the Congo, Laurent Kabila was succeeded by his son Joseph. In the autonomous Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov succeeded his father as premier and then as president. Fidel Castro, who had ruled Cuba since 1959, was succeeded by his brother Raul in 2008.

  It is often the case that the son proves to be weaker than the father, and his reign is shorter. Only in North Korea has the dynasty reached the third generation. It is astonishing that the Kim family and their henchmen, many of them related, have twice managed to achieve smooth hereditary successions. At the time of his succession, Kim Jong Un was the world’s youngest head of state.

  ODETTE SANSOM

  1912–1995

  I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best and at their worst

  Odette Sansom, reflecting on her experiences

  Odette Sansom represents the courage of ordinary—yet extraordinary—people during the Second World War. Although she was awarded the George Cross and the Légion d’honneur for her work behind enemy lines during the Second World War, Odette Sansom described her occupation in Who’s Who as “housewife.” Known simply as Odette, she never viewed her unflinching bravery in Nazi-occupied France as anything out of the ordinary.

  Born in France, in 1931 Odette Brailly, as she then was, married an English hotelier, Roy Sansom, whom she had met when he stayed at her Picardy home to improve his French. The couple subsequently settled in England and had three children together. Almost a decade later Odette, living a quiet life as a London housewife, responded to a War Office request for all French-born residents to provide any photographs they might have of their homeland. When Odette sent in her holiday albums, the War Office called her in to see whether she might be able to help them with more than snapshots. She was asked to join the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, where she received her basic training, but this was a really a cover for her recruitment into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the covert British organization that sent agents to occupied Europe to work as spies and saboteurs.

  Although her recruiters had been impressed by her vivacity, her intelligence and her desire to redeem France from the disgrace of its capitulation in 1940, her trainers at SOE were at first doubtful that Odette had what it took to be a secret agent. But eventually, noting her steely determination, they selected her for work in occupied France.

  She was landed by boat in Antibes in October 1942, where she met her group leader, Peter Churchill. Odette was meant to join a new circuit in Burgundy, but Churchill, with whom she would fall in love and eventually marry, instead secured permission for her to stay with his circle. Using the code name Lise, Odette worked as Churchill’s courier for over a year, helping him to transmit vital information to and from England.

  In April 1943 Odette and Churchill were betrayed by a double agent. Odette had been suspicious of “Colonel Henri” as soon as she met the German officer who claimed that he wanted to defect to the Allies. Churchill, when he returned by parachute from London where he had been receiving instructions, was equally suspicious. But by then it was too late. A more indiscreet member of their circle had already confided in Sergeant Bleicher of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), and Odette and Churchill were arrested.

  In fourteen separate interrogations in Fresnes Prison in Paris, as her toenails were torn out and her spine branded with a red-hot iron, Odette refused to alter her story, or to reveal the identities or whereabouts of two other SOE officers the Gestapo were determined to find. Sticking obdurately to the quickly fabricated story that she was married to Peter Churchill, she insisted that she, not Churchill, was the leader of the group. She managed to convince her interrogators of the truth of this by agreeing that she, rather than Churchill, should be shot. As a result, Churchill was only interrogated twice. Odette was sentenced to death.

  In 1944 she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was to be executed. That she survived was partly down to the fact that she and Churchill had convinced the Gestapo that his uncle was the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Nevertheless, Odette was held in solitary confinement and treated brutally. When the Allies landed in France, she was kept in complete darkness for three months as a punishment. But believing her to be well connected, the camp commandant used Odette as a hostage when he fled before the advancing Red Army. As soon as they reached Allied lines, Odette denounced him.

  Odette emerged from prison gaunt, ill and, in the words of a doctor’s report, “in a state of high nervous tension due to maltreatment.” Yet in the years after her release she refused ever to indulge in bitterness or recrimination and instead devoted herself to working with charities dedicated to healing the physical and mental wounds of war. She made an emotional return to Ravensbrück in 1994 to unveil a plaque to her SOE comrades who had died there.

  Odette was awarded the George Cross, England’s highest nonmilitary honor, and appointed to France’s Légion d’honneur. She was idolized in the press, and her actions were immortalized in the 1950 film Odette. But she remained a self-effacing heroine, stating that she accepted the George Cross only on behalf of all those who had fought in the war, adamant that it was the luck of her survival, and not any particular bravery, that had secured it.

  Odette married Churchill in 1947, but the marriage was not a success. She was, however, blissfully happy with her third husband, Geoffrey Hallowes, another ex-SOE man, until her death in 1995.

  She ranks with other female heroines of the Second World War, who also worked for SOE: Violette Szabo who parachuted into France, but was captured and survived weeks of Nazi torture before being executed; Hannah Senesh, Hungarian Jewess, poet and spy who, captured in Hungary, withstood torture and was shot; and the New Zealander Nancy Wake, who parachuted into France and survived the war after killing Germans with her own hands. The Germans called her the White Mouse. She was the most decorated woman of the Second World War.

  JFK

  1917–1963

  Democracy is a difficult kind of government. It requires the highest qualities of self-discipline, restraint, a willingness to make commitments and sacrifices for the general interest …

  John F. Kennedy, speech in Dublin (June 28, 1963)

  The 35th president of the United States was a gifted and charismatic man, the youngest—after Teddy Roosevelt—to reach the White House, and the only Roman Catholic to
do so. In the three short years of his presidency he gave America and the world a vision of a peaceful and prosperous future. His assassination in 1963 was met with grief across the globe.

  John F. Kennedy was the son of Joe Kennedy, a ruthless self-made business tycoon who had made fortunes in whiskey during the Prohibition era and in movies and real estate afterward. As President Roosevelt’s ambassador to London, he was discredited by becoming a shameless appeaser of Nazi Germany. But his children overcame this stain on the family’s reputation to become almost American royalty. His son John (Jack) Kennedy joined the US Navy in September 1941, shortly before the USA joined the war, and went on to serve in the Pacific theater. He was decorated with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for saving the crew of his PT (patrol torpedo) boat after it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands.

  Not long after leaving the navy, Kennedy entered politics, serving as a Democratic Party congressman between 1946 and 1952, when he was elected to the Senate. In 1960 he defeated Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Running with Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate, Kennedy beat the Republican Richard Nixon, partly as a result of his superior gift for public speaking and his ability to look good on TV. When he was inaugurated as president in 1961, he gave an inspirational speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he told his fellow Americans. “Ask what you can do for your country.”

  Kennedy’s presidency was a glamorous one, full of youthful idealism, in which the White House played host to many artists and cultural figures. Kennedy himself was an obsessional, indeed priapic, lothario, having affairs with the film star Marilyn Monroe, society women and Mafia molls: he told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that if he did not have a woman every day, he suffered from headaches. None of this was known or revealed at the time; he and his elegant first lady Jackie created an American “court” such that it came to be known as Camelot. Politically Kennedy’s presidency was dominated by the Cold War, the global struggle for supremacy between the democratic free world, led by America, and the communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1961 Kennedy authorized the CIA-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, a fiasco in which Cuban exiles unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Fidel Castro.

  Matters escalated in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Kennedy became involved in a nuclear stand-off with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, spelling acute danger not only for America but also for the world.

  Since the 1959 revolution Cuba had been ruled by Fidel Castro, a Soviet ally. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, felt Russia was losing the arms race, so he recklessly bet his foreign policy on changing the balance of power. He had decided to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, which America traditionally considered part of its backyard.

  On October 14, 1962 an American U-2 spy plane overflew Cuba, taking aerial photographs. The courage of a CIA spy in the Russian military, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was later exposed and shot in 1963, enabled American analysts to identify medium-range ballistic missiles near San Cristóbal, only 90 miles (145km) from the coast of Florida.

  President Kennedy was briefed on October 16. The next day American military units began to move southeast. Meanwhile, a second U-2 mission identified further construction sites and between sixteen and thirty-two missiles already on Cuba. On October 18, without revealing that he knew about the missiles, Kennedy warned the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, of the “gravest consequences” should the Soviet Union introduce significant offensive weapons to the island.

  Four days later, having ruled out an air strike against the missile sites, Kennedy went on national television to reveal the discovery of the Soviet missiles and announce a naval “quarantine” (blockade) of Cuba, which was only to be lifted when the weapons were removed. On October 24 American ships moved into position. Though Khrushchev declared the blockade illegal, Soviet freighters heading for Cuba stopped dead in the water.

  In an exchange of telegrams between Kennedy and Khrushchev that evening, neither side gave ground. But American military defenses were moved, for the only time in history, to DEFCON 2, a heightened state of readiness for imminent attack.

  On October 25 the United Nations called for a cooling-off period between America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy firmly refused. The next day Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles in exchange for American assurances not to invade Cuba.

  On October 27 Khrushchev made another offer: removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the removal of American missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. Then, around noon, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet missile, and the pilot killed. At a meeting with his military advisers, Kennedy agreed to hold back from an immediate military response and to offer terms in accordance with Khrushchev’s initial suggestion. But there was no expectation that Khrushchev would now accept. Kennedy warned America’s NATO allies to expect war the next day.

  However, when the next day dawned, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would remove its weapons from Cuba. Kennedy had negotiated a deal whereby the US missiles in Turkey would be removed in secret. Though few in Moscow, Washington, Cuba or Turkey were entirely satisfied with the outcome, the crisis was over.

  Kennedy emerged from the crisis with immense credit. He had been tough but not rash and had called Khrushchev’s bluff. The Soviet leader, by contrast, was criticized for his recklessness and lost face: in 1964 he was overthrown in a Kremlin coup by Leonid Brezhnev. The rest of the world was simply relieved that the greatest nuclear crisis in history had somehow been averted.

  Khrushchev backed down over Cuba, but in 1963 there were still great tensions in Germany, where Western and Soviet forces faced each other on either side of the divided country. Kennedy gave one of the great speeches of modern times in Berlin, where the Soviets had recently built the infamous wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in,” he said. In the same speech, he used the famous phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” calling for solidarity across the Western world.

  As well as being involved in a military stand-off, the USA and the Soviet Union were in competition in the space race. In 1961 Kennedy persuaded Congress to vote $22 billion to put an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, it was testament to Kennedy’s far-sighted commitment to space exploration. Less far-sighted was his commitment to increasing amounts of military support for South Vietnam in its battle with the communist North, a policy that was to mire America in a decade-long conflict that in the end it had to abandon. However, there is some evidence that Kennedy, had he lived, planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election.

  On the home front, Kennedy was initially slow to give his complete backing to the civil rights movement. But in 1962 he sent 3000 troops to the University of Mississippi to allow a black student, James Meredith, to enroll for classes. By 1963 he had thrown his whole weight behind civil rights and gave a stirring speech on national television. After his death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he had proposed, became law.

  Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 was a moment that stopped the world in its tracks. He was gunned down while being driven through the city in an open-topped car, probably by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself murdered days later by Jack Ruby, a dubious nightclub operator. The wealth of conspiracy theories provoked by Kennedy’s death is testament to the glamorous and optimistic effect that this young and charismatic president had on the world he helped save from annihilation.

  NASSER, SADAT, MUBARAK

  Egypt and The Arab Spring

  1918–70 & 1918–81 & 1928–

  I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me.

  Gamal Abdul Nasser

  Gamal Abdul Nasser was the most
influential Middle Eastern leader of the mid-twentieth century, the dictator of Egypt, the region’s most powerful country, and perhaps the most popular Arab potentate since Saladin. Yet his career ended in defeat and disappointment and the failure of his secular pan-Arabism opened the door to a new Islamic fundamentalism. Nevertheless for almost twenty years he was for many Arabs El Rais—the Boss.

  Born in a village near Cairo, Nasser was the son of a post office worker. He was educated in Alexandria, where he lived with his grandmother and joined the army in 1937. Egypt was then ruled by the Albanian dynasty of kings descended from Mehmet Ali, the Ottoman warlord and pasha who seized control of the county after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, becoming first khedives then sultans and finally kings of Egypt. The country was actually run by a hybrid elite of Ottomans and Albanians as well as Egyptians—but even this was under the domination of Britain, which had controlled Egypt since 1882. Reading widely everything from the Koran to Dickens, Nasser was political from an early age, loathing the control of the British over Egyptian life.

  Studying at the military academy, he met his political ally Abdul Hakim Amer, a genial, vain, bombastic and flamboyant fellow officer with whom he served in Sudan. Hoping for a Nazi victory to overthrow British rule in Egypt, he and Amer worked to put together a group of like-minded officers. Faced with the UN plan to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Nasser was tempted to fight on the Arab side and finally got his chance when King Farouk of Egypt, obese, incompetent and debauched, joined the other countries of the Arab League in an attack on the nascent Jewish state of Israel. The Egyptians, including Nasser, advanced fast into the Negev but the young officer witnessed the ineptitude of the king and his officers as well as the lack of equipment and absence of proper preparation.