The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  Over my years covering North Korea, I’ve met scores, perhaps even hundreds, of people who’ve escaped from the Kimist state. They’re often called “defectors,” but I don’t like that word. It implies that they’ve done something wrong by fleeing the regime. I prefer to call them “escapees” or “refugees.”

  It is becoming increasingly difficult to find people willing to talk. This is partly because the flow of escapees has slowed to a trickle during the Kim Jong Un years, the result of stronger border security and rising living standards inside the country. It is also because of a growing expectation that escapees will be paid for their testimony, an ethical no-no for me.

  But through groups that help North Koreans to escape or settle down in South Korea, I managed to find dozens of people who would talk to me without payment. They were from all walks of life: officials and traders who’d thrived in Pyongyang, people in the border regions who were earning their livings through the markets, those who’d ended up in brutal regime prisons for the most frivolous of offenses.

  There were also people who had also been optimistic that this young leader would bring about positive change, and there were those who remained proud that he’d built a nuclear program that North Korea’s richer neighbors had not.

  I met some in South Korea, often at down-market barbecue restaurants in their satellite suburbs after they’d finished work for the day. I talked to others near the banks of the Mekong River as they stopped for a pause in their perilous escape, sitting on the floor with them in dingy hotel rooms in Laos and Thailand.

  And most dangerous of all, I met some in northern China. China treats escapees from North Korea as economic migrants, meaning they would be repatriated to North Korea and to severe punishment if they were caught. But hiding out in borrowed apartments, they bravely told me their stories.

  Over hundreds of hours of interviews across eight countries, I managed to piece together a jigsaw puzzle called Kim Jong Un.

  What I learned did not bode well for the twenty-five million people still trapped inside North Korea.

  PART ONE

  THE APPRENTICESHIP

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BEGINNING

  “The Majestic Comrade Kim Jong Un, descended from heaven and conceived by Mt. Paektu.”

  —Rodong Sinmun, December 20, 2011

  WONSAN IS A PARADISE ON EARTH. OR AT LEAST A PARADISE IN North Korea.

  In a country of jagged mountains and rocky soil, of Siberian freezes and flash floods, the east coast area of Wonsan is one of the few spots of natural beauty. It has white sandy beaches and a sheltered harbor dotted with little islands. Wonsan is where North Korea’s 0.1 percent spend their summers. It’s their Martha’s Vineyard, their Monte Carlo.

  They swim in the sea or relax in the pools at their beachfront villas. They suck the delectable meat from fur-covered claws of the prized local hairy crab and scoop the rich roe from inside it. They repair to nearby Lake Sijung, where the 107-degree mud pool is said to relieve fatigue and erase wrinkles, making a tired old cadre feel instantly refreshed.

  This area is especially beloved by the most elite of the elites: the Kim family, which has controlled North Korea for more than seven decades.

  It was here that a young anti-imperialist fighter with the nom de guerre of Kim Il Sung landed when he returned home to Korea in 1945, after Japan had been defeated in World War II and ejected from the peninsula.

  It was here that Kim Jong Il, just four years old when the war ended, hid out while his father maneuvered to become the leader of the newly created North Korea. This half of the peninsula would be backed by communist Soviet Union and China, while the southern half would be supported by the democratic United States.

  And it was here that a little boy called Kim Jong Un spent the long, lazy summers of his childhood, frolicking on the beaches and zooming over the waves on a banana boat.

  When he was born on January 8, 1984—a year forever associated in the outside world with oppression and dystopia, thanks to the novelist George Orwell—the little boy’s grandfather had ruled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for thirty-six years. He was the Great Leader, the Sun of the Nation, and Ever-Victorious Brilliant Commander Kim Il Sung.

  The little boy’s father, an odd little man who was obsessed with films and who was about to turn forty-two, had been designated heir to the regime, ready to give it the dubious honor of becoming the world’s first Communist dynasty. He was preparing to become the Dear Leader, the Glorious General Who Descended from Heaven, and the Guiding Star of the Twenty-First Century.

  They both loved to spend time in Wonsan. And so, too, did the little boy who would one day follow in their footsteps.

  As he was growing up, he would come east from Pyongyang or very far east from his school in Switzerland to spend his summers here. Much later, when he wanted to show off this funfair made for one, he would bring an idiosyncratic American basketballer here for boating and partying—lots of partying. Even later still, an unconventional American real estate developer turned president would praise Wonsan’s “great beaches” and describe it as an ideal place to build condos.

  The Kim regime shared Wonsan’s natural beauty with selected outsiders to propagate the myth that North Korea was a “socialist paradise.” The city itself wasn’t particularly attractive. Wonsan was entirely destroyed in the sustained American bombing campaign of the Korean War and had been rebuilt in drab Soviet style. Red signs exhorting “Long Live Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung” and billboards advertising totalitarianism to a population that had no choice but to buy it sat atop the gray concrete buildings in the city center.

  The pristine white beach at Songdowon was always the main attraction. Throughout the 1980s, when Kim Jong Un began playing on the beach, Wonsan was a focal point for communist get-togethers. A Boy Scout camp there in 1985 attracted children from the Soviet Union and East Germany, and the state media published photos of happy children flocking from across the world to spend their summers in Wonsan.1

  The reality—even then in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union still existed and still propped up its Asian client state—was very different.

  When Lee U Hong, an agricultural engineer who lived in Japan but was ethnically Korean, arrived in Wonsan to teach at the agricultural college in 1983, he watched as a class of young women learned about a famous tree called the golden pine. Lee thought they were visiting junior high school students. They turned out to be college students—but because they were so malnourished, they looked years younger.2

  The following year, when he went to the beach to look for Wonsan’s famed sweetbriar flower, he couldn’t find any. A local told him that North Korean kids were so hungry that they picked the flowers so they could eat their seeds.

  Lee saw none of the advanced agricultural methods or the mechanized farms that the government and its representatives liked to crow about. Instead, he saw thousands of people harvesting rice and corn by hand.3

  But the Kim regime had a myth to perpetuate. When floods caused devastation in South Korea in 1984, the North sent food aid on ships that departed from the port in Wonsan, which sits just 80 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, the 2.5-mile-wide no-man’s land that has divided the peninsula since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

  Eight months after Kim Jong Un was born, even as ordinary North Koreans were suffering from severe food shortages, sacks marked “Relief Goods for South Korean Flood Victims” and bearing the symbol of the North Korean Red Cross were being shipped from Wonsan.

  “As it was the first happy event in our 40 year history of separation, the wharf was full of passion,” the Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, reported in 1984. “The wide wharf echoed with cheerful farewells… The whole port was full of love for family.”

  Of course, Kim Jong Un would know none of this. He was living a blissful, cloistered life in one of the family’s compounds in Pyongyang or at the beachfront residence in Wonsan, w
here the house was so huge that the Kim children rode a battery-powered golf cart to get around.4

  In the 1990s, while North Korean children were eating seeds for nourishment, Kim Jong Un was enjoying sushi and watching action movies. He was developing a passion for basketball and was flying off to Paris to visit Euro Disney.

  He lived behind the curtain of the world’s most secretive regime until 2009, when he reached the age of twenty-five. Then, when he was formally introduced to the North Korean elite as his father’s successor, his first commemorative photo was taken in Wonsan. It was broadcast on North Korean television only once or twice and is very grainy, but it shows Kim Jong Un, dressed in a black Mao suit, standing under a tree with his father, his brother and sister, and two other men.

  Wonsan remained an extremely important place to Kim Jong Un. After he became leader, perhaps to re-create the carefree fun of his youth, he sponsored the creation of a huge amusement park in Wonsan. The city is now home to an aquarium with a tunnel through the tanks, a funfair-style mirror house, and the Songdowon Water Park, a sprawling complex with both indoor and outdoor pools. There is a twirling waterslide that empties into a series of round pools. It is a socialist paradise recast for a theme park era.

  Kim Jong Un inspected the development not long after he became “Beloved and Respected Supreme Leader” at the end of 2011. In a white summer shirt with a red pin placed over his heart that featured the faces of his father and grandfather, he leaned over the waterslides and peered along them. He smiled broadly, declaring himself “very pleased” that North Korea had been able to build a waterpark all by itself.

  From the high diving boards, kids could see the colorful umbrellas on the beach and the pedal boats in the bay. Summer in Wonsan brought “the unusual sight of students standing on the sandy beach with beautifully colored tubes slung over their shoulders, and laughing grandparents, hand-in-hand with grandsons and granddaughters jumping from foot to foot as they look out at the sea,” state media reported.

  These facilities are for the proletariat. The royals have their own.

  The Kim family’s huge compound includes luxurious beachfront residences for the family members, as well as spacious guesthouses for visitors, situated far enough apart from each other and shielded by trees to ensure privacy. Even among the elite, discretion is key. There’s a large indoor swimming pool at the compound and pools set into barges that float offshore, allowing the Kims to swim in the water without the perils of the open sea. A covered dock houses the Kim family yachts and more than a dozen Jet Skis. There’s a basketball court and a helipad. Not far away is a new airstrip so Kim Jong Un can fly himself into the resort on his personal plane.

  The family shares their playground with the other elite who help keep them in power. The Ministry for the Protection of the State, the brutal security agency that runs political prison camps, has a beachfront summer retreat here. So, too, does Office 39, the department charged with raising money specifically for the Kim family coffers. Since their toil funds this playground, it’s only fair they should enjoy the spoils.5

  An unusual feature of the coast at Wonsan—one not yet found in any Western Disneylands, which make do with much tamer firework displays—is the missile launching sites. Kim Jong Un has launched dozens of rockets from the Wonsan area since he became leader and has supervised large-scale artillery exercises there.

  On one occasion, he watched as his munitions chiefs used new 300mm guns to turn an island just offshore to dust. On another, he didn’t even have to leave the comfort of his beachfront residence. His rocket scientists simply rolled a missile on a mobile launcher to a spot across from the house, and Kim sat at a desk at the window, smiling broadly as he watched it blast off into the atmosphere in the direction of Japan.

  And it was here, on his private beach, that Kim Jong Un ran a swimming exercise for the navy’s top commanders in 2014. The commanders, who all looked like they should be collecting their pensions, stripped off their white dress uniform and hats and changed into swimsuits before running into the sea and swimming three miles, as if they were on “a battlefield without gunfire.”

  It was quite a sight. The new leader, just turned thirty, sat at a desk on the beach, watching through binoculars as men twice his age and half his size crawled through the sea on his instruction. The man with no military experience or qualifications was showing them who was boss. And there was no better place to do it than on his home turf and surf at Wonsan.

  The Kim family’s claim on the leadership of North Korea has its origins in the 1930s, when Kim Il Sung was making a name for himself in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter.

  Kim Il Sung was born Kim Song Ju on the outskirts of Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, the same day that the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. At that time, Pyongyang was a center for Christianity, so much so that it was called the Jerusalem of the East. He was born into a Protestant family, and one of his grandfathers served as a minister.

  Imperial Japan had annexed Korea, still one country back then, two years before he was born. It was the start of a brutal occupation. To escape the Japanese colonizers, the Kim family fled in the 1920s to Manchuria. This area had become the focal point for Koreans railing against the Japanese occupation, and Kim—who took the name Il Sung, meaning “become the sun,” in the early 1930s—emerged as an anti-imperialist leader.

  In his official memoirs, Kim talked up the power of the anti-Japanese forces. “The enemy likened us to ‘a drop in the ocean,’ but we had an ocean of people with inexhaustible strength behind us,” he wrote. “We could defeat the strong enemy who was armed to the teeth… because we had a mighty fortress called the people and the boundless ocean called the masses.”6

  North Korea’s official history exaggerates Kim’s efforts. It portrays him as the heart of the resistance at a time when he still had Chinese and Korean generals above him and claims that the guerrilla movement would have collapsed without him. Though he was just one cog in the resistance machine, Kim even claimed the credit for Japan’s defeat in World War II.

  At some stage, contrary to the official narrative, Kim Il Sung shifted from his base in Manchuria to the Soviet Union with the woman who, in 1940, became his wife, in common law at least. Kim Jong Suk was probably only fifteen years old and working as a seamstress when Kim Il Sung met her in 1935.

  In 1942—again, according to the official history, but in reality it was 1941—she gave birth to their first son, Kim Jong Il, in an army camp near Khabarovsk, in the far east of the Soviet Union.

  When the war in the Pacific came to an end and Korea was liberated from Japan, the fate of the peninsula was uncertain. It had existed as one country for almost fourteen centuries. But the United States and the Soviet Union, the victors in the Pacific War, decided to divide the peninsula between them—without bothering to ask the Koreans what they might want.

  A young US Army colonel named Dean Rusk, who would later go on to become the American secretary of state, and another officer, future four-star general Charles Bonesteel, found a National Geographic map. They simply drew a line across the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel, proposing a temporary solution in which the Americans would control the southern half of the peninsula and the Soviets would take care of the northern part. To their surprise, Moscow agreed.

  This “temporary” solution lasted much longer than Rusk and Bonesteel ever anticipated or intended. It was cemented into the Demilitarized Zone after the bloody Korean War of 1950 to 1953. It has endured for six decades—and counting.

  The Soviets needed to install a leader in their northern half of the new country, a mountainous territory that covered about 46,500 square miles of land. The country is the same size as Mississippi, a bit smaller than England.

  Kim Il Sung wanted the job.

  While he was in the camp near Khabarovsk, he had impressed his Soviet benefactors enough to earn himself a role in the new North Korean regime. But the Soviets had n
ot envisaged Kim as the leader of North Korea. They were wary of his ambition. Stalin didn’t want Kim to build his own power base independent of the Soviet occupation forces.7

  So there was little fanfare when Kim Il Sung returned to Korea, wearing a Soviet military uniform as the Pugachyov, a naval ship, docked at Wonsan on September 19, 1945. He wasn’t even allowed to join the Soviet troops who had expelled the last remaining Japanese occupiers and marched victorious into Pyongyang.

  Moscow’s preferred leader of their new client state was a nationalist called Cho Man Sik, a sixty-two-year-old Presbyterian convert who had headed a nonviolent reformist movement inspired by Gandhi and Tolstoy. He wasn’t ideal—the Soviets were suspicious of his ties to the Japanese—but he was promoting education and economic development as the way to ensure a bright and independent future for Korea.8

  Kim Il Sung wasn’t having it. He soon began positioning himself for the role of leader of the new North Korea, a process that involved, among other things, hosting his Soviet patrons at alcohol-fueled banquets and providing them with prostitutes.

  It helped improve Kim Il Sung’s standing in the eyes of the Soviet generals. Less than a month after his return, Kim Il Sung appeared at a rally in Pyongyang and delivered a speech written for him by Soviet officials. As he took to the stage, cries of “Long live Commander Kim Il Sung” rang out. The people had heard awe-inspiring tales through the grapevine about this outstanding guerrilla leader and his daring feats in Manchuria.

  But the man on the stage did not match the picture in their minds. They’d expected a gray-haired veteran, an electrifying figure. Instead, they saw a man who looked much younger than his thirty-three years and was wearing a navy-blue suit that was a size too small and clearly borrowed.

  To make matters worse, Kim Il Sung wasn’t even very proficient in the Korean language, having spent twenty-six of his thirty-three years in exile. What little education he’d received had been in Chinese. He stumbled through the turgid speech the Soviet occupation forces had written for him, full of Communist terminology awkwardly rendered into Korean. Undermining himself even further, he spoke, as Cho’s secretary would later write, in a “duck-like voice.”9