The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  One onlooker said he had “a haircut like a Chinese waiter” or that he looked like “a fat delivery boy from a neighborhood Chinese food stall.” Others called him a fraud or a Soviet stooge.10

  Kim Il Sung was a flop.

  But he got a lucky break when Stalin’s team discovered that peacenik Cho was neither Communist nor a pushover. Cho started making irritating demands about running the country as an independent entity. Suddenly, the lackluster Kim Il Sung looked like a useful, pliant alternative.

  Cho was quickly arrested and disappeared, and Moscow settled on the ambitious young hopeful as their man. They elevated him through a series of roles until the Soviet occupation officially came to an end. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was declared founded on September 9, 1948, and Kim Il Sung was installed as its leader.

  No sooner had he been appointed than Kim began a personality cult so pervasive it would soon make Stalin look like an amateur. Within a year, Kim started going by the title “the Great Leader.” Statues of him started to appear, and history began to be rewritten.

  The 1945 speech that bombed was described in his official biography as an electrifying moment. People “could not take their eyes from [his] gallant figure” and cheered out of “boundless love and respect for their great leader.”11

  Kim Il Sung also quickly established a Korean People’s Army, led by fellow veterans of the anti-Japanese struggle. He formulated a plan to take control of South Korea, and at a meeting in Moscow in March of 1949, he tried to convince Stalin to support a military invasion with reunification in mind. Stalin turned him down—he did not want to begin a war against nuclear-armed America—and told Kim that the North should respond only if it was attacked.

  But Kim and his generals watched enviously as the Chinese Communists ousted Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang later in 1949. He continued to badger Stalin about making a play for the South, especially after the United States withdrew all of its combat troops from South Korea that year, leaving the lower half of the peninsula vulnerable.

  A year after Kim Il Sung first started making the case for war, Stalin finally gave in and approved the invasion in principle—as long as Mao Zedong in China also agreed. Kim went to Beijing in May 1950 and tried to convince Mao, but the Chinese leader was more concerned with Chiang and his Nationalists in Taiwan. He eventually came around to the idea after Stalin leaned on him.12

  Kim Il Sung seized his opportunity. In the early hours of June 25, 1950, soldiers of the North Korean People’s Army drove 150 Soviet-made T-34 tanks over the military demarcation line and into the South. Seven army divisions thundered toward Seoul, followed by North Korean troops on foot.

  The North Koreans overtook the entire country except for an area around the southern city of Busan. It looked like it was going to be an easy victory.

  General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the American military in Japan, was caught by surprise, but he reacted swiftly. His troops landed on the mudflats at Incheon, west of Seoul, in September and pushed the northern army back. China, sensing that things had taken a wrong turn, then sent in troops to help North Korea.

  After six months, the northern army was back where it started, at the 38th parallel. For the next two and a half years, both sides remained bogged down, unable to make any headway.

  It wasn’t that the United States didn’t try hard to break the deadlock. Just five years after the unfathomable devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MacArthur, in all seriousness, raised the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb on North Korea.

  The nuclear option was quickly discarded. But the United States went for a literal scorched-earth approach with conventional bombs, dropping 635,000 tons’ worth on the northern half of the peninsula, more than the 503,000 tons used in the whole Pacific theater during World War II.13 That included 200,000 bombs unleashed on Pyongyang—one for every citizen in the capital.

  Curtis LeMay, the head of the United States’ strategic air command, said they “burned down every town in North Korea.” After running low on urban targets, US bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams, flooding farmland and destroying crops. The air force complained it had run out of things to bomb.14 A Soviet assessment after the war found that 85 percent of all structures in the North had been destroyed.

  By the end of the war, almost three million Koreans—10 percent of the peninsula’s population—were dead, injured, or missing, according to historians. LeMay estimated that some two million of the dead were in the North.15 Some thirty-seven thousand American soldiers were killed during the fighting.

  After all this destruction and long after it became apparent that neither the Chinese- and Soviet-backed North nor the American-backed South could win outright, the two sides agreed to an armistice. On July 27, 1953, the fighting stopped. But because a peace treaty was never signed, the war never officially ended.

  In the North, Kim Il Sung’s regime blamed the conflict on an American-supported invasion from the South, a lie that is propagated in North Korea to this day. The regime pronounced itself the victor.

  North Korea still refers to the conflict as the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War. There’s a museum devoted to this in Pyongyang, where the wreckages of captured American warplanes are perfectly preserved. It is part of an effort to keep alive the memories of that ferocious war, a way to keep the population on perpetual alert, to make citizens coalesce around the Kim family.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, Kim Il Sung cemented his leadership of the shattered country by overseeing a massive rebuilding program funded by North Korea’s allies. He also purged a number of senior military leaders and Workers’ Party officials, to whom he assigned blame for the destruction of property and life, and he put down rival factions.

  Meanwhile, his propagandists accelerated their efforts to build up admiration around him. Soviet officials—themselves no strangers to personality cults—began voicing concern about the way Kim Il Sung was forcing the North Korean people to revere him.

  In a Soviet cable from 1955, officials based in North Korea noted there was “an unhealthy atmosphere of sycophancy and servility toward Kim Il Sung” among senior officials in the Workers’ Party.16 By this time, even the Soviet Union was going off this kind of idolatry. Stalin had died, and Khrushchev had secretly given a speech denouncing the adoration that his predecessor encouraged.

  The new leader also set about showing he was no Chinese or Soviet puppet. He began positioning himself as a great thinker who was leading an independent, nonaligned nation.17

  He espoused a spurious concept called juche, pronounced “joo-chay” and usually translated as “self-reliance.”

  The central idea was that North Korea was entirely self-sufficient and that its achievements had been earned “by our nation itself,” conveniently overlooking the state’s total dependence on its communist benefactors. But in other ways, North Korea had achieved a level of autarky, crafting relatively independent foreign and defense policies.

  Juche was enshrined as policy in the constitution in the 1970s. But the scholar Brian Myers likes to point out that this idea is so thin that the entry in a North Korean encyclopedia for the Juche Tower, a Pyongyang monument, is twice as long as the entry for the ideology itself.

  Still, North Korea’s economy remained larger than the South’s until the mid-1970s. This was partly because the North had all the natural resources, so all Kim Il Sung had to do was rebuild heavy industry and the mining sector that had been developed by the Japanese occupiers. Plus, he had the Soviet Union’s provisions to its client state and the benefits of socialist-style labor mobilization. South Korea had to start from scratch after the war.

  Now in his sixties, Kim Il Sung was beginning to think about his legacy—and about making sure that the dictatorship he’d established would endure. While the Soviet Union and China were using Communist Party apparatuses to elevate new leaders, Kim Il Sung wanted to keep it in the family. He toyed with passing
the crown to his younger brother. To the dismay of some, he instead decided on his eldest son as his successor.

  First, however, the system needed a few tweaks.

  The 1970 edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminologies stated that hereditary succession is “a reactionary custom of exploitive societies.” That was quietly dropped from future publications.18 State media started referring to “the party center,” a phrase used to obliquely refer to Kim Jong Il’s activities without explicitly stating his name, and Kim Jong Il began to be promoted up the Workers’ Party hierarchy.

  The North’s allies picked up on Kim Il Sung’s plans early on. The East German ambassador to Pyongyang cabled the foreign ministry in 1974 to say that North Koreans were being asked to “swear loyalty to Kim Jong Il” at Workers’ Party meetings across the country “in case something grave might happen to Kim Il Sung.” Portraits of Kim Jong Il started to appear on the walls of government offices, along with slogans of statements he had made on reunification or socialist construction, the ambassador said.

  Official publications began portraying Kim Il Sung as a benevolent, fatherly figure. Photos and paintings showed him lavishing affection on happy North Koreans or laughing with children. This kind emperor façade would make a comeback some fifty years later, when Kim Jong Un would channel his grandfather and adopt the same smiling dictator persona.

  Kim Il Sung’s first wife and his oldest son were featured prominently for the first time, forming a North Korean holy trinity. Some photos showed Kim Jong Il instructing propagandists and film producers. “He already displays the pose usually reserved for Kim Il Sung in his talks with DPRK citizens,” the ambassador wrote. “This visual observation confirms in fact our assumption we have made earlier: Kim Il Sung’s eldest son is systematically groomed to become his successor.”19

  At the sixth Workers’ Party Congress in Pyongyang in 1980, it was made official. The younger Kim was elevated to high positions in the three main organs of the Workers’ Party—the Politburo Presidium, the Central Military Commission, and the party secretariat—in one fell swoop. Only Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il held concurrent leadership of all three of the main Workers’ Party organs.20

  Presenting Kim Jong Il as his chosen heir, Kim Il Sung said that his son would ensure the revolutionary task was continued “generation after generation.”

  Kim Jong Il took on more and more responsibility within the Workers’ Party and accompanied his father on his “on-the-spot guidance” tours around the country—the practice where North Korea’s supposedly benevolent and omniscient leaders show up unannounced and tell farmers how best to grow their crops or factory managers how best to produce steel. Photos show the recipients of this knowledge dutifully taking everything down in little notebooks.

  In 1983, Kim Jong Il made his first known foreign trip without his father, a visit to factories in emerging China. The visit, one of a handful the Dear Leader made over the years, was part of Beijing’s efforts to encourage North Korea to embark on a journey of economic transformation without democratizing, just as China had done.

  “Through tireless revolutionary activities spanning over 30 years, he ushered in a new era of prosperity,” according to an official North Korean history of Kim Jong Il’s life that was published soon after he became leader.21

  But the reticent Kim Jong Il could hardly have been more different from his gregarious father. Kim Il Sung was lionized as a fearless guerilla fighter who led the charge against the imperialist Japanese. Kim Jong Il had next to no military experience. He was a film lover, a heavy-drinking playboy with a bouffant hairdo whose main contribution to the state was the movies he directed.

  Still, in 1991, he was pronounced Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army. It was hardly an auspicious time to cement the succession. The Berlin Wall had come down. Just two days after his promotion, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Communist Bloc that had supported the North Korean regime, both economically and ideologically, was no more.

  To bolster the case for hereditary succession in these challenging circumstances, the regime created a fantastical story about Kim Jong Il’s provenance that borrowed heavily from both Korean mythology and Christianity. He would be leader not simply because he had been appointed by his father but because he had some divine right.

  His birthplace became not a guerrilla camp in Khabarovsk but Mount Paektu, the volcano on North Korea’s border with China that has legendary status in Korean culture. It is said to be the birthplace of Tangun, the mythical half-bear, half-deity father of the Korean people. The creature conferred a heavenly origin on the Korean people, and, thanks to this story, Kim Jong Il appeared to come from heaven too.

  North Korea’s propagandists didn’t stop there. They said that Kim Jong Il was born in a wooden cabin and that a single bright star shone in the sky at his birth. They stopped short of making the building a manger or his mother a virgin. But, for good measure, they added a double rainbow spontaneously appearing over the mountain. The myth of the holy Paektu bloodline was created.

  Kim Jong Il had been busy perpetuating that Paektu bloodline over the previous two decades. He had racked up quite a cast of wives and consorts—and children.

  First, in 1966, Kim Jong Il had married a woman with an appropriate revolutionary pedigree chosen by his father. They reportedly had a daughter in 1968. But the marriage didn’t last, and they divorced in 1969. Still, the woman remained in good standing for years afterward, serving in the Supreme People’s Assembly for fifteen years and then as principal of the main education college for almost twenty years, taking her into the Kim Jong Un era.

  Kim Jong Il then took up with a famous actress called Song Hye Rim, whom he had spotted while he was directing movies. She was older than him and married with at least one child at the time, but he insisted she divorce her husband to be with him. He installed her in one of his mansions in Pyongyang, and in 1971 she gave birth to their son, Kim Jong Nam. Kim Jong Il was overjoyed. In deeply traditional, Confucian Korea, males are prized as heirs to carry on the family name and the family line. But both the relationship and the love child were kept secret from Kim Il Sung until about 1975.

  When that child, Kim Jong Nam, was only three years old, the Great Leader told Kim Jong Il that he needed to marry again. Unable to reveal the existence of his mistress and their child, he followed his father’s orders and wed the woman who was considered his only “official” wife. They had two daughters.

  It wasn’t long before a beautiful young dancer called Ko Yong Hui, who was ethnically Korean but had been born in Japan, caught Kim Jong Il’s eye. They had three children together: boys called Jong Chol and Jong Un, born in 1981 and 1984 respectively, followed in 1988 by a girl they named Yo Jong.

  There was some debate over Kim Jong Un’s true birth year, with some sources saying it was 1983. There were suggestions his official birthdate had been moved to 1982 to provide symmetry with his grandfather, born in 1912, and his father, whose birthdate was officially moved from 1941 to 1942.

  But Kim Jong Un’s aunt, Ko Yong Suk, laughed when I asked about her nephew’s birthdate. It had been almost two decades since she had fled the North Korean regime, but she knew for sure that Kim Jong Un was born in 1984. She’d given birth to a son of her own the month before, and she’d changed both babies’ diapers at the same time.

  The aunt had been looking after all the children. Her sister, Kim Jong Il’s concubine, was occupied tending to the designated next leader of North Korea as he worked his way up through a series of Workers’ Party and military positions.

  Ko and her husband lived in Pyongyang in a compound of several houses—including one for them and one for Kim Jong Il—with a heavily guarded outer wall around the whole compound and another wall around Kim Jong Il’s house, which was huge, they said, with a home theater and a big playroom for the kids.

  Despite the luxurious surroundings, the children lived a relatively secluded life. They played with their
cousins or stayed with their father when he was at home in the compound.

  There were no other kids around. The intensely paranoid Kim Jong Il kept all his families separate from each other, meaning that the children grew up without knowing their half siblings or really anyone their own age. Even when he sent them to Switzerland for school, he kept them separate: Jong Nam went to Geneva, while the other three went to Bern.

  All the while, Kim Jong Il carried on running the propaganda and agitation department, directing movies, and writing six operas, according to his official biography. He continued to appear alongside his father, dispensing pearls of wisdom on everything from agricultural methods to military tactics during the on-the-spot guidance sessions.

  Then came the day for which all the preparation had been put in place: on July 8, 1994, Kim Il Sung died after suffering a massive heart attack. His death was kept secret for thirty-four hours while the regime made the final arrangements to confirm the succession.22 Then Radio Pyongyang announced the news: “The Great Heart has stopped beating.”

  In a seven-page announcement, the Korean Central News Agency said Kim would be remembered as a man capable of “creating something from nothing.… He turned our country, where age-old backwardness and poverty had prevailed, into a powerful Socialist country, independent, self-supporting and self-reliant.”23

  Although the regime had been readying itself for this moment for a quarter century, Kim Il Sung’s death was an earth-shattering event. The system built around a personality cult had lost its personality. It now had to do what no other Communist regime had done before: pass the leadership down from father to son.