So efforts to crown one of her sons were well underway even before Kim Jong Nam’s ill-fated trip to Tokyo Disney, although Ko took advantage of his embarrassing gaffe to push her sons’ case.
Ko Yong Hui knew that she did not have long to lobby for her sons. She was losing her fight against breast cancer.
Kim Jong Un, meanwhile, was throwing himself into his studies at the academy, according to official North Korean accounts. The young man was such a natural at military strategy that he was instructing the instructors rather than learning from them, the state media reported.
Late one night in 2004, when Kim Jong Un was just twenty and partway through his course, he was “giving advice” to senior officials at 2:00 a.m., rebuffing their suggestions that he should go to sleep. The time is important—his grandfather was also renowned for working into the wee hours—so the detail was included to send a strong signal that Kim Jong Un was his grandfather’s natural heir.
Instead of sleeping, Kim picked up a pencil, drew a picture of Mount Paektu, and wrote under it, “The Sacred Mountain of the Revolution. Kim Jong Il,” the official history has it. He ordered this to be the cover of a book of military art about the “anti-Japanese revolutionary war,” according to this version of events recounted by Kim Jong Un’s image makers.
There may have been a granule of truth in the story, but most likely it was one of those events that takes on outsized significance in the hands of the state scribes. The officials with Kim Jong Un “were filled with deep emotion as they realized he would carry forward the bloodline of Mount Paektu in its purest form,” the official account said.2
It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of a pure bloodline in Korean culture. By claiming to be descended from the “Paektu bloodline,” the Kim family was tapping into this long-held cultural belief in a purity that was distilled into these three Kims. It’s the North Korean equivalent of tracing your ancestors to the Mayflower but in totalitarian overdrive.
Kim Jong Un’s mother succumbed to cancer in May 2004, dying at a hospital in Paris. Her body was brought back to Pyongyang for a secret funeral and burial.
In public, the glorification of her as the mother of the nation continued. This could have worked as succession preparation for either of her sons, Kim Jong Chol or Kim Jong Un. Indeed, despite the fact that Kim Jong Un had been anointed when he was eight years old, it seemed that Kim Jong Il was keeping his options open by grooming both of them.
While Kim Jong Un was still at university, Kim Jong Chol was put into the Organizational and Guidance Department, arguably the most powerful agency inside North Korea. It oversees the Workers’ Party of Korea, the cabinet, and the National Defense Commission. Kim Jong Il had begun his own political education there in 1964.
But as 2005 turned into 2006, there was speculation in the South Korean press that Kim Jong Chol had failed to prove himself as leadership material.
Perhaps as proof that he was no longer in contention—if he ever had been—Kim Jong Chol was spotted following his guitar idol, Eric Clapton, on a four-city tour in Germany. He had played the guitar from an early age and had an electric guitar and amplifier at home in Pyongyang.
Japanese television outlets filmed him in Frankfurt, Berlin, Leipzig, and Stuttgart, surrounded by a posse of bodyguards and in the company of a woman about his age. He was wearing a T-shirt, sometimes a leather jacket, and had floppy bangs hanging down over his round face. He did not seem thrilled with the media attention.
None of this was known in North Korea, though. The vast majority of North Koreans didn’t even know that the Dear Leader had a son, let alone that he knew the chords to “Wonderful Tonight.”
Meanwhile, the twenty-two-year-old Kim Jong Un went on to graduate—with honors, of course.
His graduation ceremony was held on December 24, 2006, an important day in North Korea. It was the fifteenth anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s appointment as Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army. It was also the eighty-ninth anniversary of his mother’s birth. No date is too minor for the North Korean regime to justify a celebration that helps it reinforce its personality cult.
Kim’s final dissertation was called “A Simulation for the Improvement of Accuracy in the Operational Map by the Global Positioning System (GPS).” Kim Jong Il apparently approved of this technical treatise, saying that it reflected the “great military strategy theories” developed by him and his father, Kim Il Sung.
Whether or not there was really a dissertation, Kim Jong Un was presented with a badge and a certificate declaring him to be a top student at this elite academy. He took the opportunity of his graduation to hold forth about his father’s brilliance.
“While learning the Supreme Commander’s juche-based military ideas and the art of warfare during my university days, I keenly realized that our General is a military genius, indeed,” Kim Jong Un told a meeting of the of commanding officers of the Korean People’s Army that day.
Kim Jong Un credited his father with formulating unparalleled military ideas and vowed, even though he’d not yet been announced as successor, to “become a faithful man who relieves burden from the General who is so much concerned about the army’s combat readiness.”
This was all according to the North Korean account of the meeting, in a thin 2017 booklet called Anecdotes of Kim Jong Un’s Life, published, according to the foreword, to address the supposedly huge international interest in the third Kim.
The book claimed that there had been 67.4 million stories published in English about Kim Jong Un in one ten-day period—that’s 230,000 an hour. “No other politician captured such keen attention of the world” in the history of media.
The numbers seem to be typical North Korean exaggeration, and the book failed to mention that the attention was due to Kim Jong Un’s reckless threats and general brutality rather than being driven by admiration for the young leader.
The succession preparations took on a new sense of urgency in the summer of 2008, with Kim Jong Il’s stroke. He was in a coma, “in a bad way,” when a French brain specialist, François-Xavier Roux, arrived in Pyongyang to treat him.
North Korean officials had phoned Roux, the chief of neurosurgery at Sainte Anne Hospital in Paris, for advice in 1993 after the Dear Leader fell while horse riding and suffered a head injury. He never knew why they’d chosen him. When they called for him again in 2008, he was flown to Pyongyang with a team of doctors in great secrecy to treat a mystery patient. It turned out to be Kim Jong Il himself, and he was in a “life-threatening” condition.3
It became clear why the North Koreans had sought out a foreign doctor—none of them had wanted to make decisions for their Dear Leader, and certainly not ones where his life was at stake. They needed someone who was “not emotionally involved.” At his father’s bedside in that hospital room was his youngest son, Kim Jong Un. But it was “very difficult” to get a sense of the son’s personality because “he didn’t speak to anyone” in the medical team, according to Roux.4
The French doctor visited again in September and October to check on his patient’s recovery. There was a significant risk that he would have further strokes, the doctor said.
Clearly time was not on Kim Jong Il’s side.
Less than five months later, Kim Jong Il officially notified the top military and civilian authorities that he was naming Kim Jong Un as his successor. Kim Jong Il didn’t even bother to go through with the charade that his own father had arranged for him in 1980: calling a Workers’ Party Congress and making it look like the top apparatchiks had a say in the matter. He simply anointed his son.
First, Kim Jong Il informed the top officials in the Workers’ Party on January 8, 2009—Kim Jong Un’s twenty-fifth birthday—that he had chosen his youngest son as his successor.
Then the news was announced down the hierarchy. Apparatchiks like Thae Yong Ho were informed. Thae was at work in the European division of foreign ministry in Pyongyang, a large building on Kim Il Sung Square in the c
enter of the capital, having returned from a posting to the embassy in London the previous year.
His “cell” in the Workers’ Party of Korea—the Communist organ through which the Kims have kept a grip on North Korea for more than seven decades—was called to a meeting. They assembled as instructed and were informed that Kim Jong Il had chosen his son, the Comrade General, to succeed him. They were told that this was about continuity, a message that was repeatedly reinforced throughout what Thae remembers as a very quiet meeting.
“No one ever doubted this decision,” Thae told me some years later in Seoul. “In North Korea, we are taught from a very young age that the revolution will be continued from generation to generation.”
Before that time, even relatively high-ranking officials like Thae knew almost nothing about North Korea’s royal family. From his time abroad in Europe, he knew that Kim Jong Il’s children had been educated in Switzerland, but he did not know how many children or what their names were.
The roll-out was slow and indirect, disseminated almost subliminally, to the general populace, especially those in the “hostile” northern regions, where life was toughest and loyalty to the regime was flimsiest.
It began in 2009 with “Footsteps,” the song that the Japanese sushi chef had heard in the privacy of the royal compounds more than a decade before. Now, ordinary North Koreans began hearing the bouncy Soviet-martial-style tune and its “aaaah, footsteps” refrain.
“It was actually fun singing together,” Min-ah, a young North Korean mother from the northern border city of Hoeryong, told me near her new home on the outskirts of Seoul as she reminisced about the time her neighborhood watch group—the grassroots level of surveillance in the police state—began learning the song and about the third generation.
“Footsteps” began playing on television and radio and was sung in neighborhood watch groups and Workers’ Party cells. It was printed in the notebooks that soldiers carried. North Koreans sent abroad to earn money for the regime also started hearing the song at their weekly ideology sessions.
“We were told to memorize the song and were told that the ‘Comrade Leader’ was so great,” Mr. Kang, who was also from Hoeryong, told me. Before he escaped from Kim Jong Un’s clutches, he’d been a drug dealer.
“We knew that he was going to be the leader after Kim Jong Il, but we knew nothing about him. We had no idea what he looked like; we had no idea how old he was. We knew only how great he was.”
This song’s significance was also noted in the South. A South Korean intelligence analyst sitting in his office outside Seoul was monitoring the North’s state broadcaster, Korean Central Television. It was showing Kim Jong Il at a concert in the countryside somewhere, surrounded as usual by his closest aides, including his sister and her influential husband, as well as the propaganda chief.
Then the letters appeared at the front of the stage: “Footsteps.” The choir began to sing. A light went on in the intelligence analyst’s head: North Korea’s succession question had been answered.5
South Korea’s intelligence services knew next to nothing about Kim Jong Un. During the course of 2009, they knew so little about him that they even misspelled his name and could only guess at his correct age. “Everything about Kim Jong Un is cloaked in mystery, be it his photo, birth date or job title,” a South Korean newspaper wrote at the time.
In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency got wind of Kim Jong Un’s anointment and started thinking about ways to influence him. American spies approached Eric Clapton about playing a concert in North Korea, knowing that the Kim boys were big fans of the British guitarist. Clapton was amenable to the idea, but it went nowhere. The spies also talked about trying to get a former Chicago Bull to play intermediary. They settled on Dennis Rodman. That idea went nowhere either—at least, not under the CIA’s direction.
Inside North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s age was going to be an issue. Political and social relationships in both Koreas are still bound by Confucianism, which involves a strict hierarchy that equates age with importance. Kim Jong Un was only twenty-five years old, a mere child in a political environment where his grandfather’s octogenarian comrades were still in positions of power.
What’s more, there was no preexisting myth that had been crafted about Kim Jong Un. The North Korean regime had exaggerated Kim Il Sung’s exploits to turn him into a legendary anti-imperialist guerrilla who had triumphed over the Japanese. Then there was the story of the bright star and a double rainbow above Mount Paektu for Kim Jong Il.
Kim Il Sung spent a quarter century consolidating his power, not making his total authority official until 1972, when a constitution with a position of “Supreme Leader” was adopted. He spent the next twenty years paving the way for his son to succeed him.
Kim Jong Il was promoted up the party during the 1970s and was heir apparent from 1974. At the Sixth Congress of the Workers’ Party in 1980, he was officially unveiled to the world as his father’s successor. So when Kim Il Sung died in 1994, the regime had had plenty of time to get used to the idea that his son, who was then the respectable age of fifty-two, would take over and the “Paektu bloodline” would be continued.
Kim Jong Il, however, had not begun to prepare the system for his son—who was so young he would still have been doing his compulsory military service if he was any other twenty-five-year-old North Korean man—to carry on the family business. Kim’s stroke changed his calculation about the future, and he spurred his inner circle into action.
Starting in 2009, Kim Jong Un was rapidly elevated through a series of increasingly powerful civilian and military positions, and the influential propaganda and agitation department began creating a personality cult around him.
North Koreans began hearing about the “Leader Comrade,” and the state outlets began to talk about “a historic time of transition.” It was only after this that the name Kim Jong Un began to appear. Posters went up everywhere heralding Comrade Kim Jong Un, the successor of the Paektu bloodline, as “our people’s glory.”6
The official narrative described him as a “Brilliant Comrade” and a “Young General,” a “morning star shining over the whole nation.” The North Korean regime sent a booklet to every unit of the Korean People’s Army called The Material in Teaching the Greatness of Respected Comrade General Kim Jong Un.
Among the supposed great feats it listed was that at age three, Kim Jong Un would fire a gun and hit a light bulb a hundred yards away. Another version of this story had him hitting a target ten times in ten seconds. By the time he was eight, he could not only drive a truck, but he could drive it at eighty miles an hour. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about the military, whether it be the army, the navy, or the air force. It was hard to swallow even in North Korea.
During the course of 2009, the North Korean constitution was revised to strengthen the power of the country’s supreme leader even further and to make clear that the armed forces should be looking after the “core of revolution”—the core being, of course, the Kim family. Kim Jong Un was reportedly given a place on the National Defense Commission. The Korean People’s Army was no longer known as the “Kim Jong Il armed forces” but as the “Kim Jong Un armed forces.”7 The kid who paid little attention at school was soon being heralded as a “genius among geniuses.”
Kim Jong Un’s pledge to the generals that he would carry on the revolution was printed in the pamphlets and distributed to every unit of the Korean People’s Army.
The adulation for his mother continued. An eighty-five-minute documentary called The Mother of the Great, Military-First Korea appeared on state television.
It showed photos and footage of Ko Yong Hui being a devoted follower of the regime during the mourning period for Kim Il Sung in 1994. And it showed her accompanying Kim Jong Il during his guidance visits to military, industrial, and cultural sites during the 1990s—footage that was certainly never broadcast at the time, when the “first ladies” were entirely invisible.8
One scene showed Ko speaking at a party marking her fiftieth birthday party. “The General said to me once, ‘You must tell the people how hard these past seven years have been for me,’” Ko said, talking about the years since Kim Il Sung died and during which famine ravaged the country. “I have personally seen how difficult these seven years have been for the Peerlessly Great General,” she simpered.
They weren’t that difficult. Kim Jong Il was eating caviar and lobster while his compatriots starved. For two years during the height of the famine, he was the world’s largest buyer of Hennessy Paradis cognac, importing almost a million dollars’ worth of the liquor a year.
But the propagandists had an alternative history to write. And that required bestowing legitimacy on the princeling.
Hence the documentary. The goal was clear: Ko Yong Hui was the newest “Great Mother” of the nation, following in the footsteps of Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s venerated mothers. It was inevitable that her son, with that pure Paektu blood coursing through his veins, would be the next leader of North Korea.9
At their compulsory weekly education sessions, people around the country were having messages drilled into them about the incredible feats of this young genius. They heard the one about firing a gun when he was three years old and the ones about riding horses and driving cars at an age when most kids are learning their ABCs.
“It was hard for people to believe these things—we just laughed at them. It may have worked for kids but not for adults,” Mr. Kang, the drug dealer, told me. “But if you questioned it, you’d be killed.”
Some of its efforts to sell the new leader pushed the boundaries of credulity, even in this totalitarian state. One officially sanctioned biography called The Childhood of Beloved and Respected Leader, Kim Jong Un claimed that he had perfect pitch, that he could ride the wildest horses at age six, and that, when he was just nine, he had twice beaten a visiting European powerboat-racing champion. The youngster had driven at speeds of 125 miles per hour, it said. It was so unbelievable that the textbook was recalled after whispered criticisms began circulating that it “distorted and exaggerated” the leader’s early years. It was revised to make it more credible.10
The Great Successor Page 8
