The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  As evidence of his treachery, the tribunal cited the fact that Jang didn’t clap much when Kim Jong Un was “elected” to a new post in the Central Military Commission. While everyone else was breaking out into cheers so enthusiastic that they “shook the conference hall,” Jang was a picture of arrogance and insolence, the tribunal said. He took his time standing up, and when he did, his clapping was halfhearted.

  The North Korean scribes accused Jang of “dreaming different dreams while in the same bed.” Those dreams centered on a reformed economy with himself, not Kim Jong Un, at the head of it. Jang may have been inside the regime, but he wanted to take it in a different direction.

  Some analysts viewed Jang’s execution as a sign of Kim Jong Un’s weakness, of just how threatened he was by his mercurial uncle. They saw it as proof of the lack of cohesion in the young leader’s regime, a signal that he was having trouble rallying the old guard around him. In fact, it was a sign of strength. Kim Jong Un was fully in control, so in control that he could dispose of his uncle and his uncle’s clique just by giving the order.

  He had deliberately staged an unequivocal display of how savage he could be and sent a clear message to anyone else in the regime who might think about promoting his own ideas or creating his own coterie.

  It had been nearly two years to the day since Kim Jong Un had taken over the state. And almost as if he’d been reading a textbook, he had figured out who was loyal and who was expendable. He was going to make it past the two-year mark in eye-popping style.

  Jang was gone, and his wife, Kim Kyong Hui, was never seen in public again. Rumors swirled about her. Maybe Kim Jong Un had his aunt put under house arrest. Maybe she was ill. Maybe she was spending her days drinking. Maybe she was dead.

  Jang’s execution was exceptional even by North Korean standards, not least because it involved unprecedented transparency from within the regime itself.

  North Korea’s experiment with news management over the death of Jang didn’t entirely have the effect the regime intended. The world had come to expect ever more outlandish tales from the depraved North Korean regime, and this apparent disclosure of truth would also be exaggerated.

  Instead of sending a message of coherence and power, it allowed the international media to have a speculative field day about what other depravities might be happening in the weird world of Kim Jong Un. The world’s imagining quickly reached fever pitch.

  The most ludicrous rumor was that Kim Jong Un watched while a pack of 120 ravenous Manchurian hunting dogs tore a naked Jang to pieces. That story first appeared on a satirical Chinese-language website and was then printed almost word for word in a Hong Kong tabloid called Wen Wei Po, known for its colorful stories and for not always bothering itself with facts.

  Then a relatively serious newspaper, the Singapore Straits Times, picked it up and retold it in English. A commentator opined that if an outlet based in Hong Kong, a territory that is part of greater China, could run such a story, it must mean that Beijing was extremely unhappy with Kim’s decision to get rid of the two countries’ middleman. It didn’t seem to occur to the commentator that a sensationalist tabloid might not bother itself too much with actual facts.

  There’s long been a tendency, concentrated in but not limited to the scurrilous tabloids, to print anything about North Korea. This is partly a response to the regime’s knack for the bizarre—Kim Jong Un beaming over a barrel of lubricant—and the public’s willingness to believe almost anything about a regime that is both cartoonish and exceptionally bloodthirsty at the same time.

  The hungry dogs story started to gain traction. It was repeated by more reputable news organizations, even as they conceded they could not verify the tale. From then on, it became difficult for the truth—that he was probably shot by a regular firing squad—to compete. The truth could not get in the way of a good story and a pack of ravenous hounds. Besides, Kim Jong Un’s press department was hardly likely to call the newspapers to insist on a correction.

  Even if it was less spectacular than the Hong Kong tabloids would have the world believe, Jang’s sudden and spectacular demise did send a chill through China’s relations with North Korea—and through what might be generously called North Korea’s business community.

  Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Jang’s associates disappeared around the same time. Some of them were not just purged from the system but more likely executed. Those outside North Korea at the time fled.

  Ro was one of them. He was on a business trip in Russia when he heard the news that Uncle Jang had been executed. He was told to report to a North Korean security service official, which made him nervous. So he decided to flee.

  He made his way to South Korea, where he started a business selling medicinal herbs from a Seoul basement squeezed between an acupuncture clinic and some kind of karaoke hall where K-pop was blaring into an empty room. It was a strange afterlife for a once-powerful apparatchik, but Ro was simply grateful to be alive.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE ELITES OF PYONGHATTAN

  “A large number of monumental edifices of eternal value have been built across the country and streets and villages have turned into a socialist land of bliss.”

  —Kim Jong Un, April 27, 2012

  RI JONG HO WAS ANOTHER NORTH KOREAN FAT CAT. HE WINED and dined. He traveled. He had a car with a chauffeur. He made money, lots of it. Some for the Kim regime and some for himself.

  He enjoyed an “upper-class existence” in North Korea. “People might not like me saying this, but my life wasn’t that tiring,” he told me a year after he’d moved to the United States with his family. “I was rich.”

  The family was part of the privileged capitalist class at the center of the regime, people enjoying a new standard of living under Kim 3.0. They’re the North Korean version of the Masters of the Universe, married to the Real Housewives of Pyongyang. They’re the nouveaux riches in a country of the ancient poor. Under Kim Jong Un, they are prospering like never before.

  “When it comes to getting rich, there are few rules anymore,” Ri told me when I met him near Tyson’s Corner, an upmarket commuter suburb outside Washington, DC. “Every North Korean breaks the law. Kim Jong Un breaks the law as well. Because everyone does it, the authorities just close their eyes.”

  This is the price of Kim’s “small coalition.”

  The young leader could squash his rivals, just as he had done to Uncle Jang. But he had to keep some supporters, and he had to keep them happy by keeping them rich.

  Enter the “donju,” the North Korean “masters of money.” This catch-all phrase refers to the class of entrepreneurs who supported Kim Jong Un’s regime and became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams in the process. They are the Russian oligarchs of North Korea.

  Uncle Jang was the ultimate master of money, but Ri, who knew Jang, wasn’t doing too badly for himself either.

  The masters of money are officials in the Workers’ Party or the military. They’re people running state businesses at home or abroad. They’re the ones trying to attract investment into North Korea. They are officers in the security services, married women who are exempt from state jobs because they’re supposed to be home cooking and raising children, and border traders with good political networks or the money to buy good political networks.

  With some creative accounting, these people can make amounts of cash that, not too long ago, would have been unfathomable—thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars. Those at the top with access to lucrative industries like mining can easily become millionaires. And this money flows through North Korea under the watchful eye of—but existing almost entirely independently of—the state.

  The capitalist class that emerged after the famine of the 1990s started with ordinary people who were trying to fend off starvation. But it soon included officials in the Workers’ Party and the military who could use their positions to start up money-making ventures.

  Since Kim Jong Un came to power at the end of 2
011, their ranks have exploded. There are now untold thousands of North Koreans who have a financial interest in his leadership. They are the aspirational middle class as well as the entrenched elites.

  They have a role model in the form of the Great Successor, who enjoys all the trappings of his position.

  Kim Jong Un has at least thirty-three homes throughout North Korea, South Korea’s intelligence agency estimates, of which twenty-eight are linked to private railway stations. The residences have layers of fencing around them that are clearly visible from satellites. The buildings on the compounds are connected by underground tunnels and house huge subterranean bunkers for the leader and his family to hide in if they come under attack.

  The Great Successor lives in the lap of luxury. His main compound in northeast Pyongyang covers almost five square miles and is known as No. 15 Official Residence or the Central Luxury Mansion. It was remodeled soon after Kim Jong Un took control of the country. The Olympic-sized swimming pool with a large, twirling waterslide—where Kim Jong Un probably played as a child—was filled in, and a new swimming pool with a pool house was constructed.

  The renovations were estimated to have cost tens of millions of dollars; indeed, some reports suggest Kim Jong Un spent $175 million on it, an impossible figure to verify. Kim had an entire office of moneymakers, like Ri Jong Ho, out there generating the funds to maintain such a lifestyle.

  At another compound on the outskirts of Pyongyang, in the Kangdong district, Kim has a bowling alley and shooting range, horse stables, a soccer field, and a race track. And then there’s the huge waterfront compound in Wonsan, which Dennis Rodman described as a cross between Disneyland and Kim Jong Un’s own private Hawaii.

  Kim travels often in his own private jet, a Soviet-era Ilyushin IL-62 with a cream and wood-paneled interior, not dissimilar to the American president’s plane, Air Force One. It’s officially called Chammae-1, or Goshawk-1, after the North Korea’s national bird, but in the outside world, wits have nicknamed it Air Force Un. He’d sit onboard in his big leather chair at his desk with a MacBook on it, talking into one of his several phones and tapping his cigarette into a crystal ashtray as he was flown around his kingdom.

  For fun, the man who played with model planes as a teenager now flies himself around in the light aircraft at his royal disposal. His regime even claims to be building planes that are very similar to the American-made Cessna 172 Skyhawk. In 2015, North Korean television showed Kim inspecting and then appearing to fly one of the small planes, cheered on by a crowd of air force pilots. “The plane built by our working class had the top-notch performance; it was easy to maneuver, and the engine sounded just right! Well built!” he told the engineers.

  The masters of money don’t enjoy the same lifestyle, but they have certainly experienced an increase in their standard of living under the new leader. And Kim Jong Un uses the success of the new entrepreneurs to support his claim that life in North Korea is getting better for everyone.

  It’s a neat symbiotic relationship. This system has earned Kim Jong Un a nickname in North Korea: Nanugi. It means “the person who shares,” because the leader is sharing the burden of the infrastructure projects, and the profits, with those below him.

  These masters of money are now “sharing” every sector of the North Korean economy, from canned food and shoe production to domestic tourism and coal mining.

  But the bargain is most evident in the skyline of Pyongyang, now called Pyonghattan by outside visitors. In a Potemkin village, it’s the façade that matters. The entrepreneurs are funding the ambitious projects—the architecturally impressive apartment towers, fancy new museums, and recreation centers—that Kim Jong Un takes the credit for.

  The new buildings may embrace 1990s Chinese-style architecture and 1980s building quality, but they are a sharp improvement on the Soviet brutalism of before. The marquee Ryomyong Street complex, launched in 2016, houses more than three thousand apartments in no fewer than forty-four high-rise buildings, one of which is seventy stories high. The mostly green-and-white buildings—for the complex is supposedly eco-friendly—are built in a style considered modern by North Korean standards.

  Kim Jong Un celebrates these developments, which mirror the kinds of projects underway in second- and third-tier cities across China, as a sign of North Korea’s progress.

  Ryomyong Street—Kim Jong Un named it based on the words meaning “place where the dawn breaks on the Korean revolution”—was opened with extraordinary fanfare in 2017. Tens of thousands of North Koreans, including many in military uniform, were gathered around the complex, chanting in unison and waving colorful pompoms as Kim drew up in his stretch Mercedes limousine. The flags of both the North Korean state and the Workers’ Party fluttered in the April sunshine. A brass band trumpeted. Brightly colored balloons were released into a sky so blue it seemed to also have been organized by the regime. Everything was perfect in the Socialist Paradise.

  The Great Successor walked along the red carpet and up onto the dais and watched while his top economic aide lauded the regime for building the complex.

  “The construction of Ryomyong Street is truly a significant, great event,” the official, Premier Pak Pong Ju, said. “It shows the potential of socialist Korea, and that is scarier than the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs above the enemies’ heads.”

  Then the Great Successor cut the red ribbon.

  The complexes had ostensibly been built as a reward for the scientists and engineers who were working in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Rising above the Taedong River, they look impressive from a distance. “Just like Dubai,” a government minder told me one glorious sunny day as we stood on the southern side of the river, looking across at the towers. I asked him if he’d been to Dubai. He’d never even been to China.

  But up close, there were literal cracks in the façade. On Changjon Street, the Pyongyang equivalent of Park Avenue, the tiles were falling off the new apartment buildings within a couple of years. When I went to the Mirae Scientists’ Street to visit an apartment—highly choreographed by the regime’s propagandists—a woman with a key had to come turn on the elevator for us.

  In most cities, the most sought-after apartments are those on the high floors, the ones with commanding views, but not in Pyongyang. There, the best apartments are fourth floor and below. No one wants to live in a twentieth-floor walk-up.

  The new entrepreneur class was central to this effort. The state could provide the labor—what else is a million-man army good for?—but the masters of money were called upon to use their networks and capital to provide the raw materials for construction. In return, they made money by flipping the apartments allotted to them when construction was completed. Sometimes they were given as many as ten, on which they could make as much as $30,000 in profit on each.1

  Private property ownership is still technically illegal in North Korea, but that hasn’t stopped the emergence of a vibrant housing market. Sometimes people lease out the right to live in the apartments assigned to them by the state; at other times, masters of money sell the apartments they’ve been allocated in these new developments for substantial profits.

  As a result, real estate prices have soared, with prices in Pyongyang increasing as much as tenfold. A decent two- or three-bedroom apartment in the capital costs up to $80,000, but a luxury three-bedroom apartment in a sought-after complex in central Pyongyang can fetch $180,000. It is an unimaginable sum in a country where the official government salary remains at about $4 a month.

  Another reason for the real estate boom is the almost complete lack of a banking system. The masters of money can’t stash their cash in an interest-bearing account or investment fund, so they channel it into bricks and mortar.

  Ri Jong Ho’s entrepreneurial good fortune began in the mid-’80s, when he began working for Office 39. By earning money for Kim Jong Il’s slush fund, he was enabling the Dear Leader to buy all that cognac and sushi. That made Ri an important person to
the regime, and he lived a good life as a result.

  His last job was in the Chinese port city of Dalian, not far from the border with North Korea, where he was the head of a branch of Taehung, a North Korean trading company involved in shipping, coal and seafood exports, and oil imports. He had previously been president of a ship-trading company and chairman of Korea Kumgang Group, a company that formed a venture with Sam Pa, a Chinese businessman, to start a taxi company in Pyongyang. Ri showed me a photo of him and Pa onboard a private jet to Pyongyang.

  As head of the Dalian branch of the Taehung export business, Ri would send millions of dollars in profits—denominated in American dollars or Chinese yuan—to Pyongyang. In the first nine months of 2014, until his defection in October that year, Ri said he sent the equivalent of about $10 million to the regime. Despite all the sanctions, the US dollar is still the preferred currency for North Korean businessmen since it is easiest to convert and spend.

  It didn’t matter that there were supposedly stringent international sanctions in place. Ri’s underlings simply handed a bag of cash to the captain of a ship leaving from Dalian to the North Korean port of Nampho or gave it to someone to take on the train across the border.

  But Uncle Jang’s downfall at the end of 2013 spooked many masters of money, including Ri. He and his family escaped from Dalian to South Korea and then eventually to the United States.

  He clearly made a tidy sum of money for himself on the sidelines of his official job. The family lived a comfortable life in the Virginia suburbs. But even in the United States, Ri was cagey about meeting me and careful about what he said. “There are so many other stories, but I can’t tell you all them. Do you understand?”

  He gives occasional public speeches about the North Korean regime—and much more private advice to the American government—while his children work on their English and study to go to an American university. They want Ivy League or, failing that, Georgetown.