Indeed, the idea of hosting the Americans in Pyongyang was a complicated one. After all, North Korea had been spewing hatred toward the United States for some seven decades.
While the war in Korea has been all but forgotten in the United States, in North Korea the memories of the devastation are kept alive and deeply engrained into the national psyche. The regime has made the United States the scapegoat for its wrecked economy and its martial law.
Elementary school kids go on field trips to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang or to the Museum of American War Atrocities in Sinchon, south of the capital.
They see paintings of “cunning American wolves”—illustrated as fair-haired, pale-skinned men with huge noses—torturing and killing North Koreans in brutal ways: by driving nails into women’s heads or bayonetting children, stamping on North Korean babies with their huge boots, branding them with hot pokers, and tying them up with ropes and dropping them down wells. At the Sinchon museum, these pictures are accompanied by a loud soundtrack of children screaming.
There was certainly fighting and death in Sinchon during the Korean War, but North Korea has grossly exaggerated a claim that thirty-five thousand “martyrs” were killed by US soldiers during a massacre.
Kim Jong Un has visited the museum several times since becoming leader. After one such visit, he ordered it to be expanded into “a center for anti-US class education.”
The museum is a classic example of the way that the Kim regime has stoked fear of the United States to try to keep the populace cohesive: it builds from a smidgen of truth a mountain of ideologically motivated exaggeration.
So it must have been very confusing when North Koreans woke up on March 1, 2013, to see a photo of the Beloved Comrade on the front page of the Rodong Sinmun, the North Korean Pravda, sitting with an American—and one who had the temerity to wear a hat and sunglasses in the presence of their leader.
Rodman and his entourage had arrived in Pyongyang on a freezing day at the end of February 2013, in the fourteenth month of Kim Jong Un’s reign. They had plans to lead a basketball camp—a bunch of kids in a high school gym, they thought—and play in an exhibition game.
They arrived at a ten-thousand-seat stadium in Pyongyang to find the under-eighteen national team waiting for them. The bleachers were empty, but this was clearly going to be no casual pickup game.
The following day, Rodman and his Globetrotters turned up at the stadium for the exhibition game. This time the stands were not empty. Thousands of people sat waiting patiently. Then, all of a sudden and almost in unison, everyone leapt to their feet and started clapping and cheering “Manse!” or “Live for ten thousand years!”
There he was.
“I’m sitting there on the bench and all of a sudden, he walks in. This little short guy,” Rodman said, recalling that moment. “And I’m like, wait a minute. Who is that? That must be the president of the country. And he walks in with his wife and all his leaders and stuff like that.”5
Kim Jong Un, in a black Mao suit, was coming down the stairs into the VIP section of the stadium with his wife, Ri Sol Ju.
Rodman was waiting for the leader in the VIP section, where they would watch the game in armchairs together. The Worm, wearing dark sunglasses and a black cap with “USA” on it, his ears, nose, and bottom lip glinting with rings, approached Kim and shook his hand.
The crowd continued to applaud. “The players and audience broke into thunderous cheers, greatly excited to see the game together with Kim Jong Un,” the state news agency reported, adding that Kim “allowed” Rodman to sit next to him.
The North Korean basketballers were clapping too, but they looked quite nervous.
“Every North Korean person is in awe of the Marshal and wants to meet him,” Pyo Yon Chol, a player on the North Korean national team, said afterward, referring to Kim by his official military title. “To be in the same place as the Marshal, it’s impossible to describe the feelings with words. To play with them in attendance, I had a desire to play a better game. I cannot want anything more.”6
The teams were picked, playground style, so each contained both Americans and North Koreans. Then it was game on.7
As the play progressed, everyone began to loosen up a bit. The Globetrotters did their party tricks, standing on the basket or hanging upside down from it, to hoots and cheers.
At one stage, Mark Barthelemy, a fluent Korean speaker and friend of Mojica’s from their days playing in punk bands in Chicago, pointed his camera at Kim Jong Un. To his shock, the young dictator was staring directly into the lens. Barthelemy looked out from behind his camera, and Kim gave him a little wave. Then Kim nudged his wife, and she waved at Barthelemy too. It was, he told me, a most bizarre moment in a day full of bizarre moments. The dictator was being playful.
In the fourth quarter, though, the game got serious. Kim was talking intently with Rodman, discussing the play-by-play through an interpreter, nodding, gesturing, and looking like a couple of awkward old friends at a Knicks game.
Incredibly, the game ended in a 110–110 tie, with no overtime permitted—an adroit diplomatic result.
Then Rodman stood to give a speech, telling Kim what an honor and privilege it was to be there. Kim sat expressionless, looking around at the crowd as if concerned about what the guest might say next.
But Rodman did the diplomatic thing: he regretted that their countries were not on good terms before offering himself as a bridge: “Sir, thank you. You have a friend for life,” he said, bowing to the dictator.
Finally, after two intense hours, Kim left the stadium. Everyone exhaled.
But the adventure was far from over. The delegation’s handlers hurried Rodman and his entourage out of the stadium, telling them they had an important event on their schedule.
One minder brought the Vice team an invitation on a thick white card, announcing a reception. No details were printed. But the guests were told to dress properly and that they could take nothing to the party: no phones, no cameras, no pens, nothing. It could mean only one thing.
They were driven through the streets of Pyongyang, out past a wooded area, up a road with unnecessary hairpin turns, to a large white building. They went through airport-style security, with metal detectors and wands, and entered a large white-marble room with white tablecloths and white chairs.
Kim Jong Un was waiting to greet everyone personally in a receiving line. It was like a wedding.
Rodman was still wearing his sunglasses and baseball cap, but he had put on his version of a tuxedo: a gray T-shirt with a black suit vest over it. A hot-pink scarf tied around his neck accessorized his pink and white nail polish.
Everyone was smiling broadly as they sat down at the tables, which were decorated with elaborate vegetable sculptures: large flowers carved out of pumpkins, birds crafted from some kind of white vegetable perched upon whole watermelons. Dinner stretched to ten courses, including caviar and sushi. There was wine from France and Tiger beer from Singapore. Coca-Cola, beverage of the imperialist devils, was also served.
Kim started the evening’s proceedings with a toast, clinking small glasses of soju with Rodman. Ri apparently thought better of drinking the firewater. She kept to red wine.
Then Rodman delivered a long and rambling toast, which concluded, “Marshal, your father and your grandfather did some fucked-up shit. But you, you’re trying to make a change, and I love you for that.”
Everyone held their breath. Then Kim Jong Un raised his glass and smiled.8 Phew.
Soon after, the man on the other side of Ri stood up and gave a toast about how they were all going to get to know each other. Kim Jong Un rolled his eyes as if to say, “Not that old windbag again,” recalled Mojica. Checking photos from the event, Mojica confirmed what I’d suspected. That old windbag was Uncle Jang.
But it was all smiles and happiness that night. There was round upon round of toasts. Mojica, feeling emboldened by the soju, invited Kim Jong Un to make the
return journey to New York. He then raised his glass—a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black that the waiters had been filling throughout the night as if it were wine—and took a sip. All of a sudden, the young dictator was yelling and gesturing at him. For a second, Mojica wondered if he’d committed a grave error. Then the translator kicked in with a “bottoms up!”
“It was a command performance,” Mojica told me. “The evil dictator was demanding that I chug my drink. So I chugged my drink.”
He was woozy, but he still had the mic. He slurred, “If things carry on this way, I’ll be naked by the end of the night.” Madame Choe had a look of complete disgust on her face, but as the translator, she relayed the remark to Kim Jong Un, who broke out into laughter.
It was party time.
A curtain went up, and on the stage was the Moranbong Band, sometimes called the North Korean Spice Girls. The women, wearing white jackets and skirts that were scandalously short by North Korean standards, hitting above the knee, broke into the theme from Rocky. They had electric guitars and electric violins, a drum set, and a synthesizer.
The soju was working. Kim’s face grew progressively ruddier, and his smile grew broader, revealing the discolored teeth of a heavy smoker. Mojica estimated that the Great Successor had at least a dozen shots of soju. Everyone was, in the Vice producer’s words, “wasted.”
At one point, the Globetrotters were onstage, hand in hand with the Moranbong band members. Later, Rodman had the microphone and was singing “My Way” while Barthelemy played the saxophone, leaning back with his eyes closed like he was channeling Kenny G.
Rodman sent his sidekick over to Mojica to tell him to tone down their raucous behavior. That’s when Mojica realized how out of hand things had become. You know it’s wild when an internationally notorious bad boy is telling you to cool it.
Everything else is hazy. “If I was being my best journalist, I would have stayed sober and committed everything to memory,” said Mojica. “But we all really got caught up in the spirit of the evening.”
After several hours, Kim Jong Un stood to give the final toast. He said that the event had helped to “promote understanding between the peoples of the two countries.”
Footage not broadcast on North Korean television shows Rodman and Kim hugging, the leader patting the basketballer on the back, a big smile on his face. He got his Bull.
Remarkably, Dennis Rodman remembered his promise to the Great Successor made during the drunken romp in Pyongyang.
Seven months later, he kept it. Rodman returned to Pyongyang, this time with an even more unusual posse. His muscular personal assistant, Chris “Vo” Volo, was at his side, and they were joined by a Columbia University geneticist called Joe Terwilliger, a man who prides himself on being idiosyncratic. He plays the tuba professionally, does Abe Lincoln impersonations, sometimes sports an Amish-style beard, speaks Finnish, and is a champion hotdog eater.
As a geneticist, Terwilliger had studied the Korean diaspora. He’d learned some Korean and had been teaching at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a private institution run by Korean American Christians.
So when he heard that Rodman was interested in returning to Pyongyang, he bid $2,500 at a charity auction and won the opportunity to shoot hoops with him. While they were on the court, Terwilliger pitched himself as a Korea expert who could help the basketballer. He made the team.
The problem was that the team couldn’t find a way to get back to Pyongyang. So Terwilliger called a guy he’d met in Pyongyang one time: Michael Spavor, a Canadian living in northern China who escorted academic and business-related delegations into North Korea.
In September, the four of them arrived in Pyongyang. They were put on Kim Jong Un’s private helicopter, decked out with easy chairs and a wooden table for his ashtray. They were to travel to Wonsan, the seaside resort, where the helicopter landed right in the royal compound.
Rodman liked the VIP treatment. “Everything is just like five-star, six-star, seven-star. It’s just a great day every day. There was so much entertainment, so much fun, just so much relaxation. Everything was just so, so perfect.”9
This time, there was no televised basketball, no formalities. It was all about having a good time at the palatial waterfront compound.
Kim Jong Un took Rodman and the entourage out on a 150-foot wood-paneled sailboat that had belonged to his father. The son had his own boat, too, a $7 million ninety-five-foot-long yacht, but that stayed in its special covered dock at the Wonsan compound.
They drank Long Island iced teas on the deck. They raced Jet Skis along the coastline. Kim Jong Un always won because he had the most powerful machine. The young leader liked to zoom close to the shore and jump the waves.
Kim’s wife was there with their chubby baby daughter, Ju Ae. His siblings were there too. His older brother, Kim Jong Chol, spoke English with the guests and jet-skied with them out to the two-hundred-foot-long floating pool boat, complete with water slides, moored offshore.
His younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, was there too. She had just graduated with a degree in engineering, they were told. In the years ahead, she would take an increasingly prominent role in her brother’s regime, acting as his most trusted advisor and general fix-it woman. But on this day, she was sitting on the beach in a red bathing suit, watching the shenanigans. The women from the Moranbong Band were also there, cavorting on the beach in a way that did not go unnoticed by the male guests.
Another day, Kim Jong Un and the Rodman crowd went horse riding together. A photo shows Rodman on a white steed. He is not wearing shoes. Instead, his pink-socked feet sit in the stirrups.
Afterward, there was more lavish dining, drinking, and carousing. The women of the Moranbong Band were still around. Hyon Song Wol, the glamorous head of the band who’d been reported dead in the South Korean press just the previous month, was there and very much alive.
The band broke out their instruments, and Terwilliger sang a North Korean song, “My Country Is the Best.” Rodman, in a gray suit vest with his tattoos on full display, belted out his karaoke favorite, “My Way.” Kim Jong Un, for his part, tried to sing “Get on Up,” by James Brown, according to Rodman.
It was during that visit that Kim told Rodman that he had hated the showiness of the Harlem Globetrotters. He was serious about basketball and wanted to see a serious basketball game. So Rodman said, “Let’s put on a real basketball game.” When he realized that it would be the leader’s birthday in January, Rodman thought it would be the “perfect” date for a competitive game.
Plans were quickly put in motion. Rodman and his crew returned in December to pick the North Korean team that would play against a team of former NBA stars. Their timing was terrible.
Not even a month before, Kim Jong Un had ordered the execution of his uncle, Jang Song Thaek. So while the outside world was reacting to the brutality of a man who’d kill his own family member in his quest to retain power, Rodman and his team were having fun at the Golden Lanes bowling alley in Pyongyang and viewing the wrecked American planes at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation Museum.
The backlash in the United States grew. Paddy Power, the Irish gambling company that had planned to sponsor the event, pulled out. Some of the NBA players thought about doing so too. The trip went ahead, but it was a disaster from the outset.
Rodman, who has battled alcoholism for years, started drinking on the flight from Beijing to Pyongyang and, it seemed, didn’t stop.
The other NBA veterans were clearly growing concerned. Word from home reached them that there was a lot of criticism about the fact that they were playing in a game to celebrate the birthday of a dictator. The game hung in the balance.
But in the end, they decided to proceed. They’d come all that way, after all.
On January 8, 2014, the day that Kim Jong Un turned thirty, the former NBA players were on the court. Rodman came out, sans cap, and took off his sunglasses. He bowed from the waist to Kim Jong Un, sitting in the
stands.
Then he took the microphone and noted that people in the outside world had expressed “different views” about the trip and about the Marshal himself. This was probably one of the most treasonous statements ever made in public in North Korea, a country where people can have only one view about the Marshal: that he is a demigod.
Kim Jong Un was leaning back in his armchair, surveying the stadium, apparently wondering what on earth was coming next. Rodman proceeded. “Yes, he’s a great leader. He provides for his people here in his country. And thank god the people here love the Marshal.” Then he broke out into a memorably weird rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
The North Korean state news agency made the event suitably staid, reporting that Rodman had said that “he felt the Korean people were respecting Kim Jong Un” and “sang a song reflecting his reverence for Kim Jong Un, touching the spectators.”
There were more surprises to come. The Americans had gone into the game assuming that, even if they were older and more out of shape than they had once been, they would ace the contest.
But the fit and fast North Koreans showed they could not be underestimated, outsmarting and outmaneuvering the Americans throughout the first half of the game. The score after the first two quarters was 45–39 to the North Koreans. The wily underdogs had outfoxed the supposedly superior Americans.
After the first quarter, Rodman had bowed out of play and sat next to his imperious friend. They engaged in an enthusiastic play-by-play throughout the second half. Kim leaned in and seemed to hang on Rodman’s every word. He was smiling and laughing, and his mood extended through to the end of the game, when the crowd broke out into a song celebrating the leader while he stood center stage, waving at the adoring masses.
As he chilled out in a side room afterward, Rodman, leaning back in his chair, was high on the atmosphere. “I just sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to the fucker.” He laughed, apparently astonished at himself.
But his behavior would have serious repercussions for him.
The Great Successor Page 20
