Kim and his wife, a former member of North Korea’s answer to these manufactured K-pop groups, clapped throughout, and the final standing ovation lasted ten full minutes. It was like nothing the North Korean elite had ever seen before—at least, not officially.
South Korean musicians had previously performed in North Korea but never in the presence of a leader. This was all part of the Great Successor’s effort to look like a more modern ruler. He even adjusted his schedule so he could make it to the first concert and see Red Velvet, he told the singers, thanking them for their “kind gift” to Pyongyang’s citizens. But the group’s toned-down performance was apparently still too risqué for general consumption. They were cut from the footage of the concert shown on North Korean state television.
Still, Kim met with them afterward and even posed, with his wife, for a photo with all the performers: the South Koreans with blond hair, women with short shorts and over-the-knee boots, the YB rockers in their white suits, and Kim in the middle in his Mao outfit.
This photo appeared on the front of the Rodong Sinmun, a staggering move for the main state newspaper. South Korean music was banned in North Korea; being caught with it was a political offense that could have serious consequences. Yet here were these southern infidels with their questionable morality posing with the man who enforced the ban.
North Korea didn’t acknowledge any contradiction. “Our dear leader comrade said his heart swelled” while he was listening to the performance, the state media reported, adding that he was happy to see his people develop a deeper understanding of South Korean pop culture.
Kim Jong Un was very friendly in person, said Choi Jin-hee, a South Korean singer in her sixties, who met him after the concert. “Of course I know that he killed his uncle and did all those terrible things, but he was very eloquent and gave a good impression,” she told me when I went to visit her afterward.
Choi is famous for the hit song “The Maze of Love,” said to be a favorite of Kim Jong Il. She thought that would be an obvious number for her to perform in Pyongyang, but once she arrived, she was asked to sing “Belated Regret,” a South Korean ballad from 1985 that she had never performed before. She was puzzled, but it transpired that the leader himself had asked for the song.
“Kim Jong Un actually approached me and told me that he really appreciated me singing the song,” Choi said. “I got the backstory from the North Korean singers later. Apparently when his mother was sick with cancer, she used to listen to ‘Belated Regret’ a lot.”
Kim Jong Un had not traveled outside the country during his first six years in power. He’d been busy at home.
Now, with his sister having made the arrangements, he was ready to portray himself as a responsible and respected global leader. During this transformation, he showed himself to be a crafty tactician capable of moving the pieces around the chessboard of international diplomacy.
He had invited the South Korean president to a summit. But he proved himself to be clever in getting the South Koreans to act as intermediaries in setting up a summit between himself and Donald Trump. The South Koreans had an incentive like never before to make this work.
At the beginning of March 2018, less than a month after the Olympics opened and Kim Yo Jong delivered the first invitation, the South Korean president’s envoys traveled to Washington for meetings at the White House. They thought they would talk with officials first and perhaps meet Trump the following day.
Instead, Trump walked into the first meeting, surprising the South Korean delegation, and then, surprising them again, instantly agreed to the summit with Kim Jong Un. In fact, he wanted to hold the meeting at once.
The South Koreans were flabbergasted. They asked, Shouldn’t the South Korean president meet him first and find out what he wants? Trump reluctantly saw the sense in what they were saying.
Trump’s national security staff asked him to delay the announcement. He gave them an hour or so. They scurried to call the Japanese prime minister’s office and warn the conservative ally about what was coming. Then the South Korean envoys walked out into the West Wing driveway and announced the summit. From a diplomatic perspective, it was highly irregular: a foreign government had just made an announcement on behalf of the American president.
Somehow, Kim Jong Un, who had been an international pariah up until then, had managed to set off a competition among leaders to be the first to meet him, for it wasn’t just Trump who wanted to make history.
In Beijing, President Xi Jinping was watching. The Chinese leader had made it clear that he had no time for the young punk next door. Bucking seventy years of history in which China and North Korea were supposedly “as close as lips and teeth,” Xi and Kim had not met even once in the almost five years they’d both been in power.
Kim Jong Un had never made the ritual trip to pay homage to the great Communist benefactor and protector across the border. And Xi Jinping, who rose to the presidency at the start of 2013, showed no interest in engaging with him. After all, the very same year that Xi took over, Kim Jong Un had executed the North Korean who was arguably the closest to China, Uncle Jang.
China was not impressed by Kim Jong Un’s restless pursuit of nuclear weapons and missiles. When North Korea fired three medium-range ballistic missiles on the very day that Xi was hosting leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies in the eastern city of Hangzhou, the Chinese were clearly angry. Another salvo the following year ruined Xi’s opening of the Belt and Road Forum, a huge spectacle that was meant to be China’s answer to Davos. The brash North Korean had embarrassed the Chinese president.
These provocative moves showed jaw-dropping audacity from the young North Korean leader. It was one thing to refuse to kowtow to the president next door but an entirely different matter to actively try to humiliate him.
But the events of early 2018 changed the calculus: suddenly Xi had an urgent interest in talking with Kim. Or, rather, he didn’t want to be the only one not talking to him.
So for the first stop in his coming-out parade, Kim Jong Un and Ri Sol Ju boarded the leader’s special train, with its stuffed pink armchairs, bound for Beijing. Kim was going to personally give Xi an update on the recent developments, Chinese state media reported.
This leader who’d been shunned by Xi for so long was given a red-carpet welcome—literally. There was a red carpet on the platform at Beijing Station. Later, Xi and Kim walked along the red carpets, inspecting a military guard, and posed for happy photos. Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, is a famous opera singer in China, so the women added a heavy dose of glamor to the events.
Dinner was a jolly affair. Black-and-white footage of the good old days was played across large screens. There was Kim Jong Un’s grandfather meeting Mao Zedong and hugging Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. There was Kim Jong Il hugging Jiang and his successor, Hu Jintao, three times in the socialist tradition.
Then at the end, Xi and Peng, holding hands, waved and smiled as the young couple departed in a black car. It was like newlyweds leaving their first Thanksgiving with the groom’s parents.
It was a startling sign of both sides’ recognition that they had much to gain from being close and harmonious friends. Kim Jong Un knew he needed the man who was still, despite their strained relations, his closest ally.
And now that Kim Jong Un had started talking, China didn’t need to worry about the “maximum pressure” campaign anymore. The specter of war on the Korean Peninsula had subsided, so Xi Jinping could revert to his usual concern: ensuring there was stability in North Korea. North Korean seafood began returning to the markets in Chinese border cities, and North Korean workers began venturing back out to factories. The international sanctions, while still technically in place, no longer needed to be fully enforced. Xi didn’t need to stave off an invasion anymore.
When Kim Jong Un got home, North Korean state television aired extensive coverage of the visit. It transpired that the young leader had arranged for every moment of his trip to be filmed. T
here were even cameras installed overlooking the bridge between China and North Korea to film Kim Jong Un’s train rolling across.
The Great Successor wanted his subjects to see every second of it. He wanted them to see the two leaders standing literally shoulder to shoulder in front of Chinese and North Korean flags, their glamorous wives at their sides, Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping looking like equals.
A month later, Kim Jong Un waddled up to the concrete curb that marked the dividing line between the estranged Koreas for sixty-five years. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, whose parents were evacuated from North Korea during the same war, was waiting on the southern side of the Joint Security Area, the part of the DMZ where the armistice agreement that ended the war was signed in 1953.
Kim Jong Un approached, his arm outstretched to shake hands with the smiling Moon for an inordinately long time while the cameras caught the historic moment.
Then the young North Korean showed who was in control. After crossing the line to the southern side and posing for more photos, he invited the South Korean leader to cross back into the North with him. Moon accepted, and, holding hands, the two men stood in what is technically North Korea. The South Korean reporters gasped. Kim Jong Un was writing this script.
April 27, 2018, proved to be an extraordinary day that produced an agreement under which the two leaders pledged to work toward formally ending the war and improving relations. They also declared that the Korean Peninsula should be nuclear-free. This was treated in parts of Washington—specifically the White House—as though Kim Jong Un was laying the groundwork to give up his nuclear weapons. “Good things are happening,” Trump tweeted when he woke up to read the summit news.
In fact, the wording of “Korean Peninsula” hinted at potential problems. North Korea has long insisted that the United States remove its nuclear capability from the southern half of the Korean peninsula as part of any deal. Although the United States removed nuclear weapons stationed in South Korea as part of a deal in 1991, it regularly sends nuclear-capable strategic jets and ships to the south. For the United States and its military alliance with South Korea, this had always been non-negotiable.
That day in April, I watched disbelieving as Kim and Moon strolled along a boardwalk in the DMZ specially built for the occasion. For half an hour, on park benches in the sunshine, they talked one on one about topics ranging from the United States, the United Nations, and North Korea’s nuclear program to Donald Trump personally, according to lip readers who analyzed the footage. Moon appeared to be explaining how the American president would approach his own meeting with Kim.5
This was the first of three meetings that would take place between the two leaders over the next few months. The second was a hastily arranged gathering when it looked like the planned summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump was going off the rails, and the third was when Moon made the return visit to North Korea.
The diplomacy produced some astounding outcomes. Kim Jong Un allowed the South Korean president—a man who held a position that North Korea considers entirely illegitimate since the Kims are supposed to be the only legitimate leaders of Korea—to stand in a stadium in front of 150,000 North Koreans and deliver a heartfelt speech. By the end of 2018, the two sides had started pulling down guard posts in the DMZ.
Kim also ordered the shuttering of North Korea’s nuclear test site under a mountain in the north of the country. He didn’t need it anymore—he’d achieved the technical capability he wanted, and the mountain was severely weakened anyway—but it was a spectacular way of making it look like he was giving up his nuclear program without actually giving up any weapons. Explosives were detonated in the portals to the test site, and the footage was broadcast around the world. It was a classic North Korean move: Kim Jong Un looked like he was ceding something, but it was just—in this case, literally—a smokescreen.
The staged encounters with Moon may have been relatively superficial, but they still offered a treasure trove of information. Each rendezvous offered glimpses into how Kim Jong Un operated.
The North Korean leader, more used to issuing incendiary threats and weapons of mass destruction, showed himself to be capable of acting like an international statesman, being affable and even self-deprecating.
When Thomas Bach, the German who was president of the International Olympic Committee, went to North Korea in March of 2018, Kim Jong Un took him to a soccer game afterward at Pyongyang’s huge May Day Stadium.
During the match, Kim repeatedly talked about the importance of sport in the North Korean education system and for the general well-being of the population. Sport was a priority, the leader said.
The irony of a clearly obese person talking about the importance of sport was not lost on Kim Jong Un, and he showed a surprising ability to joke about himself. Such a joke would be treasonous if made by anyone else in North Korea.
It may not look like it, he more or less told Bach, but I love sport, and I used to play a lot of basketball. Much laughter ensued.
Indeed, the meetings offered unfiltered insights into what may be Kim Jong Un’s biggest risk factor: his health. The young leader looks like a heart attack waiting to happen and has clearly had health problems. That period at the end of 2014 was an early indication. He was still thirty when he disappeared for six weeks, apparently the consequence of severe gout, and returned with a walking stick.
Four years later, when the two Korean leaders shoveled dirt onto the base of a pine tree during their first meeting, the sixty-five-year-old South Korean president did it with ease. The thirty-four-year-old North Korean, however, could be seen huffing and puffing. His face was red after the smallest exertion. At an earlier meeting, Kim Jong Un’s wife told the southern envoys that she couldn’t get him to give up smoking.
Then, when they all went to Mount Paektu together in September, Kim Jong Un was panting heavily. He observed that Moon didn’t seem out of breath at all. Not for a walk as easy as this, responded the South Korean, who loves to hike.
The North Koreans guard details of the leader’s health closely. For all his meetings outside North Korea—including in Singapore—they travel with a special portable toilet for him to use so that he won’t leave any samples from which health information could be extracted.
But with all these meetings, there was plenty of uncensored footage of Kim Jong Un out and about, and medical experts were able to draw certain conclusions from it.
First, they classified him as severely obese. Kim Jong Un is five feet, seven inches tall, and his weight is estimated to be about three hundred pounds. That means he has an extremely high body mass index of 45 or 46.
It affects the way he walks—with his toes and arms out. Doctors speculated that he snores heavily. In poring over the footage of Kim, they had even counted his breaths. He’d exhaled thirty-five times on a forty-two-second walk with Moon during the first summit. Either he was very nervous, or his lung capacity was reduced from lack of exercise.
They noted that there seemed to be something wrong with his right ankle—consistent with the reports from 2014, although not proof that it was the result of excessive cheese consumption—and that he could be wearing a brace.
They speculated that the Great Successor was binge eating as a result of the stress of the job and opined that his health prospectus was dire. “Generally, such obesity, coupled with smoking, will reduce one’s life expectancy by 10 to 20 years,” said Professor Huh Yun-seok of Inha University Hospital, postulating that the young leader already had diabetes.
His “waddling” was also an indication of a weak physical state. Another doctor noted that a severely obese person is four times as likely to develop arthritis.
It wasn’t just the Great Successor who was in poor shape. He knew his country was too.
Kim Jong Un was surprisingly frank during his meetings with the South Korean president about shortcomings in the supposed People’s Paradise north of the DMZ. He warned his southern counterpart that when he came
North, he’d find the transportation system “deficient and uncomfortable” compared to the South’s high-speed rail.
He capped off the day by speaking live to the world for the first time. He stood in front of a podium next to an elected head of state and read a statement to reporters just like a regular leader.
His wife also knew how to play the part. At the dinner that night, the South Koreans brought in a magician to break the ice. But it was the North Korean first lady who got everyone laughing first. “Am I going to disappear?” Ri Sol Ju asked jokingly, immediately lightening the atmosphere.
The magician went around the room, collecting money from attendees and turning big bills into small ones. Then he turned a ten-dollar note into a hundred-dollar note, which he handed to Moon. The two leaders laughed uproariously, Moon holding up a Benjamin and an ebullient Kim waving his hand in the air. Someone yelled out, “No more exports necessary from North Korea. You can create money just like that with magic!”
They drank plentifully. The South Koreans had laid out a super-premium brand of soju, alcohol content 40 percent, and Kim Jong Un did not once refuse an offer of the liquor during the almost three-hour-long dinner banquet.6
After the dinner was over, North Korean staff swept through and collected all the glasses and cutlery that Kim Jong Un and his sister had used at the meetings, washing them forensically clean.
Throughout these encounters, Kim Jong Un had proved he could crack a joke, that he could turn on the charm, and that he could stroke a rival president’s ego. In every respect, he proved that he was no madman but a calculating leader with a strategy that was proceeding according to plan.
With the dress rehearsal complete, Kim was ready for the main event.
The Great Successor Page 28
