The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  But that second summit showed that the diplomatic path would not be smooth.

  Trump had concluded that it was his “maximum pressure” campaign that had lured Kim Jong Un out of his nuclear bunker and to the negotiating table.

  This was a misreading. Sanctions did have an influence on Kim Jong Un, but they were just one factor. The young North Korean’s confidence and the fact that he had a credible nuclear weapons program, together with the pressure of the sanctions, had combined to bring him to talks.

  The North Koreans were also having trouble figuring out how Trump operated. They were searching for a logic or a pattern in his decision-making so they could game out his approach.

  For clues, one North Korean official had been watching the West Wing and Madame Secretary, television dramas based on the White House and the State Department. The official asked an American interlocutor: Is this how the White House works? Is it a bottom-up process, where officials send ideas up to the White House? No, the surprised American tried to respond diplomatically, it’s the opposite. Donald Trump runs a very top-down operation.

  With these misunderstandings hanging over them, Trump went into the Hanoi summit expecting the economy-focused North Korean leader would be desperate to bargain away his nuclear weapons in return for the US-led sanctions being lifted. And Kim Jong Un went in believing that Trump would be making the big decisions and would be looking for a diplomatic victory to tweet about.

  When they met for marbled North Korean steaks—rare for Kim, well-done for Trump—that first night in Hanoi, they found that their starting positions were as different as their grilling preferences.

  Trump had been willing to lifting the sanctions, with a provision allowing them to be swiftly reimposed if North Korea resumed weapons testing, the North Korean vice foreign minister said after the summit.

  But the hardline national security adviser, John Bolton, and secretary of state Mike Pompeo apparently prevailed over their boss, talking him out of easing up on the North Koreans. The American president told his counterpart he needed to give up his entire nuclear program before getting any sanctions relief.

  This was essentially the same deal that US presidents had been trying to strike for decades, including during Bolton’s time in the Bush administration.

  This approach had always failed. It had failed because it overlooked the whole reason why North Korea had pursued nuclear weapons in the first place: the nuclear program is a means to defend North Korea against an American attack.

  For the negotiations to succeed, they could not be only about denuclearization. They had to be about transforming a relationship that had been dire for seven decades and convincing Kim Jong Un that he no longer needed his nuclear weapons as protection against an American invasion. Or at least that he no longer needed so many nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them.

  The process required a slow and steady normalization that involved both sides showing good faith. Setting up a liaison office so that the two sides could talk, a precursor to full diplomatic relations, would be a good first step. Working towards a peace treaty would be another. Indeed, they had agreed in Singapore to an incremental and reciprocal approach, and the working-level officials had been discussing this between the summits.

  So Kim Jong Un went into the Hanoi talks with an offer to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear facility—a redundant plant—if Trump lifted the sanctions imposed in 2016 and 2017. That quasi-blockade, designed as punishment for the missile launches and nuclear tests, had cut off seafood, coal, and metals exports.

  The Americans were right to be skeptical about the North Korean side being as good as its word. Kim Jong Un’s father had made the same offer more than a decade before and had even blown up a cooling tower at Yongbyon. All the while he was pressing ahead with his nuclear program at other facilities.

  But Kim Jong Un clearly thought he was making a decent offer, one that warranted at least a temporary end to the sanctions. He would not buckle.

  There was no deal. The two leaders walked away.

  The silverware and glasses sat untouched on the table where they were supposed to have lunch. The hotel staff ate the foie gras and snow fish that had been prepared for the leaders. The pens lay on a desk set up for a signing ceremony that never happened. While the two men were engaged in their artificial brinkmanship, two countries with nuclear weapons—India and Pakistan—were embroiled in an actual conflict.

  The whole tableau would have been ludicrous if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

  These two unconventional leaders, whose biggest advantages were the facts that they were so different from their predecessors, had fallen prey to conventional thinking.

  It would be easy at this point to see the whole effort as doomed, to see Hanoi as evidence that history would repeat itself. The stop-start efforts of the previous quarter century showed that it was prudent to have low expectations about diplomatic engagement with North Korea.

  But sitting in Beijing, watching these events unfold, I retained a sense of optimism that this time could be different. I still didn’t think for a second that Kim Jong Un would give up the “treasured sword” of his nuclear program. He did not want to become Muammar Gaddafi, giving up his nuclear weapons only to be invaded and overthrown. Nor did I think he would embark on Chinese- or Vietnamese-style economic reforms. He could not become North Korea’s Deng Xiaoping, embarking on a version of the “reform and opening” strategy that transformed China into the world’s second-largest economy. He could not pursue the kinds of Doi Moi reforms that had allowed Vietnam to flourish.

  In both China and Vietnam, the Communist Party has managed to remain firmly in control, even as capitalism has become the motivating ideology for many people. But there was one crucial difference. The Communist Parties in China and Vietnam weren’t family dynasties. Their leaders had different surnames. There was at least some internal jockeying for top positions. In North Korea, that kind of leadership contest would not be tolerated.

  So even the lure of economic assistance—repeated by the US negotiators in Vietnam, one of the models of reform that Trump had previously held up to Kim—could sound dangerous to the Great Successor.

  North Korea has long considered exhortations for reform to be tantamount to calling for regime change, given that the North Korean economy can’t just open up and allow a freer flow of information, money, and people without seriously loosening the Kim family’s grip on power.

  But perhaps there was some middle ground. Kim Jong Un might give up some parts of his nuclear program. And he might inch toward some kind of tentative economic liberalization. Andrei Lankov, a noted scholar of North Korea who once studied at Kim Il Sung University, describes it as “reform without opening.”

  For, despite the ups and downs, Kim Jong Un’s goal remains clear.

  He had followed the first part of Deng Xiaoping’s maxim: “Let some people get rich first.” Now, if he was going to have a shot at staying in power for years to come, he needed to try to follow through on the oft-forgotten second part of that phrase: “And gradually all the people should get rich together.”

  For that, he needed real, tangible economic development that he, and certainly not any outsider, was directing.

  He had a unique window of opportunity to achieve that, one that wouldn’t be open for long. The Great Successor, having defied predictions again and again, needed to maintain the momentum that the peace-talks process was giving him in the minds of his North Korean subjects before democracy and disinterest took over.

  South Korean president Moon Jae-in, the man whose embrace was instrumental in allowing diplomacy to flourish, would be in office only until 2022 and would be a lame duck for the last couple of years. Moon had been a been an unusually dogged and subtle partner in the negotiations; any successor might be much less invested in the idea of peace between the two Koreas.

  Kim’s newfound negotiating partner, Donald Trump, would be up for reelection even sooner, at
the end of 2020, and his success was far from certain.

  The North Koreans were so concerned about Trump’s prospects that one of Kim’s advisers even consulted a traditional Korean fortune-teller to ask whether he would be reelected. (The answer was yes.)

  For his part, Trump also showed a continued appetite for this process. “Relationship very good, let’s see what happened!” he tweeted after returning to Washington.

  By the end of March, Trump had shown just how willing he was to do a deal with Kim Jong Un, overruling new sanctions that his own Treasury Department had imposed on North Korea just a day before—apparently as a favor to his counterpart in Pyongyang. Asked to explain the extraordinary move, Trump’s spokeswoman said: “President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.”

  Kim Jong Un could bet that if Trump lost the election just eighteen months away, the next president would not be as amenable to dealing with him.

  Kim didn’t have to worry, however, about a change in leadership next door in China. President Xi Jinping had scrapped term limits to allow him to remain in power indefinitely. But that offered little succor. Xi clearly did not think much of the Little Comrade Neighbor and had engaged only when he needed to assert his role in any diplomatic thaw. It would be easy for him to go back to ignoring Kim.

  So as Kim Jong Un rolled through China on his train from Hanoi back to Pyongyang, he knew that his window for freeing himself from the sanctions would be open only briefly. Yes, China and Russia had given him some relief already by relaxing the controls on their borders while they pushed at the United Nations for the sanctions to be lifted, noting that Kim no longer needed to be punished for testing. But Kim Jong Un needed more. He wanted the sanctions lifted in principle as well as practice.

  And so he left the door open for more talks. “Kim Jong Un expressed his thanks to Trump for making positive efforts for the successful meeting and talks while making a long journey and said goodbye, promising the next meeting,” the Korean Central News Agency reported at the end of the failed summit.

  It was Kim Jong Un who summed up the prospects for the process best of all. Before the main talks in Hanoi, after their conversation over steak had shown how difficult the day’s discussions would be, the Great Successor described the trajectory he saw.

  “It’s too early to tell, but I wouldn’t say I am pessimistic,” Kim said when asked by an American journalist how he was feeling. The fact that Kim answered a question from the press at all was unprecedented, and another sign of his willingness to buck convention.

  “But,” he continued, looking around with a slight smile on his face and Trump at his side, “my gut is feeling that good results will come.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing about North Korea is a fascinating, challenging, infuriating, and infinitely interesting enterprise, and one that is never complete since we cannot know all the answers. I am grateful to all those who have shared their insights as I have tried to write about this most impenetrable state and to the friends and family members who have encouraged me as I undertook this book.

  I am most thankful to the people who escaped from North Korea and agreed to tell me their stories when they had nothing to gain from doing so. In fact, doing so was risky for themselves and their relatives back home. But dozens of courageous escapees from North Korea spent hours upon hours telling me their difficult stories and patiently answering my endless questions so that I could try to show what life was like in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. I must preserve their anonymity here, but to each and every one of you, thank you. Your stories are so important, and I am very honored to be able to tell them.

  To interview North Korean escapees, I needed help from people who have devoted their lives to this work. Their introductions were essential for reporting about life inside North Korea today. I am grateful to Jung Gwang-il of No Chain for North Korea, Park Dae-hyeon and his team at Woorion, Ji Seong-ho of Now Action and Unity for North Korean Human Rights, and Kim In-sung from the North Korea Database for Human Rights.

  Thanks to the wonderful Lina Yoon, with whom I’ve spent many hours talking about the plight of North Korean women in particular. I am indebted to Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, who is not only passionate about helping North Koreans but who also has the sharpest insights into North Korean life today.

  Many other experts have shared their time and their thoughts about North Korea with me over the years. For that, I would like to thank the following: Jieun Baek, Joe Bermudez, Bill Brown, Bob Carlin, Adam Cathcart, Victor Cha, Cheong Seong-chang, Choi Jinwook, Choi Kang, Cho Bong-hyun, Cho Tae-yong, Cho Yoon-jae, Chun Yung-woo, Ralph Cossa, John Delury, Kenneth Dekleva, Christopher Green, Thomas Fisler, Gordon Flake, Rüdiger Frank, Tatiana Gabroussenko, Ken Gause, Bonnie Glaser, Yoji Gomi, Stephan Haggard, Hahm Chai-bong, Melissa Hanham, Peter Hayes, Siegfried Hecker, Aubrey Immelman, Jiro Ishimaru, Frank Jannuzi, David Kang, Kim Byung-yeon, David Kim, Duyeon Kim, Michael Kim, Kim Seokhyang, Kim Seung-min, Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Bruce Klingner, Lee Hark Joon, Hyeon-seo Lee, Steven Levitsky, Jeffrey Lewis, Mark Lippert, Keith Luse, Michael Madden, Alexandre Mansourov, Patrick McEachern, Curtis Melvin, Alastair Morgan, Tony Namkung, Marcus Noland, Chad O’Carroll, Paik Hak-soon, John Park, Kee Park, Dan Pinkston, Ra Jong-yil, Evans Revere, Christopher Richardson, Greg Scarlatoiu, Geoffrey See, Syd Seiler, Gi-wook Shin, Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, Sheila Smith, Dan Sneider, Scott Snyder, Hannah Song, Kathy Stephens, Torkel Stiernlöf, David Straub, Sue Mi Terry, Thae Yong-ho, Michael Vatikiotis, Wang Son-taek, Grayson Walker, and Joe Yun.

  There are others who have shared their insights with me but have asked not to be named here because they continue to travel to North Korea. They know who they are and that I am grateful to them.

  Special mention to Andrei Lankov, who has been an endless font of knowledge and shrewd perception since I first arrived in Seoul in 2004.

  In Switzerland, Titus Plattner shared much of his own reporting with me as I was writing this book, and Christina Stucky came with me to the Köniz municipal offices at a moment’s notice and helped me understand Swiss discretion. Deepest thanks to Imogen O’Neil, who was kind enough to share her insights into the Kim family and who very generously let me use parts of her unpublished book.

  I was very lucky in 2014 to join the Washington Post, a paper where I instantly felt I belonged. My editors allowed me to devote a lot of time and resources to covering North Korea and trusted my instincts as I went off on reporting trips without knowing what I would find. Parts of this book draw on reporting I did for the Post during my four years covering Japan and the Koreas.

  I was very fortunate to have as my editor Will Englund, who always made my stories better and provided invaluable counsel on how to deal with the tricky situations I sometimes found myself in. Emily Rauhala was a source of constant encouragement and an excellent sounding board. Gerry Shih covered for me in the final weeks. Thank you to Doug Jehl and Tracy Grant for being supportive of this project, and for being so generous in allowing me time to finish it.

  In Seoul and on difficult reporting trips in China and Thailand, I was fortunate to work with Yoonjung Seo. She was the best colleague and reporting partner I could have hoped for. She arranged many of my interviews with escapees, and her gentle manner put them at ease when I arrived with my questions.

  While writing this book, I had invaluable research and translation help from Shinhee Kang, Min Joo Kim, Yeonji Ghim, Min Jung Kim, and Yuki Oda. Min Joo rallied with last minute translations and answers.

  My long-suffering Korean teacher Lee Un-kyung patiently allowed me to divert lessons from grammar to North Korea jargon.

  A number of people read parts of the manuscript once it was complete and offered helpful feedback. Sincere thanks to Patrick McEachern, Titus Plattner, Imogen O’Neil, Jonathan Pollack, and Shea Cotton. Toby Manhire ran his sharp editor’s eye over the almost-finished book and improved it immensely with his suggestions.

&nb
sp; The impressive Fyodor Tertiskiy conducted a close read and made many helpful suggestions and corrections. Any errors that remain are, of course, mine alone.

  My agent, Flip Brophy, believed in this project from the outset and found me a wonderful editor at PublicAffairs, Clive Priddle, who has been a delight to work with.

  I am lucky to have found encouraging mentors at just the right times in my career: Ann Marie Lipinski took me into the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, fortified me, and sent me back out into the world raring to go. David Rothkopf convinced me that I had insights and experiences that I should share in a book. Chung Min Lee spurred me on when I thought I couldn’t do it.

  I have benefited enormously from working on Japan and the Koreas alongside Sarah Birke, Emma Chantlett-Avery, Danielle Demetriou, Elise Hu, Jennifer Lind, and Motoko Rich and enjoyed their friendship at the same time. I spent many hours writing side by side in Tokyo with Sandra Fahy, whose academic work on North Korean human rights is unparalleled. In Beijing, Kathy Long and Yvonne Murray cheered me down the home stretch.

  In Tokyo, I was fortunate to have friends who provided encouragement, entertainment, and childcare during missile launches and nuclear tests. Thank you to Tomoko Sugiyama Wilson and Tom Wilson, Rika Beppu and Taito Okiura, Sarah Birke and Philip Blue, and Adam Day and Wendy MacClinchy.

  I would also like to thank friends who’ve supported me from afar: Emily Anderton, Natalia Antelava, Susie Banikarim, Soung-ah Choi, Emma Jacobs, Lucy Kebbell, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Flavia Krause-Jackson, Maggie Kymn, Toby Manhire, Leonie Marinovich, and Andrew North.

  When I arrived in South Korea on my first foreign posting, I had the good fortune to become friends with an exceptional journalist named Barbara Demick, who of course went on to write Nothing to Envy, the gold standard for books about North Korea. Barbara, you have been a generous friend and mentor, and I’ve learned so much from you.