The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  While the boy could accept that religion was a sham, he simply did not believe that America was poor. On that subject, he had authoritative counter-information. Picture books that he had committed to memory showed a California couple taking a Sunday-afternoon drive in a big automobile as their dog poked its nose out the car window and lapped at the cool breeze. The dog lived better than he did. Another book described a Japanese stowaway who jumped off a ship in America and became rich. In Kanggye, No had seen the houses of American missionaries. They were large and luxurious and had flush toilets, a rarity in Korea. No believed that the United States was paradise and his new teachers were liars. At thirteen, he began to dream about stealing away to America.

  CHAPTER 2

  Poodle and Pretender

  I

  In September 1945, Kim Il Sung returned to Korea, not as the famous liberator of his homeland, but as an unannounced nobody in the Soviet army. He was a lowly captain and wore a Soviet uniform.

  Because he had a legend to protect, he was worried about how this would look to his countrymen. He also wanted his Soviet masters to give him and his partisan comrades a high-profile role in chasing the Japanese out of Korea.

  “Commander, sir, please make it so that it appears as though the anti-Japanese partisans participated in the war of liberation,” Kim reportedly begged Major General Nikolai Lebedev, the political commissar for the Soviet occupying forces.

  Lebedev refused, and Kim was not allowed to join Soviet troops when they routed the Japanese and marched victoriously into Pyongyang. Kim might have been kept out on direct orders from Stalin, who did not want him getting credit for ending colonial rule and building a populist base independent of Soviet control.

  So Kim did as he was told. He came home in the shadows.

  Along with about sixty other Koreans, he tried to travel overland to Korea from the Soviet Union, but a bridge across the Yalu River had been blown up. So his party backtracked to Vladivostok, boarded a Soviet navy ship, the Pugachev, and landed one afternoon without ceremony in the port city of Wonsan. After finding lodging on the second floor of a restaurant, Kim and his men marked their first night in the fatherland with bowls of noodles, according to Yu Song Chol, a Soviet Korean officer who was traveling with Kim and would later become chief of operations in the North Korean army.

  After eating his noodles, Kim told his men to maintain a low profile: Don’t get drunk, cause trouble, or raise eyebrows. If they were asked about their mission, they should say they were an advance party planning the grand arrival of Kim Il Sung. He ordered them to say nothing about the “age, place of birth, or personal history” of Kim Il Sung. Yu was puzzled but later concluded that Kim “simply wanted to hide the truth of his shabby, humble return to Korea.”

  Years later, propagandists in North Korea concocted a more suitable narrative: “General Kim Il Sung returned home in triumph, leading the anti-Japanese fighters . . . The Korean people who welcomed their Leader found no proper words to express their happiness. Every town and village all over the country seemed to surround the General and dance with joy.”

  As Stalin’s lieutenants worked to Sovietize the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, Kim’s willingness to do as he was told—and his grassroots fame as a guerrilla leader—made him a Korean worth employing and exploiting. While the role of Soviet poodle was problematic for his image as a legendary Korean freedom fighter, it did a world of good for his health, his family, and his career.

  Stalin’s investment in Kim began in 1941 in the Soviet Far East, where he was briefly arrested after fleeing Manchuria to escape the Japanese. Quickly identifying Kim as someone who might prove valuable, the Soviet army fed, sheltered, educated, and indoctrinated him. For about two years, he was assigned to the Khabarovsk Infantry Officers School. Then he was sent to a military base in the woods about fifty miles northwest of Khabarovsk, where he was promoted to captain. There, he commanded the First Battalion of the Eighty-eighth Sniper Brigade, a multinational unit of six hundred soldiers created to gather intelligence on Japanese forces in Manchuria.

  Kim, though, did not spend much time in the field. After years of hunger, cold, and stress as a guerrilla leader in Manchuria, he was in poor health. He was “lean and weak, and his mouth was always open, perhaps because he was suffering at the time from hypertrophic rhinitis [chronic nose infection],” according to Yu, then his army colleague.

  During his half decade at the Soviet base, Kim’s health improved, he gained weight, and he started a family. He married Kim Jong Suk, a partisan fighter seven years his junior who had joined his band of fighters in Manchuria as a sixteen-year-old kitchen helper. The Japanese later arrested her as a spy when she tried to buy food for the partisans. After her release, she followed Kim to the Soviet Union. She bore him two sons at the Soviet base, including Kim Jong Il, and was posthumously named a “revolutionary immortal” and a member, along with her husband and firstborn son, of North Korea’s “holy trinity.” (An official North Korean biography of Kim Jong Il later claimed he was born at a secret guerrilla camp on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the sacred mountain of Korean revolution. In Kim family mythology, this is where his father led the anti-Japanese revolution to victory.)

  With the Soviets, Kim finally had time for political and military training. He worked hard to impress his Soviet superiors, who viewed him as a capable leader and strict disciplinarian intolerant of excessive drinking. At the military base, he was not the highest-ranking Korean, but he was the most influential.

  After Kim’s return to Korea, there was no plan to install him as a significant official in the new Soviet satellite state. “No one among us was thinking that Kim Il Sung would become the new leader of North Korea,” recalled Yu.

  Kim seized the initiative when he arrived in Pyongyang in the fall of 1945. Rather than become the city’s police commander, which was the job the Soviets had chosen for him, he maneuvered to place his partisan friends in important security jobs. They soon dominated every police and military organization in the North, giving Kim a formidable and well-armed power base. To speed these appointments, Kim orchestrated boozy banquets for Russian generals, including Major General Lebedev, with Korean and Japanese prostitutes hired by Kim and his men.

  The Soviets needed a local figurehead who had credibility with the Korean people, but Kim was not their first choice. Instead, they wanted Cho Man Sik, by far the best-known and most trusted political leader in northern Korea. A former school principal, he was sixty-two and a devout Presbyterian. Some called him the Korean Gandhi. Trained as a lawyer at an elite university in Japan, he became famous during the war by publicly disobeying Japan and refusing to change his name from Korean to Japanese. The Soviets met with Cho several times in the fall of 1945, negotiating with him about the shape of the new state. They offered him the presidency of North Korea, provided that they could pull strings in the background.

  But Cho was not a Communist and hated the idea that a new nation in Korea would be under Soviet control. He was also proud and stubborn, insisting that he be treated as the most important person at meetings, which annoyed Soviet generals. Still, they felt they had to work with him, as Cho embodied every important tradition in Korean politics. He was wellborn, well educated, well respected, and an elder. One evening in late September, the Soviets invited Kim to help them persuade the old man to see reason. Their dinner at Club Hwabang, a pricey restaurant and brothel, failed to make any progress in turning Cho into a puppet. But Kim’s presence suggested that the Soviets were beginning to hedge their bets.

  The Soviets soon gave up on Cho, deciding that Kim better suited their needs. To make it official, tens of thousands of people gathered on October 22, 1945, on an athletic field in Pyongyang, where General Lebedev introduced Kim as a national hero and “outstanding guerrilla leader.” Kim’s speech—written in Russian by the political affairs section of the Soviet Twenty-fifth Army and translated int
o Korean—was clotted with Marxist jargon and incomprehensible to most Koreans who heard Kim stumble through it.

  To help Kim look like a leader that day, a Soviet major lent him a blue suit that was a size too small. Kim had never worn a necktie, and a Soviet colonel helped him get it around his neck. Pinned on his lapel was a Soviet medal, the Red Banner of Combat.

  In the audience, most Koreans knew (or thought they knew) a great deal about the legendary Kim Il Sung and his heroic exploits in Manchuria against the Japanese. They had heard fantastical stories about him for so many years that they quite naturally assumed he was an elderly fellow like Cho Man Sik: gray-haired, well dressed, distinguished, and eloquent.

  The youth who stepped up to the rostrum, nervously clutching his speech, uncomfortable in his tight suit, was not at all what they expected.

  “He looked like a callow young man, even younger than his actual age of thirty-three,” wrote Yu. “I even heard one woman next to me comment, ‘That is not him. What type of Kim Il Sung could that be?’”

  Another witness, the personal secretary to Cho Man Sik, reported,

  His complexion was slightly dark and he had a haircut like a Chinese waiter. His hair at the forehead was about an inch long, reminding one of a lightweight boxing champion. “He is a fake!” All of the people gathered upon the athletic field felt an electrifying sense of distrust, disappointment, discontent, and anger.

  Oblivious to the sudden change in mass psychology, Kim Il Song continued in his monotonous, plain, and duck-like voice to praise the heroic struggle of the Red Army . . . He particularly praised and offered the most extravagant words of gratitude and glory to the Soviet Union and Marshal Stalin, that close friend of the oppressed peoples of the world. The people at this point had completely lost their respect and hope for General Kim Il Song. There was the problem of age, but there was also the content of the speech, which was so much like that of other Communists whose monotonous repetitions had worn the people out.

  When the speech was over, the Soviets knew they had a problem. Kim’s performance had backfired, enhancing the stature of Cho Man Sik. But the decision had been made: Kim might have looked like a waiter in a bad suit, but he flattered Stalin in every speech. He found Korean kisaeng girls for Russian generals. He was worthy of being a Soviet puppet.

  To sell their selection to the masses, the Soviets embarked on a major propaganda campaign that emphasized Kim’s guerrilla credentials and authenticity. (After Cho Man Sik resigned in protest on February 4, 1946, from the chairmanship of a Soviet-created governing bureau, he was arrested and disappeared. He was probably shot just before or during the Korean War.)

  The custodians of Kim’s image would erase the embarrassment of his first appearance in Pyongyang. They rewrote the words and reimagined the Great Leader’s coming-out speech. Photographs were retouched: Russian generals who stood behind Kim as he read his speech disappeared, as did the Red Banner of Combat pinned to his chest. Oil paintings were commissioned that showed Kim’s triumphant return to Korea without Russians. People “could not take their enraptured eyes from [Kim’s] gallant figure,” wrote an official biographer. They “were dancing with joy and hugging each other.” They cheered out of “boundless love and respect for their great leader.”

  II

  No Kum Sok soon began to see a lot of General Kim Il Sung—and Stalin.

  At school, on the street, in every newspaper—the young Korean leader and the old Soviet dictator were inescapable. The first wave of photographs, posters, and billboards showed Kim with a skinny face and wearing a Western-style coat and tie. In the months to come, as more posters flooded the cities, his face filled out. Kim shifted to a Mao suit and posed with workers and students. The newspapers were silent about his years in the Soviet Far East, his rank as a captain in the Soviet army, and the whereabouts of Cho Man Sik.

  Like many Koreans, No and his father regarded Kim as a fake and a temporary placeholder. They believed the Korean Peninsula would unify under a democratically elected government, perhaps with the help of a respected elder like Cho Man Sik.

  Instead, the intense propaganda praising Kim Il Sung became overwhelming. Phony or real, Kim was the Soviets’ chosen leader. When the government released a song about Kim’s legendary achievements, it became the most popular musical number in the North. All schoolchildren, including No, learned it by heart.

  Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

  Who is the patriot whose fame shall ever last?

  Over Korea ever flourishing and free.

  So dear to our hearts is our General’s glorious name.

  Our beloved General Kim Il Sung of undying fame.

  No’s father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1947. Surgeons operated in a Japanese-built hospital but told the family that cancer would soon return. No’s mother and father decided to move to Hungnam, the coastal city near their families. No, then fifteen, traveled there ahead of his parents in the fall of 1947 to enroll in high school. His parents followed the next spring. For several months, No lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Uncle Yoo, who idolized Kim Il Sung.

  No quickly realized that his uncle and aunt were poorer than his parents. They struggled to buy food for themselves and their four children. The boy tried not to eat too much or make his uncle angry. He hid his poster of Syngman Rhee, although his uncle found it and scolded him. When Uncle Yoo lectured him about the genius of Kim, No learned to nod agreeably.

  Keeping Uncle Yoo happy could be helpful.

  No discovered this when he tried—and failed—to enroll in high school. He had been an excellent middle school student in Kanggye, and he and his parents had hoped that his grades would smooth his admission into a new high school. But transferring between schools was difficult in North Korea, a holdover from the Japanese colonial era, when authorities wanted people to stay put. When No presented his transcript to the principal at Hungnam First High School, he was denied admission.

  Three months later, Uncle Yoo had an idea. His nephew should impress the principal and the teachers with his insatiable hunger for learning. He should show up early every morning at the large room where teachers assembled before class. He should stand there all day, looking eager for knowledge. It worked. On the third day, the vice-principal called No to his desk and praised the boy’s courage in pursuit of an education. No started high school the following morning. Uncle Yoo was delighted and seemed to have convinced himself that his nephew had become a “real Communist.” Uncle Yoo told his nephew to report all anti-Communist behavior he saw at Hungnam High.

  No did not become a snitch in school, but he sensed teachers would not tolerate an America-is-best attitude. He avoided Japanese or English words and began studying Russian. When Kim Il Sung unexpectedly visited Hungnam for the speech on top of the fertilizer mountain, the boy knew it was important to show enthusiasm. He had become an excellent liar.

  Several weeks after the fertilizer speech, No’s parents made their way to Hungnam. They could afford only a modest house of unpainted wood with four rooms and a sheet-metal roof. Money for food and clothing was scarce. His father’s stomach cancer had returned, and he was too sick to work.

  III

  Kim Il Sung’s competitive edge over rival politicians depended on Moscow, which supplied the guns and money that created and sustained North Korea. To nurture and strengthen that relationship, Kim constantly and effusively praised Stalin, calling him the Sun of Mankind and Glorious Leader of Worldwide Revolution. His flare for flattering higher-ups was matched by an instinctive feel for what was going on down below. When peasants were stirred up, he had a gift for turning their anger into his power.

  Five weeks after his bumbling performance in Pyongyang, Kim sensed opportunity in Sinuiju, a border city across the Yalu River from Manchuria. There, in the early afternoon of November 23, 1945, Soviet soldiers joined Korean Communist securi
ty forces in shooting to death a hundred students and wounding about seven hundred others. The Soviets called in aircraft to strafe crowds of young people. The mass killings halted the single largest anti-Communist protest in North Korea since the arrival of the Soviet army.

  The trigger for the demonstration was the arrest of Principal Chu, the senior administrator at a local middle school. The Soviets had angered the principal, his teachers, and his students by cutting resources, reducing teachers, and controlling the content of classroom instruction. But there was much more to it than that. The boorish behavior of Soviet troops had infuriated the entire population of Sinuiju. As they had in Kanggye and across much of North Korea, Russian soldiers robbed stores and homes, busted up local brothels, and roistered around city streets, drunk, disorderly, and heavily armed. The coming of the Russians coincided with food shortages, price hikes, and rising hunger. Soldiers stole food to feed themselves, angering farmers and landlords. The sizable population of Christians was outraged because the Soviets called them part of a “bourgeois social stratum” and limited their influence in city affairs.

  With help from Christian pastors, a thousand students from seven local schools surrounded Communist Party buildings. To get close, they cheered Stalin (a variation of the flattery game that Kim Il Sung played so well). Then they shouted, “Charge!” They scaled walls and began fistfights with Soviet and Korean security forces. Shooting broke out with handguns, rifles, and machine guns. Reports of the killings spread quickly, sparking demonstrations in several cities and catching Communist authorities off guard.

  Suddenly the Soviet occupation forces needed damage control.

  Three days after the shootings, a Soviet aircraft delivered Kim Il Sung to Sinuiju. He visited several schools, where he calmed people down by listening to their complaints and reminding them of his credentials as an anti-Japanese guerrilla and a Korean patriot.