That is not to say there were no opponents of the regime. Oh told me that his father, a bodyguard, had died in a 1960s shootout with special forces soldiers at a mansion where Kim Il-sung and first lady Kim Song-ae were staying in Changson county, North Pyongan province. “It was Kim Song-ae who shut my father’s eyelids,” Oh said. “This is widely known in North Korea.” The coup plotters, he said, turned out to be under the control of Minister of National Defense Kim Chang-bong, who was not present for the gun battle.
Other sources indicated that anti-regime activities had not been infrequent. Kim Myong-chol guarded both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il during his stint in the bodyguard service from 1976 to 1985. When I met him in 1994 he was suntanned, with coarse hair and a toothy smile. Oh yes, and he wore a gold watch. “When I entered there were only about 3,000 to 4,000 bodyguards,” he told me, “but after the killing of Ceaucescu and his wife in Romania in 1989, they increased the number and now it’s about 70,000.” Kim Myong-chol had left by then but he learned of the increase from old colleagues when he visited headquarters.
“Externally-we were guarding against enemy countries; internally, counterrevolutionaries,” he said. “There was a 300-page book published by the Bodyguard Service detailing past incidents involving people who opposed the government. I remember a lot, but I can’t remember dates and names. Around 1977, in Anak County, Hwanghae Province, a person stole an AK assault weapon from a soldier, cut it down—sawed it off—and hid it inside his jacket. He was headed for Pyongyang to terrorize a high party official when a plainclothes bodyguard caught him. His chest was bulging. There were similar incidents involving different weapons. Some people decided they wanted to give a letter of complaint to Kim Il-sung personally and tried to get through the bodyguards to him, but they got caught.” He mentioned also a large student anti-regime movement, led by the son of a vice director of State Security that he said was uncovered in 1991 at Wonsan University. “I didn’t realize any of the contradictions while I was a bodyguard,” Kim Myong-chol said. “I was prepared to give up my life for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Bodyguards are more loyal than the army. Bodyguards are people with a sturdy background of loyalty. Even a dog wouldn’t go against an owner who had raised him.”
Aspects of Lim’s story did check out. For example, army movie creative boss Li Jin-u was a real person who got into real trouble. Lee Chong-guk, former sergeant in the Bureau of Nuclear and Chemical Defense, related to me a rumor that Li Jin-u had been killed for spreading secret information about nuclear weapons. “In 1989, Li Jin-u was making a movie, Red Maple Leaf,” Lee said. “Researching for the scenario, he had to use data processing and look up information. He found some information about nuclear weapons and told Western reporters about it. That upset Kim Jong-il, who had Li killed. That’s a rumor, but for sure Li was never seen again.”
And the 1992 purge of dissident or at least disgruntled officers in the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces did happen, by the accounts of many sources. According to Kang Myong-do the leader was Vice Marshal Ahn Jong-ho, and forty other elite officers were involved. Ahn Jong-ho, Kang said, had graduated from Mangyongdae Revolutionary School. As an officer he had studied at a Soviet military academy before returning to the KPA for assignments in the strategy and battle training departments, heading the latter. He had been a rising star, Kang said. Others involved were the deputy commander of the battle training department and the vice head of the strategy department, Kang said.
Kang said the officers harbored doubts about the regime and personally disliked Kim Jong-il. All had studied for three to four years at the Russian academy and had experienced considerable freedom, comparatively speaking. It was natural, he said, that they had some doubts after that experience. They also abhorred Kim Jong-il’s distortion of history. Quite a few had been his classmates at Namsan Senior Middle School, so they knew his “promiscuous lifestyle. They disliked his changing his birthplace to Mount Paektu.” The forty, Kang said, were executed, and the authorities “got rid of” fifty others who had studied in Russia. Kang listed previous coup attempts from as far back as the 1960s led respectively by Ho Bong-ha, Yi Hyo-seun, Kim Chang-bong and Kim Byong-ha. “Even in this tightly controlled regime there is always a possibility of coup d’etat,” he said.1
Former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop added that in addition to the leaders who were executed, “almost all the people who had studied in the Soviet Union were deemed to have been influenced by the anti–Kim Jong-il organization even if they-were not soldiers. These people were not allowed to travel overseas, and anyone found to have the slightest connection to the anti–Kim Jong-il organization was executed, resulting in the death of almost all the students who had studied in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I used to supervise the Juche Science Institute, where I met a Russian literature graduate of Kazan University in the USSR. The professor who had supervised his graduation thesis was the dean in charge of foreigners, and such professors usually had connections with the Security Bureau of the Soviet Union. Based on this flimsy reasoning, the People’s Army arrested the graduate and had him shot.2
Choe Joo-whal, a former People’s Army lieutenant colonel who defected, said the purged officers’ offenses included giving military information to Russian intelligence. The internal spy who discovered the plot was Won Eung-hui, said Choe, who put the number purged by Won on Kim Jong-il’s orders at around three hundred. Kim Jong-il, he added, was going all out to build support among other military officers. In 1992, Kim had a “very fancy” apartment building constructed on the Taedong River in Pyongyang so that he could give the apartments to influential generals. In 1995, he gave twenty generals new Mercedes Benz automobiles as presents, Choe said.3
In his December 7, 1996, speech, Kim stated that “currently, there are no anti-revolutionaries within the party,” although there was “huge chaos due to the poor performance of the party in constructing socialism,” and those party workers who had “stood by with folded arms during this hard time will have to account for their actions in the future.” In the event, after the three-year period of mourning for his father ended and he made good his threat, he seems to have found some officials to accuse of being outright oppositionists.
From 1997, according to reports that filtered out of the country, North Korea publicly executed over fifty high officials. According to South Korean intelligence chief Lee Jong-chan, one of them was Ri Bong-won, a four-star general who supervised KPA personnel decisions and was accused of spying for South Korea.4
There were rumors, reported abroad, of a coup attempt by elements of the Sixth Army Corps in North Hamgyong Province. Kim Jong-il told some ethnic Koreans from Japan in April 1998 that the rumors were “a baseless lie. There was no such attempt. What really happened was that we found some defects in the political indoctrination program of the corps and had to remove some officers after self-criticism meetings. Contrary to the published reports, neither the corps commander nor the political commissar was executed. The joint chief of staff, who was the corps commander in question, is here today. After the so-called coup attempt, he was promoted to the chief of the joint staff. Now the enemy propagandists claim that the political commissar was behind the coup and that it was he who was executed. The truth of the matter is that the commissar was relieved because of his stomach cancer.”5
Back to the account by Lim Young-sun of his adventure on the train, I see three items of circumstantial evidence in favor of crediting Lim’s story. First, there were afterward quite a number of new and credible reports of anti-regime leafletting and graffiti writing. Second, the single provocation Lim claimed to commit was so modest (except by North Korean standards) that I would expect a movie scenarist exercising literary creativity to come up with something more heroic—car chases, shootouts, that sort of thing.
Finally, I found Lim to be perfectly plausible in the role in which he cast himself: leader of an ambitious movement. He seemed to me the sort of man who in traditional Korean cultural ter
ms would be accepted as a leader and thus would be capable not only of dreaming up but also of carrying out an important movement. That is to say, he came across as an impatient authoritarian—the same bossy type as Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and the South Korean military coup leaders-turned-dictators who had opposed them. Lim showed that side of himself in his behavior toward my interpreter, Rhee Soo-mi, pounding home his points to her. (An ambassador’s daughter, accustomed to big shots, she refused to let him rattle her; following her work with me, she went on to become a New York lawyer.) I was not sure whether Lim intended irony in one peculiar exchange. “You should go to live in North Korea,” he told me. I asked what I would learn there. “To obey,” he replied with no sign of mirth.
Lim said he wanted to study for a while and then work in a corporation. I figured that in no time he would be CEO.
THIRTY-TWO
In a Ruined Country
[N]o man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
—THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE
Kim Jong-il’s election on July 26, 1998, to the Supreme People’s Assembly North Korea’s parliament, was unanimous, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The current Great Leader won election from Pyongyang’s District 666. Whoever picked the military-dominated district for him may not have been aware that the number has satanic associations. (Perhaps someone realized it later. In 2003, Kim was elected instead from District 649.)1
The KCNA reported that the voters in District 666 sang, danced and shouted wishes for Kim’s longevity after they had voted. Exulted one: “Experiencing the same glee that our people felt when they held Great Leader Kim Il-sung in high esteem as head of state fifty years ago, I cast my ballot for the Supreme Commander, Kim Jong-il.” Many outside analysts believed— mistakenly, as it turned out—that the hoopla was preparation for the junior Kim’s formal takeover of the country’s presidency. That title had been vacant since his father’s death in 1994, even though the son as head of the military and the Workers’ Party had exercised effective control over the machinery of power. In the end, the expertly embalmed father was kept on as the country’s president in perpetuity.
All the folderol about unanimous elections and titled glory aside, how ?were the fifty-six-year-old Supreme Commander’s subjects really feeling about their leader? On his watch a famine, brought on by flooding and drought—and, to a large extent, by refusal to change failed economic and agricultural policies—had killed countless countrymen in the three years since 1995. Whether estimates of up to two or three million dead from famine-related causes during that period were correct or not,2 there was no disputing that hunger was extremely widespread. It afflicted even the best-fed large segment of the populace, which was the Korean People’s Army. The soldiers “get more than other North Koreans but they’re not getting enough,” an official with close ties to the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) and U.S. militaries told me in June 1998.
The man told me a story that harked back to H. G. Wells’s frail, flushed, four-feet-tall Eloi. In the first year of the most devastating period of the famine, he said, “two North Korean soldiers from a frontline unit in the south-western islands got washed away in a boat while checking their nets, seeking protein. They stayed approximately two days in the boat, and were almost dead when rescued. The ROKs picked them up, and let the North Koreans know we’d return them. While they had them in the ROK Navy hospital they examined those boys from asshole to appetite. They found both had liver dysfunction due to chronic malnutrition. Both had kidney dysfunction and skin discoloration. Both had severe dental problems. The big one was five feet five and a half inches tall. The other one was four-foot-eleven. The big one, nineteen years old, weighed 98 pounds. The little one, twenty-one, was eighty-nine pounds. We don’t get a lot of North Korean soldiers to do in-depth medical analysis. We didn’t know whether we had the runts of the litter. We repatriated them through Panmunjom. About ten days later we saw on Pyongyang television these guys returned to their unit for a heroes’ welcome. Everybody in the unit was the same size.
“We can’t extrapolate but we can draw a very firm conclusion that in that unit on the frontline islands the men were all little, all chronically undernourished and not in very good health. And when I look at other North Koreans, other than in Panmunjom, I see little scrawny guys. North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul plump up after three to six months in the South. You can conclude all are undernourished—perhaps not malnourished, but not up to their genetic potential. In South Korea there are lots of six-foot-two, 180-pound guys. Even North Korea’s big guards at Panmunjom are not nearly as big as South Korean JSA [Joint Security Area] guards. Anecdotally I’d say it’s clear about the KPA: their gas tank is running pretty close to empty.”
This jibed with what World Food Program Assistant Executive Director Jean-Jacques Graisse told me and other journalists in Tokyo that same month. In North Korean kindergartens, Graisse said, “the children look far better than they did two years ago when the food assistance started. The food was delivered and has produced positive results among children.” But still, along the Pyongyang-Wonsan-Chongjin route, said his colleague, Eri Kudo, “we really saw in nurseries and kindergartens significantly undersized children with very, very thin limbs.” Said Graisse, “I was shocked to see in most classes that the children on the average looked two years younger than they-were”—a judgment that he said medical doctors working for aid organizations confirmed.3
On family visits the WFP officials asked to see kitchens so they could learn what people were eating. One old woman had only a large rice bowl containing a watery porridge of rice and grated corn—mainly water. The woman explained it was for her entire family—three bowls of that porridge for the day for five family members. Walking around, Kudo found an old man lying down—her husband. He could not stand up. His digestive system was too weak to take even the porridge. Kudo saw swollen faces. One aspect of East Asian culture, she noted, is the high value placed on forebearance: “ ‘Try to put up with the situation, don’t complain too much.’ So we imagine there are many more like that.”
Was the regime’s collapse, or at least its leader’s overthrow, at hand? That might have seemed a likely outcome in almost any other country similarly afflicted—and especially in an East Asian country traditionally imbued not only with the desire to show forebearance but also with the notion that a ruling dynasty keeps power only until the “mandate of heaven” is withdrawn. In that old way of thinking, natural disaster itself is blamed on the ruler, seen as a sign of heaven’s disapproval of a lack of righteousness in his administration and a signal that it is time for a change. It seemed clear to me and some other outsiders that the Kim dynasty really was responsible for long-term policy failures that exacerbated the disasters befalling the land.4 And in truth, North Koreans were not so far away from the traditional ways of viewing their rulers otherwise. Did some of the more simple-minded among the populace also see their woes in the mid- and late-1990s as the revenge of heaven upon the system the Kims had built?
Leaving aside heavenly portents and omens, a study entitled “Pattern of Collapse in North Korea,” written by an American expert and circulated among Pyongyang-watchers in the latter half of the 1990s, hypothesized a seven-phase process. Much of North Korea seemed already to have passed through the first three phases listed in the paper by Robert Collins, who based his theorizing on accounts of communism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and on his decades of experience as a U.S. government employee observing North Korea.5
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea long since had encountered resource depletion, which was Collins’s Phase One. The country then had moved into Phase Two, prioritization, in which someone had to decide either that everyone would suffer equally o
r—the decision actually made—that certain groups such as the party elite and the military would be given priority in distribution of scarce food and other resources. (American food aid specialist Andrew S. Natsios argues in The Great North Korean Famine that this setting of priorities in favor of Pyongyang and nearby west coast areas meant cutting off the east coast of the country from food subsidies. Natsios calls such a policy “triage,” a term normally applied to decisions by frazzled military medics, following bloody engagements, that certain wounded soldiers will be treated—because their chances of recovery seem high—-while others, whose prospects are considered relatively hopeless, must be left to die.)
Robert Collins’s Phase Three, local independence, also seemed well established in much of the country by mid-1998. In that phase, working-and-living units—even whole localities—that got little or nothing from the center because they were left off the priority list had to adopt their own means of coping. That often involved circumventing regime policies, as we shall see in chapter 33.
Thus, as the end of the millennium approached, North Koreans should have been moving into Phase Four—suppression—if the regime was heading toward imminent collapse according to the pattern Collins posited. In what he called a “most pivotal phase,” the core group of the regime would feel its ultimate political control threatened by the new disdain for the rules shown by groups pursuing survival-at-any-cost schemes. So Kim Jong-il and company would crack down, handing to their formidable internal security apparatus “maximum, even indiscriminate, powers” to suppress actions that contradicted state policies.
In case suppression should fail to put a cap on local independence, it would instead push the country into Phase Five: resistance by organized groups and leaders. If the drama should play out fully, there would then ensue Phase Six, the fracture of the core group, a splintering that would occur because of opposing views about how to handle increasingly violent resistance; and, finally, Phase Seven, realignment of the national leadership without necessarily eliminating all of the core group.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 81
