Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  I make no claim that the former Northerners I spoke with constituted a scientific sample. For a while, though, I probably was speaking with the majority of the recent arrivals. My KOIS contacts knew that I was interested in meeting former political prisoners, officials, military people and broad-gauged people in general—but also anyone who could shed light on the lives of ordinary people. They knew, as well, that I was engaged in a book project that would take some time, and that I did not place top priority on angling for news scoops concerning, say, the status of North Korean programs for developing weapons of mass destruction.

  KOIS staff members did some culling. They advised me on occasion, for example, that so-and-so, who had just defected, reportedly had proven in official debriefings to be not very talkative or interesting—and thus I might be wasting my time if I met that person. In no case did I discover later that a defector whom KOIS officials had flagged as probably less worthwhile as an interviewee had gone on to say important things to other interviewers, whether Korean or foreign.

  Of course, I was cognizant at all times that spin of one sort or another could be involved in the help I was receiving. Without dictating to a defector what he should say, for example, the South Korean authorities could try to determine the most opportune time to present him to the public. After all, while finding the truth was my goal (and again, it’s up to the reader to judge the extent to which I found it or failed to find it), polishing the image of South Korea and promoting the policies of its government constituted the main work of KOIS. What I can point out, though, is that it was a time when democratically elected governments sought especially to show that the bad old days, when many official fabrications and manipulations of information had been justified on grounds of anti-communism, were past. Any spin that furthered that goal of theirs, I calculated, might also further mine.

  Eventually, I heard that the pendulum had swung so far that the Kim Dae-jung administration had taken to discouraging defectors from giving interviews for fear they would antagonize Pyongyang and cloud the “sunshine” policy. The Roh Moo-hyun administration reportedly continued such a policy. I had pretty much completed the defector-interviewing phase of my research by then, fortunately.

  There were, in fact, a couple of high-level defectors whom I was not able to interview because they were under wraps for whatever reasons at the times I tried to meet them. One was Hwang Jang-yop. (I had met and spoken with Hwang briefly at a Tokyo reception just days before his 1997 defection. He had not, alas, revealed his defection plans to me and the other two foreign correspondents questioning him that evening. But in hindsight I thought he had seemed to be under some strain—perhaps on account of the swarm of minders surrounding him, who quickly spirited him away before he could say much of anything to us. That line of thinking occurred to me after it came out that Hwang had hoped to defect while in Japan, but had not been able to shake the people watching him—and so had waited and made his escape after arriving in Beijing, en route home to Pyongyang.) Following his defection, fortunately, Hwang wrote prolifically for publication.

  One further note: I learned that the practice of KOIS, when arranging for foreign reporters to meet defectors, was to provide each interviewee a per diem “transportation fee” of 100,000 won, the equivalent of something under $100. Although such modest compensation of interviewees for their trouble was accepted as normal in the East Asian context, to put money and interviewing together always raises a caution flag in American journalistic ethics. I was not in a position to change the system, but I did undertake payment of the fees out of my pocket (in envelopes that I personally handed to the defectors when the interviews were over) in order to avoid having the South Korean government subsidize my research.

  Speaking of subsidies, the financing of my project hit a dry spell after my Fulbright grant expired in 1993. I hereby offer thanks to my lucky stars, and to the gods of Wall Street, for the fact that timely bets—first on Southeast Asian and later on Russian stock funds—produced returns sufficient to permit continued work on the book until I returned to full-time newspaper work for Asia Times in 1995, and to resume work on it after the newspaper ceased print publication in 1997.

  I am grateful for the opportunity to work on the book at Dartmouth College in 2002 as “distinguished journalist in residence” at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Thanks to Prof. Michael Mastanduno of Dartmouth, Prof. Joseph Massey of the Tuck School of Business and Margot E. de l’Etoile, who keeps the center humming, for making possible a very productive period. Special thanks go to Dartmouth professor David C. Kang, an old colleague from my Seoul Fulbright days, who put me forward for the Dickey fellowship. Dave also read and commented on huge chunks of the manuscript and was otherwise endlessly helpful and encouraging.

  At Ohio University’s E. W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2002–2003, and since then at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, I have spent practically every waking, non-teaching moment working on the book. I acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Scripps-Howard Foundation and (through the LSU Foundation) of the Manship family and the State of Louisiana’s Board of Regents. I am grateful also for the help and patience of my colleagues and students at both universities.

  Among friends offering valuable encouragement when I decided to try my hand at producing a book, William Chapman, former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief, was the author of a volume about Japan that I greatly admired. Daunted by the prospect of undertaking such a huge effort, I asked Bill how I might come up with an overall theme. (I had not yet learned Kim Jong-il’s term, “seed.”) “Just report,” he told me, “and then go back and try to figure out what it all adds up to.” In our journalistic trade, as Bill did not need to remind me, the worst thing we could say about another reporter was that he or she never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

  I followed Bill Chapman’s advice, gratefully, and he helped again when he introduced me to the New York literary agency Scovil Chichak Galen. Jack Scovil made Herculean efforts to interest publishers in my partial manuscript. When one after another told him that Americans weren’t very interested in reading about Korea, he refused to give up. He told me later that he had lost sleep worrying that Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader might go unpublished. Jack finally found the perfect publisher, and a highly perceptive editor, in Tom Dunne. I am deeply grateful to both men for making it all happen. My appreciation goes also to Sean Desmond, my editor at Thomas Dunne Books, who has done a bang-up job of shepherding the book into print, and to the impressively meticulous production editor, Mark Steven Long.

  Thanks to Ray Downs, Richard Read and Mike Tharp for providing helpful comments on the manuscript.

  At the Seoul home of Jack and Meehee Burton, the sofa bed always awaited me. I am deeply grateful for their friendship and warm hospitality. In Seoul I also received valuable help from, among others, Prof. Ahn Byung-joon, Prof. Ahn Chung-si, Michael Breen, Dr. Cha Yong-koo, Prof. Chay Pyung-gil, Chi Jung-nam, Cho Gab-je, R. S. C. Gimenez, Jean-Jacques Grauhar, Kenneth Kaliher, Dr. Kil Jeong-woo, Kim Chang-soon, Kim Choong-nam, Kim Key-man, Dr. Kim Kyung-won, Kim Yong-min, Amb. Juergen Kleiner, Catherine Lee, Lee Dong-bok, Dr. Lee Hong-koo, Shim Jae-hoon, Christopher Torchia, Kate Webb, Won Yong-chol, Dr. Yang Sung-chul, Yoo Kun-il and Alexander Z. Zhebin.

  United States officials and former officials who helped out included De-saix Anderson, Amb. Stephen Bosworth, Steve Bradner, David E. Brown, Hugh Burleson, Richard Christenson, Jim Coles III, Bruce Donahue, Edward Dong, Rust Deming, Amb. Donald Gregg, Morton Holbrook, Amb. Thomas Hubbard, Amb. Charles Kartman, Jim Keith, William H. Maurer Jr., Aloysius M. O’Neill III, David Pierce, James Pierce, Larry Robinson, Danny Russel, Steve Rounds, Jack Sears and David Straub.

  Old friend Park Shin-il called upon members of his vast net-work of colleagues to lend assistance. South Korean officials and former officials who were particularly helpful included Byun Chang-yull, Hwang Hyon-ta
k, Kim Myong-sik, Kim Ryu, Park Jung-ho, Park Sung-soo, Shin On, Sohn Woo-hyun, Suh Sang-myun, Yang Yun-kil, Yi Chan-yong and Yoo Il-han.

  In Japan I had help from, among others, Takao Goto, Richard C. Hanson, Lee Hyon-suk, Prof. Lee Young-hwa, Yoshiko Matsushita, Katsuko Saito, Katsumi Sato, Kim Myong-chol, Larry Kelly, Mark Schreiber and Geoffrey Tudor.

  Elsewhere I had valuable help from Grayson Bryan, former congressman George “Buddy” Darden, Dr. Young S. Kim, Stephen W Linton, Leonid Petrov and John Einer Sandvand. Thanks to all of those.

  Going way back, I remember with gratitude William Carter, especially and the other gifted public school teachers in Marietta, Georgia, who taught me to write, including Iris Collins, Imogene Keck, Christine Hutcheson and Clara Nolen. A passion for history came over me after I arrived at Princeton, where I studied under such great professors as David Herbert Donald, Eric F. Goldman, James M. McPherson and—my initial guide to Asia— Frederick W. Mote. (Two decades later, thanks to the Professional Journalism Fellowships—now John S. Knight Fellowships—program, I had the opportunity to study with outstanding Asia experts on the Stanford faculty including Masahiko Aoki, Peter Duus, Harry Harding, John W. Lewis, Melinda Takeuchi and Robert Ward.)

  Finally, Angsana Saengsawang rates special mention for her unflagging support and for putting up with my many absences from our home in Bangkok. And to my son Alexander K. T. Martin go my congratulations that he has turned out to be such a fine young man, even though the book soaked up too much of the parenting that should have gone to him during his boyhood.

  I’m sure I have overlooked someone I should be singling out for public thanks. I apologize for that. Of course neither the people named nor the many other benefactors who go unnamed—the latter group including North Korean and Chongryon officials to whom I am grateful for help with information or arrangements—are not to blame for shortcomings in the book. For those I am totally responsible.

  Bangkok, July 8, 2004

  NOTES

  Preface.

  1. Quotations are from H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, edited by Nicholas Ruddick (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001).

  1. To the City of the God-King.

  1 While many visitors to Pyongyang have suspected as I did that actors and actresses were performing as ordinary citizens, it would have been hard to prove. But a diligent search undertaken by a Seoul-based newsletter may have unearthed the smoking gun. Korea Countdown (published by Breen & Gustaveson Consulting, Ltd.) stated in its August 1994 issue that its editors had found two places in Kim Il-sung’s own writings where Kim complained, in so many words, that the “actresses” who lined Pyongyang streets to greet foreign VIPs were not giving a good enough impression. Alas, the newsletter did not cite the specific passages.

  Evidently the North Koreans learned from the Soviet Union the idea of using a subway to impress visitors. American Gen. .Mark Clark in 1954 related “the old tale of the American engineers who visited .Moscow” and were shown the Moscow Metro: “The Americans were astounded. They had never seen such a clean subway, so well appointed and so beautified with murals. Finally an American said: ‘This is wonderful, beautiful, much better than anything we have at home. But we have been here thirty minutes now and haven’t seen a single train, or a customer. Tell me, when do the trains run?’ ‘Ah, ah, ah,’ admonished the Russian host, ‘how about your lynchings in the South? ” (Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954], p. 34).

  2. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas in Development: A Comparative Study of Principles and Strategies of Capitalist and Communist Third World Development (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 169–170.

  3. Being put on night trains turned out to be the rule rather than the exception. I found on my later trips to North Korea that the authorities booked foreign visitors on night trains most of the time—perhaps because there ’were sights they did not want us to see.

  4. He spelled his surname “Bai” in the Roman alphabet, and pronounced it “Bye.” That name (also transcribed as “Pai”) is fairly common among Chinese, but the more usual Korean surname is pronounced something like “bag” without the g and is usually Romanized as “Bae” or “Pae.”

  5. Author’s interview with a student at Kim Il-sung University.

  6. Officials mentioned the president’s busy schedule of on-the-spot guidance as the reason he would not be able to meet me during my stay.

  7. Kim Il-sung, “Educate Students to Be Genuine Successors of Socialist and Communist Construction,” speech to a meeting of educational workers on March 14, 1968, cited in Park Yon-hon, “Cultural Policy of North Korea,” Vantage Point (August 1979), p. 10.

  8. Theory of Public Education (Pyongyang: Social Science Publishing House, 1975), pp. 115–121, cited in Park, “Cultural Policy,” p. 8. While the North Korean state under Kim took the leading role in education and tried to eliminate clan groupings that had underlain the old order, it did leave the nuclear family more or less intact. See Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 97–98.

  9. Chango Machyo, deputy national political commissioner of the secretariat of the National Resistance .Movement of Uganda, quoted in “DPRK President’s Reminiscences Disseminated Worldwide,” People’s Korea (pro–North Korean newspaper published in Tokyo), December 25, 1993. High-ranking cadres in North Korea get their own, more accurate news from a daily compilation that is circulated internally, not for the eyes of ordinary people. This seems to resemble the printed daily news briefing from his aides that U.S. President George W. Bush was reported to rely on in lieu of a personal reading of the newspapers.

  10. I attended some of those sessions in Tokyo. They were small gatherings made up primarily of people associated with the Old or New Left. By the end of 1992, according to a South Korean government count, North Korea had established 1,687 propaganda organizations in 132 countries (Korea Herald, June 19, 1993).

  11.Quoted in an abstract of an article by Prof. Song Min-ho of Korea University in Seoul, “Characteristics of North Korean Literature,” Vantage Point (June 1978): p. 14.

  12. Almost as North Koreans came to do in the case of Kim Il-sung, the Japanese reverently ascribed unlimited benevolence to their emperor, as shown, for example, by a government document issued after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923: “September 4th, 1923. H.M. the Emperor, sympathizing with the hard lot of the subjects in the afflicted districts, graciously bestowed a substantial sum of money from the privy purse in aid of the sufferers’ relief funds, through the Prince Regent. Premier Count Yamamoto, deeply impressed by the gracious Imperial donation, issued a proclamation addressed to the nation (Cabinet Proclamation dated Sept. 4), in which he called the attention of the nation to the benevolence and profound concern of the Imperial House for the interests of the nation” (The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan [Tokyo: Bureau of Social Affairs, Home Office, 1926], p. 16). I am grateful to Geoffrey Tudor for sending me a copy.

  Asia shows other examples of worship of the ruler. In Thailand, for example, lese majesty is among the most serious of crimes. The cult of Mao Zedong in China was an obvious prototype for Kim’s cult, although most observers believe it was a case in which the student, Kim, outdid his teacher, Mao, in carrying things to an extreme. The most direct inspiration for both the Chinese and the North Korean leader cults was the cult of Stalin. For an excellent discussion highlighting Stalinism’s contributions to the system that Kim Il-sung built, see Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 28–56.

  2. Fighters and Psalmists.

  1. Hwang Jang-yop, The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (I), trans. Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (Seoul: NKnet, 2000), http://nknet.org/enknet/data/hwang1-1.htm.

  2. Kim Il Sung’s With the Century was published serially by Pyongyang’s Foreign Langua
ges Publishing House. The first two volumes ’were released in limited numbers in 1992, in Korean as well as in English and Japanese translations. Volumes 3 and 4 were published in 1993, volume 5 in 1994 and volume 6 in 1995. Those six volumes (which apparently had only small printings in the English version and are difficult to find outside North Korea) take Kim’s story from his birth in 1912 up to the late 1930s, when he was a guerrilla commander in Manchuria. Page references here to those volumes are to the English version.

  Thanks to Kim’s newfound concern for accuracy, With the Century is a very important and welcome new resource. Nonetheless, in an attempt to produce a truthful account for presentation in the present work, I have found it necessary even with these relatively forthright memoirs to hack through embellishments, anecdotes that do not ring true and out-and-out prevarications that range from minor fibs to Big Lies in which Kim claims that he defeated the Japanese to liberate Korea, and that the Americans and South Koreans started and then lost the Korean War. Part of the winnowing process involved comparing Kim’s latest claims with his earlier ones and with the findings of outside scholars, whose works are cited at appropriate points.

  In the preface (vol. 1), Kim described the genesis of the work as follows: “Now that a large part of my work is done by Secretary for Organizational Affairs Kim Jong-il, I have been able to find some time. With the change of generations, veteran revolutionaries have departed from this life and the new generation has become the pillar of our revolution. I came to think that it was my duty to tell of the experiences I have gained in the common cause of the nation and of how our revolutionary forerunners gave their lives in their youth for this day. So I came to put down in writing what has happened in my life, a few lines each time I found a spare moment.”