Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  The behavior of the woman who was executed probably had been fairly tame compared with the Kims’ sex lives, news of which would have shocked most North Koreans. But unlike President Bill Clinton’s United States and Prince Charles’s Britain, North Korea had no news media that would publicize tales of the rulers’ bed-hopping and cut their images down to mere human size. And the senior Kim, for his part, although he was a sociable sort who enjoyed business-related entertaining, kept his peccadilloes private to the extent he did not, as a general rule, hold private parties even for his pals in the inner circle.62

  Kim Il-sung, while he did not have much of a conscience, “would never flaunt his lifestyle in front of his people,” a former elite official told me. “They make the girls’ parents sign contracts of secrecy, tell them their lives are in danger if they talk. And people around them don’t really know the nature of their work is servicing Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Most of their acquaintances think they have gone to acting school.” Any unauthorized person who might happen to discover the truth would be in grave peril simply on account of the knowledge.

  Some bodyguards and household servants were in on the secret, of course. In exchange for their silence they were permitted to lead “lives without normal controls—privileged lives,” the former high official told me. It was through that inner circle that the word eventually leaked to other high officials outside the Kims’ immediate households. Some bodyguards-turned-generals, aping the Kims’ behavior, set themselves up with harems of their own. That aroused other officials’ suspicion and led to some discreet conversations in which bodyguards spilled the beans. Still, the former official said, most North Koreans did not know. As for the high officials who had found out, they feared the consequences if they talked about it with anyone they did not trust implicitly.

  ELEVEN

  Yura

  Kim Jong-il had a troubled upbringing. At age seven, already having lost a younger brother, he suffered the death of his mother. His father was often absent, preoccupied with affairs of the heart in addition to such affairs of state as his invasion of South Korea and the three-year war that followed. As the UN forces advanced across the 38th parallel, Jong-il, then called Yura, and his little sister were shipped off to the rear for the duration. Following the war, the father’s paramour—the hated rival of the boy’s dead mother— became first lady of the land. In classic East Asian style, it appears, the jealous new “wife sought to channel her husband’s affection to her own children at the expense of her stepson, on whom she spied and informed. The sadness and alienation of a boy bereft of maternal love could have been more than enough in themselves to cloud his developing personality.

  To make things worse, inveterately status-fixated Koreans around him, young and old alike, deferred to the eldest son of the country’s top leader as if he were a little prince, thus encouraging the bully in him. By the time he graduated from college he was well along toward developing a reputation, among both Pyongyang’s Korean elite and the small foreign community, of being wild, recklessly impulsive and, by turns, cruel and warm-hearted, even extravagantly generous.

  At the same time, though, Kim Jong-il had begun showing flashes of the intelligence and artistic sense that he would use later to transform the country’s stodgy cinema and stage productions. More important, living with daily exposure to high statecraft and palace intrigue, he was sharpening skills of manipulation and political infighting that eventually would help carry him to the pinnacle of power as his father’s successor.

  The regime said nothing about the circumstances of Kim Jong-il’s birth and infancy until the mid-1970s, when he had been tapped as the successor. What was said after that was crafted to lend a magical aura of inevitability to his rise. In recent years, however, witnesses have come forward who knew the boy and his parents and described their lives in the Soviet Union and in the period after they moved to Pyongyang.

  The Korean-American writer Peter Hyun in an article in the Seoul monthly Wolgan Chosun recounted a 1999 interview with Lee Min, a comrade of Kim Il-sung and his wife during the anti-Japanese period. Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk, “was quite a beauty,” Lee recalled. “Her face was that of a princess but her complexion was dark on account of her many years in the field. Her eyebrows were black and her eyelashes were long, making her truly attractive. Her build was even more attractive.”

  Lee was a member of another of the fighting units that escaped to Siberia after taking a beating from the Japanese. In 1942, she met Kim Il-sung, then a captain in the Eighty-eighth Brigade, and his wife. Lee married a Chinese who was also deeply involved in the anti-Japanese struggle in Manchuria and who eventually became governor of Heilongjiang Province. As a Korean-Chinese, she herself became a high-ranking provincial official dealing with ethnic minority issues. Sensitivities in Sino–North Korean relations may have been at the root of her reticence on one key question when she spoke with Hyun. “Kim Jong-il was born before I met Kim Jong-suk, and I don’t have anything to say about his birthplace,” she said.

  The two women spent considerable time together between 1942 and 1945. Kim Jong-suk, according to Lee, “spent winters indoors and summers outdoors. She was quick, generous and had many talents,” among them cooking, sewing, acting and singing. In the dramatic productions that Kim Il-sung produced in the Eighty-eighth Brigade’s camp, Kim Jong-suk directed the dancing “and, often, danced herself.”

  Kim Jong-il, Lee recalled, “was a bright and agile child. He had his mother’s dark eyes and dark complexion. He was a cute boy.” In the afternoon, after his child care center let out, the boy enjoyed playing with a wooden rifle, marching along with fighters who were undergoing training. “When he played with Choe Hyon’s daughter Gop-dan and other kids, Jong-il had to be the commander. Gop-dan was one year older than Jong-il. I would ask him if he could kill the Japanese with a wooden gun. He would reply confidently that he could. I would tell him that he needed a real gun to kill a Japanese, and then he would ask his mother for a real gun. Kim Jong-suk told him: ‘No, you cannot have Dad’s gun. You must use your wooden gun to take a real gun from the enemy. That’s the only way you “would ever become a general like your dad.’ Kim Jong-suk was quite strict with Jong-il.”1

  At a Russian nursery attended by children of Eighty-eighth Brigade members, Yura Kim and the other children received ideological indoctrination. Stalin and Mao Zedong were exalted beings, while capitalists and religious believers—especially the Germans and Japanese—-were compared to wolves for their evil, cunning natures. In an interview with a South Korean newspaper, a woman who had cared for Yura at the nursery recalled him as a rough lad given to biting other children.2

  Photographs from the period show that the home of the Kims after they moved from the Soviet Union to Pyongyang was a Western-style, multi-story house built of stone—from the look of it, probably one that had belonged to Japanese colonialists or Western missionaries. Such a house required servants. A Japanese woman was trying to return to Japan in 1946 when Pyongyang authorities dragooned her into working in the Kim residence as a maid. Not hiding her obvious feeling that she was too refined for such duty the woman later described the mistress of the house, Kim Jong-suk, as a rustic. Lacking style or glamour, the North Korean first lady had not adapted her rough ways of dress and behavior to the unfamiliar life in a city. “She used to go out barefooted to the back yard of her house and butcher chickens whenever she was told to prepare food for guests,” the Japanese woman recalled. “She was very quick in plucking out chicken feathers. It was just enough to make me imagine how she had operated during her partisan’s life in the forests.3

  Pyongyang’s version of Kim Jong-il’s upbringing following the family’s return to Korea in 1945 begins with a visit to Mangyongdae to meet surviving relatives on his father’s side. The white-bearded great-grandfather, Kim Bo-hyon, naturally made a big fuss over the three-year-old, joggling him on his knee and remarking: “On this joyous day the deceased members of our famil
y will probably close their eyes in relief. Thank you, my dear granddaughter-in-law. You’ve brought our great-grandson to us and our Mangyongdae home brightens up.4

  This typical homecoming story is charming and believable—except for one enormous, gaping hole. The account, like other official biographical works, says nothing to indicate that Kim Jong-il was not the only son whom Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-suk had brought back with them to Korea. In fact he had a little brother, then one year old—the same brother who, three years later, drowned in a pond at home in Pyongyang. It stands to reason that the little one, even if his parents had not brought him along to take his turn being joggled on Grandpa’s knee, would have rated a mention at least. In Confucian family life, after all, even though the eldest son is the be-all and end-all, it is considered important to have at least one more son—as insurance that there will be a male to carry on the line if something happens to the firstborn.

  Since his official biographies were all produced after Kim Jong-il had taken charge of the country’s literary and propaganda output, it would be difficult to explain the lack of any reference to his little brother other than by surmising that Kim Jong-il chose, personally, to erase the younger child’s existence from history as North Koreans could read it. Why? One possible explanation is that the omission made it simpler like-wise to ignore two stepbrothers born later, Pyong-il and Yong-il—Kim Jong-il’s perceived rivals, whom by all accounts he hated. Also, it would not do to mention the fact that he once had a brother who, at the time of his drowning, was still called by a Russian nickname, Shura. That would not fit with the nationalism that was at the root of the juche ideology.

  Another possible reason for the omission is guilt. One account by a North Korean official who defected to South Korea in 1960 says Kim Jong-il himself-was responsible for his brother’s drowning, through careless horseplay: Four-year-old Shura was trying to climb out of the pond where they had been wading but six-year-old Yura repeatedly pushed him back in, until the younger boy became exhausted and drowned. When they heard of the accident, the boys’ parents ran to the pond, out of breath.

  “What’s the matter?” Kim Il-sung shouted to Kim Jong-il, who was standing there like an idiot. Shura was already dead by the time his father arrived there. “I’m asking you what this is all about?” The father again spurred the child to say something. But the boy was without a word. “What have you been doing with Shura?”

  The story is at best secondhand, and it dates from the pre-1988 period when a military dictatorship ruled South Korea and was widely suspected of manipulating North Korean defectors’ testimony for political and propaganda purposes. Still the account should not be rejected out of hand—especially given that official biographies of Kim Jong-il published after that version came out did not counter it with any alternate, official version of little brother Shura’s life and death. Such sad things do happen among young children, and it would be only natural to wish to obliterate the horrible memory.

  The former official who told that story described little Kim Jong-il as “a lonely and guilty child” who enjoyed killing bugs and was known to make a pest of himself-with acts of mischief. For example, he sneaked into the guard house and swiped a bayonet, which he jabbed into the calf of a guard before running away. He tormented a carpenter by vandalizing his workshop, beating on the carefully sharpened tools with a hammer and strewing things about, then hiding to watch the man try to control his anger. Once the carpenter caught the boy scraping a saw’s teeth on the concrete floor, and could not resist slapping his face. Kim Il-sung happened to come out just at that moment. To the petrified carpenter the Great Leader said: “Comrade carpenter, you have done a good thing. No one can endure the mischief of a naughty boy even if he is the son of the premier.” But then, according to the story, Kim told his bodyguard chief: “Get rid of that bastard carpenter right away. How can he use violence here?”5

  Regarding Kim Jong-il’s mother’s death on September 22, 1949, the official biographies are vague about the cause—and, of course, say nothing about her rivalry-with Kim Song-ae. But far from ignoring her death as they do the death of her son Shura, they dwell upon it at length to garner every possible ounce of public sympathy for Kim Jong-il.

  Kim Jong-suk told her son she was going to the hospital, which was just opposite the house, and would be back very soon. The thirty-two-year-old woman then “left the house with a smiling face.” Jong-il and his younger sister were waiting impatiently for her return, the little girl crying, when a car pulled in through the gate of the house. Kim Jong-il ran out on the porch, but it was a female relative who had arrived; she was there to get one of his mother’s dresses to prepare the body for the funeral. “She could hardly tell the boy of the terrible fact, so she told him that Mother would come back when the day dawned. With this she left, concealing her tears.”

  The next morning, when he learned the truth, the boy was distraught, hardly able to comprehend. He grabbed his little sister’s hand and tried to run with her to the hospital, but the women at the house—relatives, and some comrades of Kim Jong-suk’s from the days of the anti-Japanese struggle— stopped him. “He called again and again his dear mother in a trembling voice. But Mother did not come.” At the funeral in the assembly hall of the party Central Committee, Kim Jong-il “put his face to his mother’s breast and wept. The women fighters picked up the boy to take him away from the side of his mother, whereupon the father leader said in a hoarse voice, ‘Leave him alone. Tomorrow he will have no mother anymore in whose embrace to cry’ Taking his handkerchief from his pocket he wiped the tears calmly. At this moment the solemn strains of the dirge were intoned”:

  Bones and flesh of the martyrs lie buried in earth,

  But their revolutionary spirit and single-hearted fidelity remain alive.6

  After his mother’s death, one or more women took over the job of raising him and his sister, to whom by all accounts the boy was devoted. The official biographies that were published following his selection as successor fail to name a caregiver, much less record any special bond of affection with her. Some other accounts say that Kim Ok-sun, the surviving member of the tap-dancing duo from Manchurian guerrilla days and the wife of future army chief and defense minister Choe Gwang, took on the role lovingly. This does appear to have been the case, although there are other versions that say a first cousin of their father’s raised the children. In a chapter of Kim Il-sung’s memoirs—a posthumous installment whose real author we can guess to be Kim Jong-il, busily polishing his own myth—the late Great Leader is made to credit Gen. Ri Ul-sol “and other comrades in arms” for having taken care of Jong-il and his sister after their mother died. (Kim Jong-il relied heavily on Ri to smooth the succession after Kim Il-sung died.)7

  Just nine months after Kim Jong-suk’s death, with the coming of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung moved out of the house and into his command bunker. His son stayed in the house only a little longer, until the war moved too close to home. He worked up an eight-year-old’s strong hatred of “the U.S. imperialists, the sworn enemy of the Korean people for more than a hundred years, who had pounced on them again to enslave them.” He vowed to grow up and make the Americans “pay a thousand times more for the blood shed by our people.”8

  In September, after the tide of war had shifted against the North, the boy and his sister were bundled off to join the retreat from Pyongyang. Traveling by car, the premier’s family took a road that was “packed with people streaming north-ward. … The going was possible only at night, otherwise in the daytime enemy planes would raid.” During the retreat Jong-il supposedly admonished a party official, who accompanied them, for cutting a live tree for firewood to prepare their meal instead of gathering dead twigs. “Don’t touch even a single living tree,” he ordered the man. The propaganda intent of relating the anecdote is to show that the eight-year-old knew the retreat would be short-lived and wished to conserve Korean resources. To non–North Koreans, he is more likely to come across as a snot-n
osed tyrant.9

  Yura and his sister stayed for a while in the mountains near the Yalu River10 before retreating farther to “the rear”—to a place that is not named in the official histories but was actually in China. (According to some accounts the place was Jilin, where his father had attended middle school.11) Kim Il-sung had ordered the Mangyongdae School for Bereaved Children of Revolutionaries relocated there for the duration of the war. Kim Jong-il enrolled, living for a time in a house with his great-grandfather Kim and other refugee relatives before moving into the school dormitory. The teacher who had “the honor” of teaching him there announced to his fellow students that, since he was “a brilliant student,” he was skipping a grade. Supposedly “the pupils who were going to take the first lesson with him were all filled with joy.”

  Another teacher “paid special attention to his education.” When she was transferred to another post, she left a twelve-point memo advising her successor how to deal with Kim Jong-il. One of her points was that the boy “does not want and even detests special favors”—but the rest of the list was a formula for running the classroom precisely according to his needs, wishes and whims. For example, “the teacher should study without delay and in detail” the works of Kim Il-sung, since “these are what Kim Jong-il is most concerned about, and he inquires about them [at] any moment.” The daily classroom schedule “should be laid out meticulously so that there may be no time spent idly and he should be guided to observe it strictly. His temperament is like the current of a swift river, so he does not know standstill and stagnation but always makes progress.” There is more—as humorist Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. “The teacher should always watch the eyes of Kim Jong-il. … When he looks away or shows aloofness from the teacher, the latter should know that his own speech or act is at fault and should correct it promptly. In other words, it will be proper to regard the eyes of Kim Jong-il as an indicator of right and wrong.”12