Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  According to Kang Myong-do, North Korean members of the elite “felt a lot of tension and fear in May 1993 when Secretary of Defense William Perry talked about bombing Yongbyon. Kim Jong-il could not even go out. He stayed in his office. All Central Committee members were wearing military uniforms and carrying guns. From outside, North Korea seemed very confident, talking of full-scale war. But the ruling class in Pyongyang was really apprehensive of a U.S. attack, even though I believe North Korea possesses nuclear weapons—five nuclear missiles. This I heard from the State Security person in charge of political affairs at the Yongbyong nuclear facility. I see no reason why he would have lied to me.” Kang said a number of Russian specialists, freelancing for lack of remunerative work at home, “were working with the People’s Army on nuclear weapons. In August of 1993, Moscow asked that they be sent back. We had to send fifteen back. The person in charge of Russian scientists was a friend of mine. They had come of their own free will, but Russia requested their repatriation.”

  As an indirect result of all the tension, Kim Jong-il seriously injured himself in a fall from a horse, Kang said. “In 1993, Kim Jong-il was really edgy due to the NPT crisis. He had no time to relax. He liked untamed horses. Finally in September he went riding but he fell, injuring his head and arms and breaking all his teeth. All his teeth now are false. He brought a famous dentist from France to make them.”22

  Colonel Ed Logan was worried early in 1994 as he pondered, from retirement in Alabama, the prospect that the United States would refight the Korean War. “Thank God we are militarily a little better positioned than in June 1950,” he told me. “However, it is difficult to predict what happens to casualty count when a million ground troops engage in face-to-face combat with one side not accountable to anyone for the number of casualties. You can fly over and drop bombs. You can sail and control the seas. But actual control of real estate is just forward of the bayonet carried by the infantry soldier.”23

  By the spring of 1994, as a Fulbright fellow in Seoul, I had interviewed enough recent defectors to apprehend the widespread readiness of North Koreans to fight and get it over with. The Kims, requiring tension for their survival, were keeping their people on a dangerous edge, primed for war but not yet actually fighting. The North Korean military was a gigantic, cocked weapon. Who could know how and when it might go off? The tendency of many in Washington to try to isolate North Korea even further seemed to me dangerous under the circumstances.

  I also had learned from defectors that, despite the regime’s Big Brother surveillance and control, some people had gotten hold of forbidden shortwave receivers and begun listening to foreign broadcasts. Ordinary North Korean radio listeners had long been limited by available equipment to a single government medium-band frequency. The U.S. government’s Voice of America was accessible to the small group of North Koreans allowed to hear short--wave broadcasts—that is, trusted members of the leadership class whose work absolutely required familiarity with events abroad. But reports said that in January 1993 the regime had begun jamming the transmissions of VOA.24 Recall that, ironically, some members of the country’s elite had become regular VOA listeners—even fans. 25In Pyongyang during our 1992 visit one official astonished the veteran VOA Asia correspondent Ed Con-ley26 by giving an imitation, near-perfect in intonation, cadences and pauses, of Conley’s trademark signoff: “Edward Conley … Voice of America … Tokyo.” The North Korean said he had been a Conley fan for years. It was not clear whether the government specifically wished to deprive such elite officials of the VOA news source.27

  In any case, instead of isolating North Korea further, I thought that what was needed was a way to break through the regime’s lock on information and help North Koreans become aware of reality outside their country. I saw in then-current efforts in Washington to start Radio Free Asia an excellent vehicle for doing just that—if those in charge of RFA would make sure its broadcasts went out not merely on short-wave frequencies but also on medium wave, also known as AM, which my research showed far more North Koreans equipped to receive.

  I wrote up my findings in a policy paper and with the help of some friends put it into the hands of the top Washington officials making policy on Korean and RFA matters, including the secretary of state and the national security advisor. They sent thank-you notes. One high-level U.S. official concerned with Korean issues told me my paper contained new and important information. He was struck by my use of defector testimony, he said, since U.S. officials had long assumed defectors were of little value. It was time to reassess that notion in view of-what I had learned, he said.

  More than eight years later I met that official again. He was still deeply involved with issues involving North Korea. If, as promised, he had reassessed his view of defector testimony, however, the reassessment had not changed his mind. He obviously did not recall our earlier conversation and told me he had little use for what defectors said. Radio Free Asia by that time had been broadcasting in the Korean language for years—but only over short wave frequencies. It was not until 2003 that the organization finally managed to acquire facilities in a neighboring country to broadcast to North Koreans over AM frequencies.

  It was former President Jimmy Carter who managed to cut through the mutual suspicions and fears, finding a temporary compromise resolution of the standoff over nuclear weapons. As both sides contemplated going to war momentarily, Carter accepted an invitation to visit Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang. There he won from Kim an agreement to freeze North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for resumption of dialogue with Washington.

  At a June 18, 1994, press conference in Seoul, which I attended, Carter said that Kim had conveyed through him two requests to Washington. First, he wanted the United States to help Pyongyang replace its current nuclear power technology-with a more modern technology—one that would not produce large quantities of plutonium as a byproduct. Second, he wanted official assurances that neither the United States nor any other outside forces would attack North Korea.

  Although Carter had informed the Clinton Administration about his talks with Kim, he was seen in the White House as something of a freelancer. There were some ruffled feathers. However, Washington signaled that it was prepared to talk. The threat of immediate war receded.28

  One measure of how serious a possibility war had become in the minds of the leaders: Hwang Jang-yop reported that “because Kim Il-sung’s statue must not be damaged even in times of war, the recently-made statues are mostly knockdown style, so that the statues can be easily and safely moved underground in times of emergency. All Kim Il-sung statues are guarded round the clock by armed soldiers.”29

  TWENTY-NINE

  Without You There Is No Country

  In a ruined country neither the land nor the people can remain at peace. Under the roofs of houses in a ruined country even the traitors who live in luxury as a re-ward for betraying their country will not be able to sleep in peace. Even though they are alive, the people are worse than gutter dogs, and even if the mountains and rivers remain the same, they will not retain their beauty.

  —KIM IL-SUNG

  Writing those words in the memoirs that he began publishing in 1992,1 Kim Il-sung meant to contrast the horrors of Japanese colonial rule with the wonders achieved during his rule of nearly half a century. The main ruination brought by colonialism, in his view, was to national dignity. But by the time of his death in 1994 it would have been clear to almost any reader of his words that the harsh description applied, in material even if not in nationalistic terms, to the North Korea that he had created.

  Indeed Kim Il-sung himself seems to have begun in the final three years of his life to contemplate some new approaches to dealing with his country’s immense problems.

  ***

  Yoshimi Tanaka was one of nine Japanese Red Army terrorists who hijacked a Japan Airlines jumbo jet in March 1970 and flew to North Korea. Tanaka ran afoul of the law again in 1996. He was arrested on the Cambodia-Vietnam border and whisked to T
hailand to face charges that he had been part of a plot there to cash counterfeit $100 bills, hard-to-detect “Super-K” forgeries produced by North Korea’s ruling party as part of its drive to obtain foreign currency. He spent almost three and a half years in a Thai jail, and then, in 1999, he was about to be extradited to Japan, where he could expect further prison time. At that point he spoke with an interviewer for the Japanese weekly Gendai, saying: “I now recollect my life in Pyongyang with a warm heart.” Tanaka related that he had lived amid greenery in a quiet section of Pyongyang, along the Taedong River. About twenty North Koreans had been assigned by the state to work at the residences of the Japanese Red Army members and some Ecuadorian guerrillas who lived next door. The helpers “were there to manage the waterworks and boilers, transport coal and propane gas, secure foods and daily necessities and repair our Mercedes Benz cars.”

  The interviewer took that as his cue to observe: “You seem to have enjoyed a higher living standard than those of ordinary citizens.” Tanaka acknowledged that some people had disparaged the ex-terrorists’ circumstances as “life within a palace.” But he himself had no complaint on that score. “I think the president”—Kim Il-sung—“simply wanted to treat us as foreigners.” At that point Tanaka acknowledged that, living in an affluent residential area that was something of a cocoon, isolated from most North Koreans, he “did not know what the ordinary life in the republic was. So I cannot tell whether I lived a luxurious life or not.” He added, “As to the issue of hunger, as well, I really do not know about it.”

  Tanaka’s comments ring a bell. There is evidence that Kim Il-sung’s vastly more splendid isolation in real palaces—combined with the efforts of underlings to report only good news and expose him to Potemkin villages that oozed fake prosperity—kept the Great Leader from realizing the full extent of his people’s plight.

  There is other evidence, however, that even on some occasions when Kim did know what was really happening he was having such a good time as Great Leader that he didn’t want to inconvenience himself in order to deal with such mundane matters. Former ideology chief Hwang Jang-yop told of “an incident that occurred during the time when electricity supply was so poor that there were frequent blackouts even in Pyongyang.” Hwang gave no date for the incident, but power outages in Pyongyang were reported from the 1980s. “During a meeting of the party Central Committee chaired by Kim Il-sung, he called the minister of electric power to account for the inconvenience he had been experiencing recently while watching movies due to voltage drops.

  The ever-conscientious minister stood up to reply: ‘Currently there is not enough electric power to meet the requirements of the factories. Because of the heavy load in transmission to the factories, the voltage of electricity supplied to Pyongyang tends to drop.’ Kim Il-sung responded “with, ‘Then why can’t you adjust the power supply transmitted to factories and allocate more to Pyongyang?’ When the Minister explained, ‘That would stop operations in a lot of factories,’ Kim Il-sung cut him off and ordered, ‘I don’t care if all the factories in the country stop production. Just send enough electricity to Pyongyang.’”2

  Probably it is unnecessary to choose between the image of an unknowing Kim and Hwang’s harsh portrait of a knowing but uncaring Kim. It should not be surprising that he behaved on occasion like the despot that he was. Absolute power does, after all, corrupt absolutely. But it appears that his knowledge was in fact imperfect for quite a long time up until the early 1990s.

  Statesmen approaching death—even the most vicious tyrants among them—look to their reputations, their places in history. Kim Il-sung was no exception. “Just as in the past, I still feel nowadays the greatest pride and joy in enjoying the love of the people,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I consider this the true meaning of life. Only those who understand this true meaning can be the genuine sons and faithful servants of the people.3

  Kim wrote—as if-writing it could make it true—that he would be leaving behind a “revolution progressing triumphantly and our country prospering, with all the people singing its praises.4 The people indeed had no choice but to sing the revolution’s praises, and Kim’s. But conditions had reached the point where no one could ignore the stark evidence that the country was descending deeper and deeper into poverty and hunger.

  Economic conditions only grew worse in the early 1990s. Food distribution became increasingly irregular, with much smaller quantities of inferior grains such as millet substituted for the usual rice rations. People survived by using their cash savings to buy grain in the private sector—especially in a black market dealing in grain that had been held back illegally from collective-farm harvests. (This form of corruption had taken hold by the mid-1980s.) Beef, the Korean meat of choice, had become a once-a-year delicacy for most North Koreans. More than 50 percent of manufacturing had been idled due to shortages, and the workers who showed up had nothing to occupy them but cleaning the facilities. Even new factories built in the late 1980s were not operating. A largely military work force built an immense factory complex at Sunchon to make the synthetic fabric vinalon; it had its opening ceremony in 1991, but could not go into production. Supplying the clothing needs of the populace had been one of the prides of the Kim Il-sung regime, but now people’s clothing was growing shabby.5

  Word certainly was getting back to substantial numbers of North Koreans from relatives and others who had traveled or lived abroad that life in South Korea and the West—and even in China—-was richer. Getting caught saying so brought a one-month sentence in a reeducation camp.6 The economy could hardly improve if the regime’s nuclear gamble scared off anyone considering significant investment from outside. No doubt it was significant that the government had been at pains to patch even tiny holes in the tight lid it kept on information from outside. Reports told of a crackdown on contact even with Chinese.7

  What was the need for all the frantic unity campaigns and rallies pledging loyalty to Kim Jong-il if there was not a growing recognition of a split in interests between the ruling pair and other groups of North Koreans? In particular, we now know, some people in the elite—civilian and military alike— wished that they were permitted to reform the system enough to preserve their status. That is not to say there were fully developed factions in high places in North Korea. Factions could not flourish for want of strong leaders who had not yet been purged. Nevertheless, some influential members of the elite possessed survival skills and were more amenable to change than some of their colleagues and they did engage in power struggles.

  The record of“change” under the Kims could only dismay such people: In the 1970s, the North had begun to lag behind South Korea, but had rejected major change. In the 1980s, the economy had remained stagnant and the ideology ofegalitarianism and altruism had started to ring hollow to North Koreans. Reform had been the watchword in other communist countries, but Pyongyang had redoubled its commitment to its hard-line ideology. Now it was the 1990s and European communism was dead, while in North Korea the stench offailure had become almost overpowering.

  Experience had shown how difficult it was for North Korea to change while the Kims remained in power. Kim Il-sung, his longevity, his identification with the system and the lies on which he built his personality cult seemed to stand in the way of even Chinese-style reforms. The regime feared that reform of the system would imply criticism of Kim Il-sung. Opening the country to foreign ideas and information would admit views critical of Kim Il-sung. But clearly the Great Leader could not be seen to have told or condoned lies, behaved brutally toward his subjects or made mistakes. Therefore, the regime had viewed opening and fundamental reform as out of the question. Limited to halfway measures, the ruling class had been helpless to take the serious steps many believed were needed to prolong their rule—as, for example, Chinese economic reformers under Deng Xiaoping had been able to extend Communist Party rule. With Kim Il-sung and son occupying the status of permanent royalty, their more expendable subordinates in the bureaucracy
felt the pressure from above and below to perform—or, barring that, to find someone else to blame for the system’s failures.

  If there ever had been a possible way out of this historical bind for Kim Il-sung since the time it became apparent his system was losing the race, that may have been somehow to recreate himself. Could he remake his image through positive tactics such as replacing lies with truth or through destructive tactics such as blaming subordinates and evil advisers for the excesses of his system? If he could do that, then maybe, just maybe, he could permit his technocrats to go for something resembling a Chinese-style economic reform— while leaving the political system and leadership relatively unchanged for the time being. Like Mao Zedong, then, he could retain his place in history as a towering patriotic figure and the father of the republic. Evidence suggests that something like that actually occurred to Kim and that he made a beginning in that direction.

  Kim’s memoirs were one indication that an image makeover was under way The first two volumes, covering the period from his birth in 1912 until early 1933, nearly twenty-one years, went on sale in Pyongyang during his birthday celebration in 1992. Those turned out to be a partially revisionist work containing a number of attempts to distance Kim from earlier fabrications and embellishments and lies by commission and omission, as well as from some of the most widely condemned aspects of his system.8

  An example of distancing himself from old lies: Kim had been a legitimate hero of the anti-Japanese struggle of the 1930s—but only one of a number of heroes.9 To justify a personality cult, however, he had to outshine the others vastly. For his greater glory Pyongyang over the decades had downgraded or deleted the roles of others involved in the struggle—not only fellow Koreans but Chinese and the agents of the Soviet Union as well. In the memoirs, however, Kim acknowledged that he had worked as a cadre of a Chinese Communist Party organization and fought in a “joint struggle” with Chinese forces. He recalled by name many previously ignored comrades, including Korean and Chinese guerrilla leaders. And he revealed that he had accepted appointment by representatives of Moscow’s Communist International as a youth organizer in Manchuria’s Eastern Jilin Province in 1930.