Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Starting around 2000, the regime began publicly mentioning Kim Jong-nam in ways that suggested big things were expected of him. In August of that year the first group of South Koreans who had been separated from their family members in the North arrived in Pyongyang for a visit. A guide showing them the Juche Tower said Kim Jong-nam had designed it.32 In April 2001, when pro-Pyongyang Koreans from Japan traveled to North Korea to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s birthday a party official surprised them by delivering a lecture on Kim Jong-nam’s “outstanding qualities,” Newsweek International reported.33

  A human rights activist, reporting on a trend toward moderating the punishments inflicted on North Koreans caught trying to escape to China, told Chosun Ilbo that authorities had explained released prisoners’ good fortune by telling them: “You owe all this to Kim Jong-nam.”34 Easing the policy against defectors might well have seemed a no-brainer to someone who had as many defectors in his family as Kim Jong-nam still had, even after the murder of Li Il-nam. Still, it appears that the relaxation—-which probably encouraged more escapes—-was short-lived. In January 2003 Chinese police caught seventy-eight North Korean refugees who were planning to travel by ship to South Korea and Japan. A Los Angeles–based Christian minister involved in the aborted scheme asserted in Tokyo that Kim Jong-nam at the time was “in Beijing, taking care of the refugee roundup.”35

  When Kim Jong-nam got caught at Narita Airport, some analysts suggested it would be the end of his chances to become the next Great Leader. The argument was that he had embarrassed his father, who at the time was playing host to a large group of European Union officials. Kim Jong-il reportedly canceled a trip that he had planned to China’s booming Shenzhen special economic zone—a journey on which Jong-nam had been scheduled to accompany him. They had planned to leave May 7, just three days after the Japanese deported their illegal visitor.36

  Indeed, Kim Jong-nam seems subsequently to have spent quite a lot of his time traveling and living abroad. Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo, quoting an intelligence source in Seoul, reported in September 2002 that he had never set foot in North Korea in the more than a year following his expulsion from Japan, “probably because he has lost the confidence of the North Korean leader.”37 A Japanese daily, Sankei Shimbun, reported in 2002 that he had been making frequent trips to Moscow, where he dressed casually as a tourist, spent time with a young Russian woman and in general seemed to be on vacation rather than working.38 When he was not in Russia, it appeared he was living in a villa on the outskirts of Beijing.

  We might well wonder how much leadership, budding or otherwise, Kim Jong-nam could exert back home while spending so much of his time globetrotting and shopping. Any one of the high-level jobs he had been said to hold in his father’s regime could require a full-time commitment.

  On the other hand, some of Kim Jong-nam’s travels might have been an expression of the Confucian filial piety that Kim Jong-il often went out of his way to promote. Song Hye-rim was dying in Moscow, and apparently her son spent much of his time in that city. Using a Russian first name and the surname Oh, Song had been in and out of a downtown hospital before she was taken there the final time on May 17, 2001. After her funeral in a Moscow cemetery ethnic Koreans reported watching Kim Jong-nam send off his wife and son on a flight to Beijing.39

  In any case, traveling incognito was something that Kim Jong-il himself had done, as he had hinted to Kim Dae-jung in 2000,40 so he should have been aware it was risky behavior. Besides the mere fact that Kim Jong-nam got caught, and thereby focused media attention on the secretive Kim Jong-il’s private affairs, it would seem the son while in Japan did nothing extraordinarily embarrassing to his father. Indeed, Kim Jong-nam showed himself very much his father’s son in some of his interests at home and abroad.

  “Chairman Kim and his son are similar not only in appearance but also in personality,” Jong-nam’s defector aunt, Song Hye-rang, told a South Korean magazine in 2000. “Their similarities include being hot-tempered, sensitive and gifted in arts. Kim Jong-nam is an excellent writer. Since he was young, he has written movie scripts and made movies.” Kim Jong-il even had a small movie set built for Jong-nam to practice with, she said.41

  Japanese news articles reported speculation that Kim Jong-nam’s visits to Tokyo were not only for sightseeing but also for his education—either as heir to the leadership or as head of North Korea’s push to develop information technology and build high-tech weaponry Other news reports said he had begun traveling to Japan incognito as early as 1995, when members of Chongryon met him at the airport and escorted him on sightseeing excursions that took him to Tokyo Disneyland, among other places.42

  Shukan Shincho, one of Japan’s popular weeklies, eventually reported that the young North Korean had become a familiar figure at a Korean nightclub in the Akasaka entertainment district and at a bathhouse in Yoshiwara, a red light district in the Japanese capital. A bathhouse attendant, described as “curvaceous,” was quoted as saying he had visited her before his ill-fated May 2001 trip. When his picture appeared in the news media, she said, she recognized him as an enthusiastic customer. “He visited the shop and asked for me three days in a row,” the woman said.

  The customer, a big tipper who paid with a credit card, told her that he did business in Hong Kong. “He showed me photos of his children and invited me to accompany him to Chinatown in Yokohama, but I begged off,” she said. “Who knows? There’s all that talk about Japanese being abducted to North Korea; it might have happened to me, too.” The masseuse said the man she called “Wong” had a tattoo of a dragon on his back. The magazine quoted a Tokyo-based Pyongyang-watcher as saying Kim Jong-nam had such a tattoo.43

  An article in a sister publication, Shincho 45, told of another Tokyo nightlife worker, a Korean who said she had spent a night with Kim Jong-nam in 1998. The woman painted a picture of a classic East Asian big spender at table. Kim, she said, sang Japanese songs until he was covered with sweat. He ate three plates of flounder sashimi, washing it down with many glasses of Hennessey Extra cognac. She said he reminded her of a yakuza godfather in the movies, speaking softly and slowly and treating her politely and with respect. She was impressed with his Japanese language ability and his knowledge of Japanese culture.44

  What were we to make of the Young General? He might be considered just a tad undisciplined, by the standards normally applied to rising world leaders. But let’s play optimist one more time and consider the half-full glass analogy. At least the youthful jet setter had somewhat more experience than his father with the realities of the outside world—indeed, it appeared he was a linguist. And he had that affinity for high technology. A dispatch by South Korea’s wire service when he was detained at Narita airport put it this way: “Diplomatic sources say that although he is not thorough in personality, he has a certain degree of knowledge in international affairs and state-of-the-art industry.45

  Still, it seemed worth noting that Jong-nam’s aunt in an interview with a South Korean magazine in 2000 said flatly that her nephew “does not wish to succeed his father.” Kim Jong-il, she said, “seized power not because he is the son” of Kim Il-sung. “It is because he was the most capable person and he could carry on President Kim’s task better than anyone else. However, hereditary governance is against the true nature of socialism and his mother does not want it, either.”46

  We might well doubt that Kim Jong-il would wish at such a late stage to alter the North Korean tradition of father-to-son inheritance, which he had helped to establish. But it also seemed important to recall that Jong-il’s raw desire for power and his strength at behind-the-scenes maneuvering had been important factors in his ultimately being named Kim Il-sung’s heir. He might be looking over his own youngsters to see which if any of them displayed that fire in the belly that American political commentators look for as a sign that a U.S. presidential candidate is prepared to do whatever it takes to get elected.

  Thus various analysts suggested that the succession would go not to
Kim Jong-nam but to another of Kim Jong-il’s children. Daughters were never mentioned in those scenarios. Confucian tradition would militate against naming a woman, and the propaganda about the third generation specifically mentioned grandsons.

  One supposed candidate who was put forward was a newly discovered “son” of Kim Jong-il’s named Kim Hyon or Kim Hyon-nam, whose mother was unidentified. The Japanese wire service Jiji Press in September 2002, citing unnamed sources in Beijing, reported that Kim Hyon, thirty years old, had been appointed head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party. Actually it seems likely that Jiji got the story at least partly wrong and that Kim Hyon was not Kim Jong-il’s son at all but Kim Il-sung’s secret, late-life progeny. Recall the elder Kim’s child by his nurse, a boy named Hyon, whose future Kim Jong-il undertook to arrange in tacit exchange for his father’s recognition of his own son, Jong-nam.

  Was there any propaganda that might be intended to prepare for the rule of another son of Kim Il-sung? An article in Nodong Shinmun whose focus was praise of Kim Jong-il said he “accomplished the heavy task given by history that can be shouldered and discharged only by a partisan’s son.” Of course a half-brother of Kim Jong-il’s also would be “a partisan’s son,” whether acknowledged by his father or not. But that article was the same one that pointed to succession by a grandson.47

  In any case, it might seem a long shot that Kim Jong-il, having fought his uncle Kim Yong-ju and half-brother Kim Pyong-il for the top job, would pass over his own offspring and name a younger and illegitimate half-brother as his heir. If Kim Hyon was indeed Kim Il-sung’s love child, his career in service of the regime—like that of my old acquaintance Kim Jong-su— seemed unlikely to place him at center stage.

  Seemingly closer to the mark were the analysts who suggested the succession would go to one of the sons of Kim Jong-il’s third wife, Ko Yong-hui.48 Those theories were based in part on the reported fact that Ko was Kim Jong-il’s favorite among his live-in women. Envious relatives of Jong-nam’s in Moscow and Seoul noted in one 1990s telephone conversation that “Hammer Nose” was living well, apparently getting better treatment than Papa accorded Jong-nam’s mother.49 In Confucian societies, it had often happened that a favored junior wife or concubine maneuvered to have her son chosen over the first-born as heir. (Recall that Kim Il-sung’s last wife was reported to have initiated such an effort on behalf of her son Kim Pyong-il. Perhaps she might have succeeded if her stepson Kim Jong-il had not, as former official Kang Myong-do told me, attacked her power base directly by introducing his father to two new women.50)

  Ko Yong-hui by most accounts was born in Osaka of a Korean family that had migrated to Japan from Cheju island, off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Her parents reportedly took her with them to North Korea around 1961, during the great homecoming of Koreans from Japan. There she became a folk dancer, working in the Mansudae Art Troupe, the country’s most prestigious. According to the Japanese magazine Aera, she met Kim Jong-il in the mid-1970s when she performed at a party he hosted. She gave birth to their first son, Kim Jong-chol, in 1981, a second son, Kim Jong-un, two years later and a daughter after another four years.

  One argument against taking either of Ko’s sons seriously as a possible heir was that Kim Jong-chol and Kim Jong-un were not long out of college. But Kim Jong-il himself had started his career at a rather high level, straight from university. His father might already have had him in mind as heir at that time.

  An intelligence source cited by Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo described Kim Jong-chol as an intelligent young man who had studied in France. He was reported to have begun work in the central Workers’ Party apparatus.51 Other sources said he had studied in Switzerland at an international school, watched over by the North Korean ambassador—and there had developed a passion for American NBA basketball. Oh Young-nam thought he had studied in Singapore.

  Even less was known of Kim Jong-un, said to be two years younger than Jong-chol. In early 2003 a Japanese chef, who said he had traveled to Pyongyang frequently to cook for Kim Jong-il at home, talked about the two sons on television. He told Japanese viewers that, in contrast to his polite elder brother, the younger lad when very small exhibited to strangers a suspicious mien. Jong-un’s glaring ferocity, the chef said, pleased Kim Jong-il.52 The chef said Papa had indicated he would not choose Jong-un’s elder brother because he considered Jong-chol too girlish. Being mean, after all, could help round out the résumé of a dictator in waiting.

  Ko Yong-hui’s own family background might have seemed a negative influence on her children’s prospects, in view of the dismal fate of other returned Japanese-Korean families. In the end, though, if Kim Jong-il said someone had a good family background, then the definition of “good” simply changed. As we have seen in chapter 36, the old doctrine of placing the working class first was on its way out and the moneyed class—-which included many Japanese-Korean families—-was becoming recognized as valuable to the country.

  From Kim’s point of view as a leader obsessed with propaganda and hard currency, Ko’s family background might seem ideal. First, as a migrant from Japan she might be presumed to have some influence with the remaining Korean residents of Japan, whose money Kim Jong-il continued to covet. Additionally, her father’s reported birthplace near Mount Halla on Cheju island would fit nicely with a pro-reunification slogan Pyongyang had spouted for several years: “From Mount Paektu to Mount Halla.” The vision was of a single, united Korea stretching from the northern tip of the Korean peninsula, where Kim Jong-il allegedly was born, to the southern tip. The slogan was thus seen in some quarters as a device either originally intended or later adapted to further the development of a personality cult centering on Ko and, through her, one of her sons.

  ***

  With that background, consider an August 2002 article published by North Korea’s People’s Army Publishing Company entitled, “The Respected Mother is the Most Faithful and Loyal Subject to the Dear Leader Comrade Supreme Commander.” The South Korean monthly Wolgan Choson, which told the rest of the world about the article in its March 2003 issue, reported that several experts believed it referred to Ko Yong-hui.

  It could not refer to Kim Jong-nam’s mother, Song Hye-rim, because she was dead; the language indicated a live person, the magazine’s experts said. The unnamed omon’im, or “Respected Mother,” according to the People’s Army article, was “the most faithful of the faithful.” She “devotes herself to the personal safety of the Comrade Supreme Commander,” Kim Jong-il. “Accompanying the Comrade Supreme Commander, she has climbed frontline hills for over eight years.” Kim Jong-il himself-was quoted as saying of her, “She understands me deeper than anyone else, devotes herself to me. It is utter happiness to have someone like her right beside me.”

  Respected Mother was boundlessly considerate of the troops of the People’s Army. Knowing that the country was in a “difficult” situation, she showed her concern by asking if soldiers had enough soap and other essentials. Like Kim Jong-il as a young marksman accompanying his father, and like Kim Jong-il’s own, deified mother, omonim was portrayed as a fine shot, free with advice to soldiers on how to shoot better with small arms. “You should hit a moving object,” she was said to exhort the soldiers she visited.

  Why could all that not apply to Kim Yong-suk, who had been recognized as Kim Jong-il’s wife by his father? The analysts’ thinking seemed to be that Kim Yong-suk had been dumped, more or less, and wasn’t getting as much quality time as Ko Yong-hui with the Dear Comrade Supreme Commander. The magazine quoted high-level defector Hwang Jang-yop as saying, “An heir must be the child of a woman a king loves, and it is true that Kim Jong-il loves Ko Yong-hui most.”53

  Note that the eight years during which omonim was said to have been accompanying Kim Jong-il on visits to front-line military units would have begun almost precisely at the moment in July 1994 when Kim Il-sung died. Possibly Kim Jong-il had hesitated to show Ko Yong-hui off publicly before
then, for fear of sparking an uncomfortable discussion of family values with his dad. Now that he himself was the Dear Comrade Supreme Commander, however, he could arrange for public opinion to shift to recognize as his main squeeze whomever he might choose.

  The South Korean magazine’s expert consultants focused particularly on a phrase in the People’s Army article that said the unnamed Respected Mother “assists the Comrade Supreme Commander closest to his body.” That seemed to be a reference to a wife or concubine, they argued. And if legal wife Kim Yong-suk was intended, they wondered, “why wouldn’t the propagandists come right out and name her?

  A further argument for assuming that Respected Mother was not Kim Jong-il’s recognized “wife Kim Yong-suk was that there would be no need to deify a-woman whose child could not expect to be named heir. Kim Yong-suk had only a daughter. The propaganda about a third-generation succession specifically mentioned a grandson of Kim Il-sung.

  Respected Mother, then—like the Glorious Party Center of the 1970s— was supposed to be recognized and deferred to first, identified only later after people got used to the idea that there was a new deity in town.

  That said, consider this: What if Kim Jong-il had looked over his offspring and judged daughter Sol-song—-who, as we saw earlier, had been accompanying him and advising him on his guidance trips—the most competent and “loyal” of the lot? An article in the leading South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo quoted an unnamed source who described Sol-song not only as her father’s frequent companion on his trips to offer on-the-spot guidance but as the apple of Papa’s eye. Beautiful (resembling her mother, official wife Kim Yong-suk), Sol-song was also beloved of her father “because of her good and kind nature,” the paper’s source said. She was modest. As a political economy student at Kim Il-sung University, she had insisted on alighting from her car a hundred meters before reaching the campus, then walking the rest of the way so that she would not appear to put on airs as the Leader’s daughter.