Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Add that Sol-song, born in 1974, was considered an economic specialist. The article didn’t mention the likelihood that her college training in that field might be no better than her father’s, since she graduated in his department at KISU. But maybe she had a private tutor. Maybe under an assumed name she had joined one of the groups of North Koreans who went to study Western-style business administration in Australia.

  In any case, Chosun Ilbo’s source said that Kim Jong-il on his guidance trips “is often seen asking Sol-song, who is standing behind him, what her opinion is, after receiving a briefing from the supervisor. The scenes of father and daughter exchanging questions and answers on economy occasionally appear in North Korean documentary films.” The paper’s account concluded: “Some view the fact that both Sol-song and Jong-nam accompany Kim Jong-il on his on-the-spot inspections as grooming them for their separate roles as the regime’s successors.” Like her aunt, Kim Jong-il’s sister Kim Kyong-hui, the light-industries boss for the party, “Sol-song could take charge of the economic sector.”54

  Indeed, thinking from Kim Jong-il’s point of view, why not anoint her as Respected Mother (maybe she was such a good daughter she trimmed his toenails, thus assisting him “closest to his body”)—or glorify her mother, Kim Yong-suk, in that fashion? Then Sol-song could eventually reign—alone or in combination with the Young General or another half-sibling. It would be a simple matter to order the propagandists to adjust the late Great Leader’s alleged remark about a grandson to make the word read, thenceforth, “grandchild” or “grandchildren.” Designating a daughter as heir would be in line with efforts Kim Jong-il had made early in his career to reduce discrimination against women. And—no small matter to him—he would have the satisfaction of having outsmarted, once again, most of the people who presumed to figure him out.

  The Asian royal model that Kim Jong-il told Madeleine Albright he was interested in emulating, Thailand, had been a constitutional rather than absolute monarchy since a 1932 revolution. Still, while living there as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s and then decades later as a journalist, I encountered a deep-seated, old-fashioned popular reverence for the royal family. The king from time to time would call in feuding politicians and lecture them, insisting that they straighten out messes they had created and look to the welfare of the people. Agonizing over the monumental traffic jams caused whenever a royal entourage took to the streets of Bangkok during rush hour, he might suggest construction of a new express-way or river bridge. But for the most part he left the management of the country to a prime minister chosen by a more or less democratically elected parliament.

  I was not sure Kim Jong-il personally could make an easy transition from absolute monarch to Thai-style limited monarch—although the limited role might have been what he thought he was playing in 1996 when he bemoaned the poor work of subordinates he had entrusted to take care of the economy. It seemed more likely that a younger representative of the dynasty—perhaps one of those who had been educated, like Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, in Switzerland—could make a go of it.

  On the off chance that Kim Jong-il might summon me to Pyongyang as a consultant advising him how to apply the Thai model, I drafted a memo for him:

  Permit me to summarize the points I made in yesterday’s discussion, Mr. Chairman. I advised that if your son Jong-un is as ferocious as we have heard he is, you should pass him over as your successor. Pardon me for the odious comparison, but Saddam Hussein chose Uday and Qusay—and look where they are now. Since your intention is to choose a modern, limited monarch instead of a dictator, you should pick not the toughest but the most humane candidate. The chosen successor should then work ceaselessly and devotedly to improve the people’s welfare.

  In Thailand, as I told you, the people are especially fond of one of His Majesty King Bhumipol’s daughters. But while the rather saintly Princess Sirinthorn is hugely admired for her charitable good works, her older brother is first in line to succeed to the throne at the conclusion of the reign of the deeply beloved present king.

  In the case of the DPKK (Democratic People’s Kingdom of Korea—I hope I’m not getting ahead of myself here) you have not publicized a formal choice and therefore you are still in a position to consider elevating your own reputedly modest daughter, Sol-song. With her knowledge of the economic issues that are so important to your subjects, she might become a monarch who could “win hearts and minds.

  Assuming that your daughter is of the caliber of the Thai princess, you could even avoid the expense of cranking up a brand-new propaganda campaign to create reverence for her. How? When instructing young writers I often pass along (in addition, of course, to your own trenchant observations on the importance of grasping the “seed” of a work) the advice that they “show us; don’t tell us.” By applying that same principle to statecraft, showing her greatness rather than telling about it, your daughter could inspire the people to recycle the old propaganda slogans on their own initiative. That way they would continue to believe in the slogans despite intrusion of the sort of foreign influences that otherwise might incline them to disbelief. “Under the Loving Care of the Motherly Leader” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

  I do not know much about the other candidates. Perhaps one of them is better cast as Respected and Beloved Leader than your daughter. I simply suggest, strongly, that in judging all of them you use this criterion of humanity.

  As we discussed, the second point is that crowning your designated heir sooner rather than later could improve the prospects that the economic transformation would succeed and the Kim dynasty survive—perhaps even for thousands of years, as those immortal lyrics from Song of Paradise envision. Once out from under the worst of the present economic and diplomatic crisis, having delegated to competent and trusted officials the task of running the country, you could abdicate and retire to Cannes—or even to Hollywood, assuming a breakthrough in relations with the United States.

  So there you have it, Mr. Chairman. On a personal note, I am full of gratitude for your very kind hospitality. The guesthouse was wonderfully appointed, and my lack of appetite at dinner last night certainly was no reflection on the quality of the cuisine, which was magnificent. (I imagine I simply had not adjusted to the time difference.) The karaoke party was great fun, all the ladies truly lovely. Please convey my parting regards especially to Miss Choe, along with my regrets that I was not in a position to accept your very generous offer of her hand in marriage. About my consulting fee: I took your sage advice and confided to your bursar my plan to donate the amount to an aid foundation. When he realized it would be coming back to your country in that fashion he agreed to pay me in real dollars this time, instead of Super-Ks.

  Well, I see that my vehicle is waiting in the tunnel to take me back. Goodbye, Mr. Chairman. May the future bring great things for you and your people.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has been thirteen years in the making. I received major help and encouragement over those years from Hideko Takayama. She spotted and translated pertinent materials, conducted some interviews for me, shared her own articles done for Newsweek and other publications—even sent a telegram to my mountain hideout, which was unequipped with phone or TV, to alert me when Kim Il-sung died. I am deeply grateful for all her many contributions.

  I began with the notion of writing about Koreans in the South as well as the North. Richard Halloran, who invited me to the East-West Center in Honolulu as journalist in residence for the 1991–1992 academic year, fortuitously suggested as an interim project a comparison of my findings during visits to North Korea in 1979, 1989 and 1992. In the process of sorting out what had changed in the country over that span of years (-which was precious little, as I reported in a 1993 EWC publication, Intruding on the Hermit: Glimpses of North Korea, I concluded that simply getting North Korea right would be a sufficient challenge. Others who were helpful in Honolulu included Muthiah Alagappa, Lee-Jay Cho, Admiral Ronald Hays, Robert He
wett, James Kelly, Charles Morrison, Michel Oksenberg, Professor Glenn Page, John Schidlovsky Professor Dae-sook Suh, William Wise, Mark Valencia and Caroline Yang. For terrific staff support I am grateful to June Sakaba, Laura Miho and Lear Budinger.

  In 1992 I received a Fulbright grant for research in Seoul. Professors Auh Taik-sup at Korea University and Lee Man-woo at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies generously provided affiliation and facilities. Korea Fulbright staff members, especially then–Executive Director Frederick Carriere and Deputy Executive Director Shim Jai-ok, were enormously helpful.

  Although I studied Korean intensively under the excellent teachers at Seoul’s Language Training Research Center, a working level of fluency was but a distant dream. Rhee Soo-mi (whom my old friend Professor Kim Young-seok of Yonsei University recommended for the assignment) served brilliantly for several years as my principal Korean interpreter and translator. Others who ably undertook such work for me included Meehee Park Burton, Jungeun Kim and my former Newsweek colleague Lee Young-ho. Sydney A. Seiler generously shared with me his translations of Korean-language materials and a manuscript version of his book.

  Kim Il-sung in his memoirs recalled a bit of family lore from his father’s childhood. A village schoolteacher, often in his cups, repeatedly sent pupils to buy wine for him. The boy who was to become the future Great Leader’s father obeyed meekly for a while, but lost his respect for the teacher one day when he saw him fall facedown in a ditch on his way home. The next time the teacher sent him off-with a bottle to get a refill, the boy intentionally smashed the bottle on a rock outside the school. Then he told the teacher he had tripped while being chased by a tiger. The pupil’s father, Kim’s paternal grandfather, heard of the incident and observed: “If pupils peep into their teacher’s private life frequently, they lose their awe of him. The teacher must give his pupils the firm belief that their teacher neither eats nor urinates; only then can he maintain his authority at school.” A teacher, Kim’s grandfather added, “should set up a screen and live behind it.”

  The rule is all the more important for a dictator. After his rise to power, Kim adopted with a vengeance the notion that an authority figure must live behind a screen. His son, Kim Jong-il, did the same. Indeed, the two men placed the entire country behind a screen. My task has been to try to see through, or around, those screens. Since the use of such standard reporting methods as on-scene observation was severely restricted, I turned to propaganda analysis—-which often meant reading between the lines of officially disseminated stories like the one just quoted. But I needed more, and I found the third leg of a methodological tripod in defector interviews. I spoke at length with fifty former Northerners, mainly during the mid- to late 1990s.

  The use of defector testimony is controversial. This is particularly the case among American scholars of a certain group. The fact literally came home to me one summer evening in 1994 when some Dinner Guests from Hell ganged up to mount a vicious verbal assault on my bona fides (even as they ate my barbecue). Evidently I had set them off when I innocently started to hold forth on what interesting and important things I was learning in defector interviews. The evening fell apart completely when I spoke approvingly of another American scholar, not present, who had used defector testimony extensively in his work. “That puts you completely beyond the pale,” snapped the man who had assembled the war party on my veranda. Perhaps I should thank those people. That experience of being blindsided sent me reeling to the library. I read for years to catch up and keep up on the scholarly and ideological disputes that swirl around the Korea question. The book probably is better for it, although at the time I would have preferred friendly constructive criticism.

  Anyhow, I offer here full disclosure of the circumstances of my defector interviews and leave it to the reader to judge the information thus obtained and the ways I have used it. First, I acknowledge with thanks the help of the South Korean Ministry of Information and its Korean Overseas Information Service in arranging many of those meetings. I needed the help of KOIS staff members because, until defectors completed their official debriefings, South Korean security authorities had charge of them and required that they be accompanied on any outings by government minders. (I was told that this was partly for the benefit of the defectors, who were new to the country—but then, that was how my Pyongyang minders had justified accompanying me everywhere during my visits to North Korea.) Some of those police personnel waited in anterooms; others sat in on the interviews while displaying varying degrees of interest or boredom. I remember only one case when a handler’s presence became intrusive and I had to ask him to let the defector speak for himself.

  It would seem natural if some defectors tried to please South Korean officials by emphasizing aspects of their knowledge that most interested their hosts. Thus I wondered what to make of it when, in several of my interviews, defectors volunteered negative information about Kim Jong-il before I asked. I inquired of another, elite defector, Oh Young-nam (-whose minder was off getting a haircut at the time), whether intelligence authorities were encouraging such remarks. “No,” he replied. “They don’t urge you to say anything. I heard they did it in the past to some extent, but I didn’t get that kind of impression.” (When a defector exaggerated, it was on that defector’s own initiative, in the hope of becoming “a star in South Korea,” Oh also told me—insisting that he himself did not do such a thing.) There were a few other cases when interviewees wondered aloud whether they should give straight answers to my questions (answers that, as it turned out, would tend to show aspects of North Korea or its leaders in a positive light). I can report that their minders in every such case promptly assured them that they should.

  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.