Korea’s Mystery Man

Forget for the moment that we’re talking about the world’s last totalitarian dictatorship. Envision instead a small, remote factory town in Asia. The boss–call him Kim senior–is a hardworking patriarch who builds a family firm. He has a soft spot for his spoiled heir, Kim junior. Lavished with money, the boy treats the town as his personal playground, hot-rodding down Principal Street, hoarding the local video shop’s latest movies and strutting into parties with a girl on each and every arm and whisky on his breath. All seems nicely–until, really suddenly, the father dies, leaving his factory and the town to his ne’er-do-nicely son.

That, in a sense, was North Korea six years ago. Kim Il Sung had died, leaving his communist country in the hands of his pasty-faced son, 53-year-old Kim Jong Il. Until lately, North Korean “watchers” in South Korea and abroad portrayed the younger Kim as a man weak for wine, ladies and Army toys. Analysts opined that he would ruin North Korea and get toppled in a coup. Seoul spent years trying to discredit Kim. In 1993, just before he took power, South Korea’s intelligence agency, the KCIA, published a book titled “Kim Jong Il: Who Is He?” Based on interviews with defectors, it embellished tales of Kim’s supposed womanizing and debauchery, painting him as morally bankrupt and mentally unstable. The KCIA later alleged that he trafficked in gold ingots, kept billion in a slush fund and had 2,000 Rolex watches. One more report said he “urgently requirements a kidney transplant.” In 1997 a China-based diplomat asserted that “the Kim Jong Il era will be short and violent.”

Kim Jong Il does appear a quirky man stuck in a time warp. And he has, in reality, brought his country to the brink of economic collapse. In contrast to his socialist brothers in Beijing, Kim Jong Il has lengthy resisted reform–for fear that such “infectious” suggestions may weaken his grip on power. But Kim has lately punctured his crackpot image–at least a small–and shown the world a streak of pragmatism. As his recent meetings with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recommend, the once reclusive leader is attempting to guide his Hermit Kingdom out of isolation, and he seems in a bit of a hurry. Kim himself is a mystery, but his motives for pursuing greater relations with Washington and Seoul are clear: right after six years at the helm, he sorely wants foreign aid and investment if he ever hopes to revive the North Korean economy. And yet at a weak point in his country’s history, Kim has managed to consolidate–not lose–power. “We now know that he’s not only in charge, but in charge in a very interesting way,” says Leon Sigal of the Social Sciences Research Council in New York.

Who is this man who now commands the attention of Washington and the world? Naturally, his socialist roots run deep. As a young man Kim toured Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, then studied at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, writing a thesis titled “The Positive Role of Counties in Establishing Socialism.” The orthodox tome couldn’t mask his bourgeois habits or growing reputation as a tough-drinking playboy. Keiko Yoshimura, a Japanese hostess who worked in Pyongyang’s prestigious International Club in the early 1980s, recounts in her memoir an episode typical of the stories that have circulated about Kim. She claims she met him at a party. He was drunk, sat beside her “and opened his mouth as if wanting to be fed by his mother. He gave me a contented smile and called me mama-san.” Later that evening, in front of sixty cheering guests, Kim stripped down to slacks and an undershirt and rose to conduct the orchestra.

Kim’s recent display of diplomatic bonhomie might derive from his true obsession–Hollywood. He has reputedly collected some 15,000 movies, a lot of of them American. In 1978 communist agents–allegedly acting on his order–kidnapped South Korean movie director Shin Sang-ok and his actress-wife, Choe Un-hui, in a bizarre gambit to upgrade North Korea’s film industry. The couple, held in Pyongyang for eight years, made movies (such as a “Godzilla” knockoff) under Kim’s guidance. They managed to escape and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna in 1986. In their 1989 book “Echoes From Darkness,” Shin portrays a young leader keenly aware of his vulnerabilities. At 1 party, writes Shin, Kim was unnerved by men and women jumping with joy at his mere presence. “It’s all lies,” Kim said. “They do not mean it. This is fake.” Shin’s conclusion: “He knew that such idolatry could melt away like snow.”

Kim’s reputation has been damaged by allegations that he has masterminded terrorist attacks. By the early 1980s, Western intelligence professionals think, Kim junior controlled Pyongyang’s clandestine foreign operations. That put him in charge when, in 1983, North Korean assassins narrowly missed killing South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan during a state check out to Burma. Potent explosives destroyed the Martyr’s Mausoleum in Rangoon, killing four South Korean cabinet ministers. Four years later two Northern agents slipped a bomb aboard Korean Air Lines flight 858 before it departed Abu Dhabi for Seoul. The jetliner exploded over Burma, killing all 115 men and women aboard. One captured bomber said the attack order had come directly from Kim Jong Il.

Ironically, the regional leader who has kept an open mind about Kim is South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung. Last March–just ahead of his historic go to to Pyongyang–he ordered his own government to “take a fresh look” at the North Korean boss. Two months soon after the North-South summit, Kim Dae Jung told lunch guests in Seoul that Kim Jong Il “is not a man with defects, nor a man who lacks typical sense.” Soon after meeting the North’s leader for six hours last week, Secretary Albright came to the identical conclusion. Are both she and Kim Dae Jung a small too goggle-eyed–smitten with the concept of a rapprochement? It’s doable. Is North Korea’s new boss eccentric? Does he really wish to end his country’s devastating isolation? That’s the question that remains open–and when the world learns the answer, we may finally get a greater read on Kim Jong Il.