The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Madden would add Chinese to the list of languages that Kim probably speaks to some extent. From his home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Madden writes his blog; contributes to “38 North,” a respected website that closely monitors North Korea; and devours everything he can find about the Supreme Leader. Information comes from Korean publications, the DPRK’s official pronouncements, defectors, and his own sources inside the country. The Kim he envisions is something of a physical wreck. He has bad knees and bad ankles, both problems aggravated by his obesity, and is still suffering from the aftereffects of one or more reputed car accidents—one particularly bad one “in 2007 or 2008” according to Madden (the vagueness about when gives you an idea how trustworthy the information is). He’s not out racing through traffic in Pynonyang, but he is, or was, avid about driving expensive sports cars fast on his family’s vast private estates.

  “He’s a rich guy,” says Madden. “I mean Kim Jong Un might be in North Korea, but he is a rich guy. So … rich guy activities. Like the town where I grew up in in Massachusetts, they used to say you could tell a really, really, really, rich kid because he drove with bare feet. Kim Jong Un is the kind of kid that drives with bare feet.”

  Those thrilled by high speeds enjoy flirting with risk, an alarming trait in a man with a nuclear arsenal.

  More than his reticent father, Kim seems to enjoy the meet-and-greets and photo ops with regular folks. In this he appears to be more like his mother, Ko Yong Hui, who in old videos can be seen avidly shaking hands, smiling, and chatting at official functions while her husband, Kim II, tended to hang back and exude an aura of menace. Kim is crazy about sports, particularly soccer, and also takes an avid interest in military studies. The military is something his father would have left to the generals, but young Kim is a student of strategy and tactics. He pays close attention to the international weapons market and stories about American military operations, and would be, Madden says, particularly keen on intelligence about the United States’ current low-key offensive against ISIS inside Iraq and Syria. He is too young and inexperienced to be considered anything more than a dabbler, despite the generals who fervently scribble notes when he holds forth at photo shoots—they are always there with their giant hats and little notebooks behind him. But Kim’s interest in such matters is the sort of trait that might have made him a more appealing choice for the succession.

  Kim’s elder half brother, Kim Jong Nam, reportedly fell out of favor in 2001 after an ill-fated effort to enter Japan on a fake passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland. Madden says there was no family problem with the visit itself, or the destination.

  “He basically blew the cover off the fake passports that the Kim family used when they traveled abroad,” says Madden.

  His elder full brother, Kim Jong Chul, is said to have exhibited too many feminine characteristics to be considered Heaven-Sent. He has an older half sister, Kim Sul Song, who reportedly works for the propaganda department; and a younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who was recently given a high position in the regime. Neither sister was considered eligible for the throne, presumably because both are female.

  Whatever the whole story, it’s clear that early on, Kim II’s youngest son was anointed heir. Cheong Seong Chang of the Sejong Institute, a think tank in Seoul with links to South Korean intelligence, says Kim was being prepared to become Supreme Leader while his ailing father was still alive. When Kim II died earlier than anticipated, in December 2011, his son was thrust into the leadership, but he was hardly unready. He would probably have assumed the role even if his father were still living. His rollout was well under way.

  The unveiling of Kim III began as far back as 2008, when party cadres throughout the country began praising him as “the young four-star general,” according to Myers, who has made North Korean propaganda a primary academic interest. He wrote a book, The Cleanest Race, debunking the conventional notion that the country’s guiding philosophy was Marxism. Myers traced the origins of its ruling mythology to a long-standing belief in Korean racial superiority; according to this belief, the people who inhabit the peninsula are the purest race on the planet, and are thus purer in spirit and goodness than the rest of us. The Kim family story has been liberally retouched and grafted onto the legends of Korea’s founding. Kim Il Sung, born into a line of Protestant Christian ministers, is said instead to have descended from the nation’s ancestral leaders. His son, Kim II, was actually born in Russia, where his parents had gone to flee the Japanese occupation, but in the myth he was secretly born on Mount Paetku, a volcano on the border with China that is the highest peak on the peninsula, and the place where the father of Korea’s mythical founder, Tangun, descended five thousand years ago from heaven. For Kim III, myth, his father and grandfather are hard acts to follow, but Pyongyang’s propagandists have put their shoulders to the task. The younger Kim is said to have absorbed the mysteries of modern western technology by studying abroad, and to have demonstrated his genius for combat and military maneuvers commanding a “shock brigade” in the harsh mountains of the far northeast. The battle-hardened, albeit pudgy, North Korean prince began to make appearances as a minor but intriguing character in the standard-issue novels and poems praising his father. Young Kim was portrayed as a precocious military genius who piloted helicopters, drove tanks, manned the most sophisticated weapons systems, and demonstrated an astonishingly intuitive grasp of weaponry and tactics. He was said to have disciplined himself to sleep only three or four hours at night in order to devote more time to his studies at the military academy. According to Brian Myers, children in North Korean schools were being taught to sing Kim’s praises years before his existence was formally revealed to the rest of the world—at a time when Kim II’s marriage and the existence of his children was still unknown even to most Koreans.

  At his official coming-out in 2010, Kim III was presented as a four-star general and vice chairman of the nation’s Central Military Commission, a relatively modest post. “The domestic public probably knew how to interpret [this],” wrote Myers in a 2014 study of Kim’s rise: “That he was demonstrating humility by going through a kind of on-the-job training of which, being brilliant, he had no need.” He began immediately being seen at his father’s side in the state-controlled media. By late 2011, a few months before his father’s death, Kim was appearing on TV news “not just as another member of his father’s entourage,” Myers wrote, “but as an object of affection and respect in his own right.” Within weeks of Kim Jung Il’s death, after a period of histrionic grieving, the country’s propagandists were declaring that the country was in the “warm care” of Kim III. Since then, the emphasis has been not so much on glorifying his father as on stressing Kim’s resemblance to his far more popular grandfather.

  The descriptor most often applied to the DPRK is “Stalinist,” and with its old-style communist imagery and propaganda, and with its political purges and frightening gulags, the state does resemble the Soviet Union’s darkest age. But a closer analogy for the current North Korean state is a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century European monarchy, something that is hard for the western world to take seriously. After all, it has been more than two centuries since Thomas Paine was rallying American colonists to throw off King George III by denouncing monarchy as “a degradation and lessening of ourselves.” Paine reserved special contempt for hereditary succession, which he called “an insult and an imposition on posterity.” He wrote, “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” We have long since lost the ability to easily imagine a truly monarchical society, and that is one of the reasons North Korea seems so alien to us today.

  But is it really so alien? Cheong points out that despite our inclination to disbelief and ridicule, hereditary succession is alive and well. Corporate power and even the leadership of major churches in South Korea are still typically passed from fathe
r to son. Hereditary succession and even primogeniture still dictate not just ownership but leadership of major business enterprises the world over, even in the presumably enlightened districts of the media, whether such an enterprise is the vast conservative empire of Rupert Murdoch or the esteemed liberal New York Times. Americans elected the son of President George H. W. Bush to serve for two terms, and may be casting votes for another Bush in 2016. There are still enthusiasts who long for another Kennedy to emerge from a new crop at Hyannis Port and pick up the torch. The current president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Park Geun Hye, is the eldest child of the nation’s former dictatorial leader Park Chung Hee, who ruled from 1961 until his assassination in 1979, and who is still more highly regarded than any of the presidents who have followed. There is no doubt that his daughter’s election in 2011 resulted in large part because of nostalgia for her father’s rule.

  North Korea has never known anything else. It has no experience with government by consent. Just before Korea’s annexation by Japan in 1910, Koreans were still living under monarchy. And after that the rule was imperial Japan, so they bowed to the emperor. After the USSR freed North Korea from Japan in 1945, Kim Il Sung stepped into the role. The vague nationalist ideology the regime calls juche is nothing more than an effort to rationalize in pseudo-Marxist terms what Myers calls “radical ethno-nationalism.” The myth of the Kims and of Korean racial superiority is not some strange invention being forced down the people’s throats. It is the traditional way. It is who they are.

  “North Koreans have never grasped the idea of freedom or democracy,” says Cheong. “They just don’t have that concept in their heads. Even many defectors, those who have fled North Korea—they still have respect and even reverence for Kim Il Sung.”

  It is worth remembering that during the early years of the original Kim’s reign, North Korea actually surpassed South Korea in prosperity. It was only after his death in 1994, and the elevation of Kim II, that years of inept centralized planning caught up. The state was managed into catastrophic ruin. Industry collapsed. Millions starved. People boiled grass and stripped the bark off trees in their desperate search for sustenance. Many Koreans who enjoyed prosperity during the original Kim’s reign saw a direct connection between his death and the famine and continuing disaster that followed under Kim II’s reign. Since anger against the Supreme Leader cannot be expressed directly, it registered in mounting reverence for the good old days, and the good old ruler.

  If special status, divine inspiration, is carried in a bloodline, then physical similarity counts for a great deal. Some believe that a big factor—perhaps the biggest—in Kim’s ascendance may well have been how much he looks like his grandfather. In 2010, when pictures of Kim III were first made public by the family, everyone on the Korean peninsula was struck by the resemblance.

  “He had the face of Kim Il Sung when he was young,” says Cheong. “Naming him as the heir captured the nostalgia of the North Korean people.”

  Cheong is certain this is deliberate. There is a popular belief in Korea, gyeok se yu jeon, that inherited traits skip a generation. A grandson tends to be more like his father’s father than his own. This predisposed North Koreans to see the designated heir as a reincarnation of the beloved founder. And where nature falls short, artifice steps in. Whether or not he was ordered to bulk up, there’s no doubt that Kim’s expansion has given him the patriarch’s rotundity. There are even reports, Cheong says, that he was flown to Germany for plastic surgeons to tweak his facial features in order to enhance the resemblance. It seems more likely that the young man simply looks like his grandfather, but there is little doubt that Kim works at enhancing the visual connection. You see it in his his odd haircut, in his clothing, and in the way he walks and moves like a much older man in public appearances. In a steady stream of publicity stills, he adopts the stances, gestures, and facial expressions of his grandfather—or, rather, of the painted images of Kim Il Sung in generations of party propaganda.

  What’s he really like? A man in his position has few unguarded moments. Bill Richardson, formerly New Mexico’s governor and a congressman from New Mexico, has served as U.S. ambassador to the UN and has negotiated with North Korean leaders in Pyongyang during visits there on several occasions. He has retained high-level contacts in North Korea and remains deeply interested in the country.

  “So let me first give you what others in North Korea have told me about him,” Richardson told me in a phone interview. He was kind enough to jot down some of his impressions before we spoke:

  Number one—He frequently jokes with other officials about not knowing anything, that he is new, and young, and he has no experience. He actually thinks that is funny. So that is one. Number two, that he seems to be insecure. However, he hears no one, and he does not like to be briefed about issues. However, that does not mean he is not street smart nor he is not skillful. Surmising the way he has replaced the people, especially in the military, that he felt were not his people, he has actually done that quite effectively. And brought his own people in or people that he thinks are more loyal to him. But it strikes me that he feels, by his actions, by his bluster, and by his missile launchings, that he is trying to consolidate his power. Which, even after more than [three years], he feels, he still has a way to go.

  Of course, none of this hesitancy or insecurity is displayed in public. No one in North Korea displays what he really thinks or feels in public.

  3. Theater

  Kang Mi Jin comes by her insights into North Korea the hard way. A small, very delicate woman whose polite and quiet demeanor masks steel, she fled the country twelve years ago with her then eleven-year-old daughter, crossing the Yalu River into China. Living in Changsong county in the mountainous North Korean border region, she was doing reasonably well as a single mother, working long hours for the People’s Army Welfare Bureau and supplementing her income by selling produce from a booth in a neighborhood market. When she resisted payoff demands from the local police, she says, they began looking for ways to harass her and her family. A friend tipped her off that she was about to be arrested and sent to a prison camp, so Kang plotted her escape. In the winter of 2008, she and her daughter walked a two-hundred-yard strip along the river for a month, studying the shifts, habits, and patrols of border guards. They found a place where two guards routinely met patrolling from different directions, and then parted, walking away from each other. This happened every day between 6:30 and 6:40 p.m. After consulting with a fortune-teller, Kang and her daughter waited for the guards to part and then simply walked across the frozen Yalu into China near the Changbai Malugouzhen Protection Station. Another escaping woman they met on the other side was immediately seized by bandits and sold into slavery. They were more fortunate. A sympathetic woman helped Kang make contact with relatives in China, and she eventually made her way to Seoul, where she now writes stories for Daily NK, an activist website that reports on human rights abuses and agitates for democratic reforms.

  In the years since her escape, Kang has maintained a string of confidential informants in North Korea, with whom she communicates by Chinese-registered cell phone, these days mostly through text messages. She doesn’t tell them she is a defector or a journalist; more often she’ll say she works for a bank or is a graduate student doing research. In this way she monitors daily life inside Kim’s kingdom, where she says many are doing better financially while experiencing even greater political oppression. She watches DPRK propaganda videos with a practiced eye. I asked her if the mass displays of emotion one sees in videos from North Korea were genuine.

  Kang smiled and shook her head no. She described one, showing the funeral ceremonies for Kim II. In it, a crowd of women, bundled against the cold and kneeling in the snow, wept hysterically as the funeral procession passed.

  “They were all bending forward, reaching out with their arms and then lowering themselves to the snow,” she says. “Only, when their hands came to close to the snow, they sto
pped. Their hands did not actually touch the snow.”

  She laughed.

  “What did that tell you?”

  “They didn’t want to get their hands cold and wet.”

  It was all theater. The grief, the weeping, and the prostrating were not just expected, but required. Here is where our inability to imagine a true monarchy shows. Kingship requires display. It accounts public belief more important than private belief. Pretending in public is essential. We see the same thing in a theocracy like Iran, where the state’s legitimacy rests on shared religious conviction. Strict piety is the rule in public, while in private you encounter the same variety of opinion in Tehran as you do anywhere. Official hypocrisy is known and largely accepted. Behind closed doors women wear western clothes, guests are served alcoholic drinks, conversation is candid and often irreverent and critical of the state—but never in public. It is the same in a royal state, where the prevailing myth is the monarch. Even in eighteenth-century England, accepting accident of birth as the determinant of power meant suspending reason and common sense. I doubt that Thomas Paine’s scorn of hereditary succession was especially shocking to educated Englishmen, who were aware of King George III’s occasional bouts of madness. One bows to the king not because he is in fact superior to other men, but because he is the king. He embodies the entire social and economic order—the status quo. One bows because if the throne is safe, so is the empire. Sober, rational men still have private opinions and beliefs, but in public they shower praise on, and indulge even the foolish whims of, a monarch in order to preserve their own well-being. Today in Pyongyang privileged millions enjoy a relatively good life because of the system that coddles them, and that system is Kim. The mass displays of loyalty and affection, which may seem ridiculous to us, make perfect sense there. They are reassuring, and mandatory.