The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  In this respect, the remarkably colorful and detailed 2,700-word official denunciation of Jang Song Thaek, calling him “despicable human scum,” was revealing. It begins theatrically: “Upon hearing the report on the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the service personnel and people throughout the country broke into angry shouts that a stern judgment of the revolution should be meted out to the antiparty, counterrevolutionary factional elements.” It then proceeds in the same vein, describing Jang as “thrice-cursed” and a “traitor for all ages,” and listing his sins against the regime and mankind. Jang had been plotting to overthrow “the peerlessly great men of Mount Paetku,” the Kims, and neglecting to play his assigned role in the national pageant by “projecting himself internally and externally as a special being” on a par with Kim III. He is accused of accepting bribes and of preventing a tile factory from erecting a mosaic depicting Kim I and Kim II; and he “was so reckless as to instruct” that a granite monument engraved with a letter from Kim III to an internal security unit and destined for the front entrance of its headquarters instead “be erected in a shaded corner.” He is accused of gambling, distributing pornography to his “confidants,” and otherwise leading a “dissolute and decadent life.” This was a bad person.

  More significantly, Jang was accused of opposing Kim’s economic reforms. This sent a stern message to the rest of North Korea’s leadership. Internal debate over reform was ended. To oppose change was to oppose Kim. It is now treason.

  “The entire party, whole army, and all people are dynamically advancing toward the final victory in the drive for the building of a thriving nation, meeting all challenges of history, and resolutely foiling the desperate moves of the enemies of the revolution under the leadership of Kim Jong Un. Such a situation urgently calls for consolidating as firm as a rock the single-minded unity of the party and the revolutionary ranks with its unitary center and more thoroughly establishing the monolithic leadership system of the party throughout the party and society. Jang seriously obstructed the nation’s economic affairs and the improvement of the standard of people’s living in violation of the ‘pivot to the cabinet principle’ and the ‘cabinet responsibility’ principle [a return of authority for steering the economy to Pyongyang’s top executive body, which has been calling for reforms].”

  The execution of Jang underscored how seriously Kim is betting on his economic reform policies. The early returns are good.

  “The crude economic indicators that we get are of steady growth,” said John Delury, who met with me in Seoul. “It’s anemic relative to East Asia and relative to [its] huge development potential. North Korea should be in the ten-plus GDP growth range. So, it’s like two. It’s kind of trudging forward as opposed to getting worse and worse.”

  Delury estimates that trade with China is up threefold since Kim took office. On his most recent trip in Pyongyang in 2013, he was struck by the number of people he saw with cell phones. During past visits he could readily count the number of cars he saw; now he no longer could.

  “You can see the emergence of a consumer like a public-consumer culture,” he said. “It’s like a leisure class. You can call it a middle class using a very loose definition of what a middle class is. Probably the best is that it’s a consumer class. That’s clearly an important sort of constituency for Kim Jong Un. So he’s building stuff for those people. A lot of [the time] when he’s appearing in public, he’s doing stuff for those people. He’s giving them stuff. He’s feeding that. That’s important because obviously that’s the slippery slope into capitalism and into economic opening and all of those things. And so, he has very consciously and pretty aggressively associated himself as the leader of that constituency.”

  In acknowledging that a big thrust of Kim’s leadership so far has been aimed at improving the lives of his citizens, we should not mistake it for leniency. At the same time that he has been freeing the economy, Kim has been cranking up the state’s repressive machinery.

  “Kim’s father also wanted [the people’s] lives to improve,” said Lankov, “but his father was far more cautious. His father understood that … well, the masses are not always happier when you try make them happy. Alexis de Tocqueville identified the paradox: when a bad government tries to become better, it becomes more vulnerable. In this regard, Kim Jong Un’s policy is very smart. He began to tighten ideological controls, which became very loose under his father because his father didn’t care that much.”

  Under Kim II, the long border between North Korea and China was almost open—witness Kang Mi Jin’s story of her relatively easy escape across the frozen Yalu. Today it has become much more difficult to cross. In the three years since Kim took power, the number of defectors to South Korea (most of whom, like Kang, arrive by way of China) has been nearly halved—from 3,000 annually to about 1,500. This is probably not because living conditions have improved in North Korea. Living conditions are far better in Mexico than in North Korea, and yet millions of Mexicans are still running to the United States to seek a better life. The slowdown is the result of tighter border controls. Those caught trying to cross illegally are beaten, tortured, or killed. Kim’s regime means to do well by those who accept it, but it has, if anything, grown harsher toward those who do not.

  Propaganda under Kim has become more pervasive and also more persuasive. Good propaganda is not about lies; it’s about exaggeration. Years ago, when North Koreans defected to the south, they were denounced as fools. They had been deceived by the devious propaganda of the Americans. South Korea was so backward, went the party line, that defectors would starve to death. Most North Koreans, even with their limited access to outside information, knew this was a lie. Today the story is not that South Korea is destitute. The regime acknowledges that South Koreans are doing better than its own people. But it argues that defectors will not do better in the south than the north. The North Korean defector will be despised, discriminated against, and exploited. And there is at least some truth in this. The stories are exaggerated.

  The most hopeful reading of Kim’s rule so far is that he is on the path to becoming a relatively benevolent dictator—in comparison with his father and grandfather. This is what many North Korea–watchers consider the best-case scenario for Kim’s prospects: that he will smoothly steer North Korea out of its dark age, and himself live to a ripe old age overseeing decades of moderate prosperity and maybe even cracking open the door to more domestic freedom and better relations with the west.

  Except that nothing about the way Kim is proceding is smooth.

  “Nothing about the things he is really doing is stupid,” said Lankov. “The way he is doing it is stupid.”

  5. “Bottoms Up!”

  One of the more recent signs of change in North Korea has been little noticed by the larger world, but it is sure to have caused a stir in Pyongyang. Mrs. Kim has begun frequently stepping out in public, usually beside her husband, without a badge.

  Since 1972, according to Lankov, Korean adults in public have been required to wear on their lapel or chest a small red badge advertising their loyalty to the Kim dynasty. Initially the red badge showed the face of Kim Il Sung, but later a two-Kim version became popular, depicting both Kim I and Kim II. So far there is no Kim III badge. There are now a few dozen variations; someone will surely write a monograph on the subject eventually. Lankov said that “every” adult must wear the badge, but perhaps it is only members of the leadership. You will look hard to find anyone in a picture from North Korea who is not wearing one … except the fashionable Mrs. Kim. This may be intended as a fashion statement, but to those who have slavishly obeyed the requirement for decades it would hardly register as something that simple.

  “She is the only person who appears in public without the badge,” said Lankov. “It’s a bit like, in a Catholic country, the wife of the most Christian king appearing in public without a cross. Or, worse still, in some strict Muslim country
, the wife of a leader appearing without a veil. Not a good idea.”

  “Why do you think she does it?”

  “Because they are spoiled, rich young people who don’t understand how risky is the game they are playing.”

  Lankov may be reading too much into this. It may be a sign that Mrs. Kim and her husband are feeling more confident in their roles, and like every new generation, shedding vestiges of the old. Whether that confidence is warranted remains to be seen. One of the most unsettling things about Kim’s rule so far is his tendency to act out unpredictably and even strangely, and in his enthusiasm, to overdo. From time to time he gets goofy. Call it his Dennis Rodman problem.

  Consider the ski resort. Under his direction, the regime has built, in the Masik Pass in the southeast, a reportedly first-class facility billed as “the most exotic ski resort on Earth.” It is certainly the most unusual. Built at enormous cost in a country where most people are more concerned about their next meal than the thickness of snow powder, the Masik Pass project can only be called a hopeful gesture. The idea is to attract foreign tourists, which seems unlikely, but also to attract newly prosperous citizens. That sufficient numbers of domestic customers who can afford such an expensive holiday will materialize may be even less likely than attracting tourists. What the resort most clearly reflects is Kim’s whim. Skiing was one of his pastimes in Switzerland when he was a boy. There is a spectacular but ultimately sad state photo taken at the resort’s opening in December 2013, showing Kim in a heavy black coat and a big black fur hat sitting on a ski lift ascending a snowy slope. The landscape is stunning, but Kim is sitting by himself on the lift. The dangling lift behind his is empty. The Heaven-Sent Brilliant Commander is alone at his multimillion-dollar playground, looking nothing so much as forlorn.

  Some see this simply as a spectacularly bad investment, a sign of Kim’s impulsiveness.

  “Very often he is driven by his emotions,” says Lankov, who calls the resort one of his “absolutely crazy business schemes.”

  “He wants to be popular,” says Lankov, but he also wants success. He has reportedly ordered that his minions attract one million tourists to the resort annually. “They have no chance of getting that many people. They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the infrastructure, they don’t have the climate…. It’s a fantasy world, a world of dancing Mickey Mouses [Kim is fond of Disney characters].”

  Lankov is not the only one who sees it that way.

  “If the leadership says it, or decides, they just do it, regardless of how inefficient it might be,” said Pinkston. “Kim has really focused on sports and recreation. [The ski resort] was really given high priority, and aquariums in Pyongyang or dolphinariums, whatever they call them, amusement parks, those types of things. There is a children’s camp that has been upgraded, that is one of the projects this year that they have been working on. So this is what dictatorships do. You go back to the Roman times, right, so you provide circuses and gladiator bouts and these kinds of big public projects to the people or society to demonstrate that you are looking out for them, because you do have to maintain some critical mass of support. So that is what you do in a dictatorship.”

  Like monarchs everywhere, Kim does whatever he wants. It doesn’t have to make sense. This is evident in his amateurish efforts to reach out. Those who believe that Kim, even if he wanted to do it, could simply halt his country’s nuclear program and reverse a half century of implacable hostility are being unrealistic. Given who he is, it’s unlikely he thinks this way. But he has shown a surprising desire to normalize relations with the rest of the world. He has sent goodwill delegations to China, Russia, South Korea, and Europe, and has made odd and sometimes startling gestures of friendship toward the United States—like releasing three American citizens under arrest in his country and asking nothing in return but a high-level state visit. He didn’t get it, unless you count National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who retrieved the errant Americans without meeting with Kim or other top North Korean officials.

  When I was visiting Seoul in October, during a time when Kim had not been seen for weeks and was presumably recovering from minor surgery on his ankle, the dictator shocked South Koreans by dispatching to the Asian Games, a regional Olympics-like sports contest, three of the regime’s most powerful figures—Vice Marshal Hwong Pyong So, head of the North Korean army’s General Political Bureau and Kim’s presumed second in command; Choe Ryong Hae, secretary of the Workers Party; and Kim Yang Gon, a senior official responsible for South Korean affairs. All three men are known to be very close to Kim, and as such represented the highest-level delegation from the north to ever visit the south, and prompted widespread hopeful speculation that Kim was serious about inviting a substantive dialogue with his southern, democratic counterparts, with whom his country has been in a tense military standoff since before he was born. The three top North Koreans posed for pictures, waved, and expressed “heartfelt greetings,” but apparently had little else to offer. Ordinarily a top-level delegation like that would arrive only if it had something important to say, or offer. Enthusiasm for the outsize gesture faded in a few days, when it became apparent that the smiles and waves and heartfelt greetings were the whole story.

  “Again, [Kim] overdid it,” said Lankov, just a few days after the visit had made an exciting splash in Seoul. “It was necessary to send somebody to South Korea, to send a feeler, and to check whether the South Koreans are ready, under some conditions, to lift … the ban on inter-Korean cooperation. It was necessary to send somebody. But instead of sending one senior diplomat, for some reason they decided essentially to send half of their entire movers and shakers here. A delegation which suddenly, with twenty-four hours’ notice, arrived here. It was the highest delegation which ever visited South Korea. Ever…. Unbelievable! And they came essentially empty-handed! With no exact plans. I can easily imagine Kim Jong Un, lying in bed after recent surgery, taking the phone, and saying, ‘We should do something. Let’s impress them. Let’s send them half of my government.’”

  Kim has expressed a desire to meet personally with President Obama. In none of these outreaches has he offered anything substantial: no compromise on nukes; no promises to end provocative missile tests and the country’s occasional acts of hostility toward South Korea. It is as though he wants the rest of the world to like North Korea just as it is, and believes his wanting it is enough to make it happen. And when you consider it, how else would a boy king think?

  The most notoriously strange example of an overture by Kim to America was, of course, Kim’s meetings with Rodman.

  “I think just personally, Kim just likes basketball; he is a basketball fan and he likes the Bulls, right?” said Pinkston. “So many times, or I would say in general, sports will often transcend politics.”

  In this case, the real story is better, and more complicated. The meeting is certainly the most direct contact any Americans have had with the young dictator. It was fun. The trip to North Korea with Rodman was conceived as a TV stunt. Shane Smith is the bearded, tattooed cofounder and CEO of Vice Media, a highly successful offbeat news/entertainment company that has made a name for itself, in part, by visiting difficult spots on the map. Several years ago, Smith proposed to his staff that they figure out a way to get inside North Korea with their cameras. Various approaches were kicked around before it was decided to try to exploit Kim’s reported fascination with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. Vice Media contacted Jordan’s representatives, proposing to fly him to Pyongyang with its crew, and was met with a combination of profound disbelief and silence.

  “We had thrown out the idea of Dennis Rodman as [laughter here] a gay, very crazy idea,” said Jason Mojica, a Vice producer. “And then someone who kind of overheard it here just literally got in touch with his agent.” The agent conveyed that his client was generally keen on anything to make a buck—he had recently appeared at dental convention—and so Rodman was enlisted. They had a Bull.

  “He
did great,” said Mojica.

  It was surreal. With his variously colored hair, piercings, and tattoos; with his flamboyantly ill-defined sexuality—he wore a wedding dress for the cover shot of his autobiography—and reputation of substance abuse, Rodman might be considered a poster child for individual liberty, for better or worse. A less likely ambassador to the world’s most totalitarian state cannot be imagined. But his name opened doors magically. The concept Vice proposed was to visit North Korea with Rodman and to stage a basketball camp for kids. Rodman was to help recruit other pro basketball players—who wound up being members of the Harlem Globetrotters, adding to the bizarre character of the event. The highlight of the camp would be an exhibition basketball game between two teams made up of the campers and the pros.

  “I guess we kind of expected that it would be held in a run-down gymnasium with like eighty to a hundred kids, and that the game would just be this little thing that we really did just for the cameras and the very few people in attendance,” said Mojica. “And, of course, we did put in the app [application] that we would love to meet Kim Jong Un and so forth. Waves, hello, maybe we can shake his hand before he disappears. But we never expected it to actually happen.”

  Certainly not the way it did. The proposal was accepted, and Rodman flew to Pyongyang in January 2014 with the Globetrotters and the Vice crew. Along for the ride (and for his language skills) was Mark Barthelemy, an old friend of Mojica’s—they both attended college in Chicago in the early 1990s and played in punk rock bands. Barthelemy went on to specialize in Korea and learn the language. He is an entrepreneur and stock analyst who lives in Seoul for half of the year. Mojica wanted someone along whom he could trust and who spoke fluent Korean.

  “This whole thing was set up as an attempt to meet the guy [Kim],” said Barthelemy. The visiting Americans were given the full-on Potemkin village treatment, visiting new shopping malls, workout centers, supermarkets … all designed to dispel the somewhat dated notion that North Koreans stripped bark off trees to make soup. The group was shocked when, on the day of the basketball camp, instead of being led into a run-down gymnasium, they were escorted into an arena more like Madison Square Garden, packed to the rafters with North Koreans. Barthelemy was on the floor shooting still pictures when …