Worse still, the regime was about to commit its biggest error ever, one that was entirely self-inflicted and that would shake the system to its very core.
On November 30, 2009, a Sunday, the regime abruptly announced that it was devaluing the currency, the North Korean won. The news came down through the Workers’ Party hierarchy, with high-ranking officials in Pyongyang the first to know and ordinary people in the boondocks the last.
The North Korean cash squirreled away in wardrobes around the country became almost instantly worthless. Citizens had one week in which they could convert 100,000 won, worth about thirty dollars or a one-hundred-pound sack of rice at the time, into the new currency, which would have two zeros knocked off the end. One hundred old won would, from then on, be worth one new won.11
Chaos and panic enveloped the country. The elites in Pyongyang who had heard the news first rushed to change their won into foreign currency or to spend as much as they could—on food, clothing, anything—
before the change took place.
But for everyone else, the news arrived too late. Families who had been toiling to drag themselves into the emerging middle class had their life savings obliterated overnight.
Mr. Hong was one of those who’d turned his miserable state-mandated job into one that actually earned him a living. He’d been working as a border guard near the North Korean city of Hyesan and had branched out into the money transfer business: he used his connections on both sides of the border to secretly get money from the outside world to North Koreans inside.
This highly subversive business is nevertheless commonplace on the border now, as North Koreans who’ve escaped to South Korea and China want to send money home to relatives. Through his industrial zeal, Mr. Hong had built up a nice little nest egg for his family. He’d managed to save 30,000 North Korean won, a huge amount in an area where 10,000 won could buy a reasonable house.
He could buy meat and fish for his wife and their elementary school–aged daughter to eat every day, sometimes more than once a day. They had all the trappings of wealth that Kim Il Sung had long ago talked about—although the Great Leader had said these benefits would come by creating a socialist paradise, not by smuggling cash across the river.
But with the currency reforms, Mr. Hong’s savings were wiped out, and his family’s lifestyle was gone almost overnight. Untold numbers of other North Koreans who’d turned into secret capitalists suffered the same debilitating fate. That marked a turning point in the way Mr. Hong and his neighbors thought about the country’s leaders. For the first time, he realized he was being cheated by the system.
He recounted the turmoil that the currency reforms caused in his hometown and how it proved to be the final straw for him. “I thought that Kim Jong Il really cared for the people, but when the currency reforms happened and all my savings were wiped out, I knew that wasn’t the case,” Mr. Hong told me in the rundown commuter town outside Seoul where he had been living since escaping at the end of 2015.
As the value of the North Korean won plummeted on the black market, the regime banned the use of foreign currency and imposed strict new rules about when markets could be open and what products they could sell.
It was not enough. Inflation spiked. Food shortages worsened. Around the country, people were dying. Some were having heart attacks from the shock of losing everything; others were killing themselves.12 The regime, realizing the potential for disruption and perhaps unrest, raised the amount that could be changed into the new currency to 300,000 won and then to 500,000. Some workplaces raised salaries or offered to pay workers their wages at the old rate.13
The whole idea of devaluing the currency seemed designed to crack down on the private markets that had taken root after the famine and the growing economic influence of the traders. The move wiped out their savings, except for the biggest fish, who could save their money in foreign currency.
Some reports from inside North Korea suggested that the effort was undertaken in Kim Jong Un’s name, part of an effort to signal his emergence on the political scene.
If this was true, Kim Jong Un never shouldered any of the blame for the fiasco, at least not publicly. That went to Pak Nam Gi, a seventy-seven-year-old technocrat who had been chief of the planning and finance department in the Workers’ Party.
In January of 2010, Pak was sacked from his position. By March, he had been charged with “deliberately ruining the national economy.” He was executed at a firing range in Pyongyang.14 Someone had to take the fall for this debacle.
Not only did the system try to divert any blame from Kim Jong Un, but it tried to make him look like the good guy. The Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea gave out 500 won of the new currency to every household at the end of 2009. It was “consideration money from General Kim,” the committee reportedly told the citizenry.
Despite this attempt to buy favor, the environment was not exactly conducive for a tricky transfer of power. But with Kim Jong Il’s health continuing to deteriorate, what choice did the regime have?
With the country in economic turmoil and dissatisfaction simmering just below the surface, Kim Jong Un’s next audition was designed to prove his military chops. Tyrants the world over know that there’s nothing like a brazen military victory to distract from troubles at home.
The princeling is thought to have been the mastermind behind the sinking of a South Korean naval corvette, the Cheonan, at the end of March 2010. The 1,200-ton Cheonan was struck by a torpedo during a routine patrol in the West Sea near the North-South maritime border, the scene of previous naval skirmishes. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed. It was one of the bloodiest incidents since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
An international investigation into the attack found evidence that pointed overwhelmingly in the direction of North Korea, saying the only plausible explanation for the sinking was a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine.
There were suspicions among analysts in South Korea that Kim Jong Un was behind the attack, trying to burnish his credentials with North Korea’s top brass.15 He had his bespoke degree from Kim Il Sung Military University, but he didn’t have any on-the-ground experience. So he urgently needed some if he was going to lead a country that had, under his father, espoused a military-first policy prioritizing the Korean People’s Army.
Another crucial rite of passage was completed in August, when Kim Jong Un accompanied his father on a trip to China, apparently so Kim Jong Il could make a formal introduction to the regime’s historical patrons in Beijing. There are rumors that during this trip, they toured parts of northeast China, where Kim Il Sung had cut his teeth as an anti-Japanese fighter.
With the formal introductions to their Chinese comrades completed, the Cheonan sunk, and the myth of the Paektu bloodline aggressively propagated, Kim Jong Un apparently had all the qualifications he needed for a promotion. On September 27, 2010, Kim Jong Un was made a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army, which, his father said in the announcement of his son’s elevation, “is demonstrating its might before the world as a powerful revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu.”16
That was on a Monday. The following day, the regime called a Workers’ Party representatives’ conference for the first time in forty-four years. Posters up in Pyongyang urged cadres to “greet the conference of the Workers’ Party of Korea as an auspicious event which will shine forever in the history of our party and country!” The Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the Workers’ Party, reported that the conference would “shine as a notable event in the history of the sacred Workers’ Party.”
At the conference, Kim Jong Un was named vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and appointed to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, moving him up the ranks of the two branches that keep the regime in power—not a bad start to the week for a twenty-six-year-old.
By Friday, the regime had released the first official photo of Kim Jong Un, running it in full color on the fr
ont page of the Rodong Sinmun. In the front row sat Kim Jong Il, in his trademark olive-green jumpsuit, surrounded by the top brass, many of them festooned with military decorations. And there was the young Kim Jong Un, the only one dressed in a black Mao suit, his hair in a peculiar pompadour. The echoes were clear: he looked like a young Kim Il Sung.
For the outside world, what had been suspected was suddenly patently clear: the rumored successor had come fully into view.
Further confirmation, as if any were needed, came less than two weeks later, when Kim Jong Un appeared next to his father at the celebrations for the sixty-fifth anniversary of the communist Workers’ Party of Korea.
They stood on the balcony of the Grand People’s Study House, a huge library overlooking Kim Il Sung Square in the center of Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un was expressionless as he clapped at the appropriate times during the parade, standing closer to his father than the men in military uniforms and high-ranking party officials but still keeping a respectful distance. His father was the star of the show.
Several of the men on that balcony would not be around much longer.
Kim Jong Il seemed frailer than ever, walking with a limp and having trouble using his left hand, even for applauding. He would be dead in just over a year.
Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho, the chief of general staff in the Korean People’s Army, who gave a speech that day lauding the North Korean system, would be purged from this system within two years. After that would be the man in the black suit and darkened glasses—Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who’d be brutally thrown out too.
As the regime focused on cementing the idea of hereditary succession into the third generation, anyone who might question or rival the new young leader would be cast aside.
Even Marx and Lenin, whose portraits had hung over the square for decades, would soon be removed.
But the sixty-fifth anniversary tableau offered a vision of communist unity as thousands of troops marched through the square, shouting for the long life of their system.
From that point on, Kim Jong Il was rarely seen without Kim Jong Un at his side.
There he was, following his father on a tour of new apartments built in the capital, all smiles, clapping at the residents’ accordion performances and pouring celebratory rice wine for them. He was with Kim Jong Il as he gave on-the-spot guidance about the construction of the power station. And he was present alongside his father during a performance of the Electronic Band of the Song and Dance Ensemble of the Air Force Command early in 2011. They played snappy numbers, including “Where Are You, Dear General?” and “We Will Become a Shield in the Sky.”
All the while, half a world away, events were taking place that must have shaken the Kims to their core. In the final days of 2010, autocracies with dynastic designs began falling in the Middle East.
In Tunisia, resentment over economic inequalities brought protesters into the street. In January 2011, the government was overthrown. The protests became contagious. Thousands upon thousands gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo, demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian ruler who seemed to be preparing to pass power on to his son, Gamal.
The following month, Mubarak resigned. By then, the Arab Spring movement had spread to Libya, where Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled through fear for more than four decades, was positioning his second son, Saif al-Islam, as heir apparent.
Another month, another authoritarian leader was threatened. In March, it was Syria’s turn. Protestors demanded that Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the leadership from his father, release political prisoners, sparking a brutal, years-long civil war.
One can only imagine the horror with which these events were watched from Pyongyang. The general populace would have had little idea what was going on. Although many people did manage to break through the ban on foreign media, few of them chose to watch international news, preferring the escapism of illegal action movies or soap operas.
But for the North Korean regime, the sight of autocrats falling would have been deeply disquieting.
The regime stepped up its succession preparations. State media began mentioning Kim Jong Un much more often, usually preceded by a new honorific “Beloved and Respected Comrade General.” The authorities reportedly ordered that no babies from then on could be called Jong Un, and any North Koreans who already had that name—a relatively common one based on two Chinese characters that mean “proper” and “kindness”—had to change it.
In schools around the country, Kim Jong Un was gradually being introduced into the curriculum. During ideological education sessions, students were taught that Kim Jong Un was Kim Il Sung’s grandson.
Hyon, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old high school student in Hyesan, on the North Korean border with China, remembered being told that Kim Jong Un had an extraordinary childhood. He got the laughable spiel about Kim Jong Un being able to drive when he was three years old. He had to take down revolutionary memos in his special notebook. He had to learn the song “Footsteps,” of course.
Government officials would hold events in their school halls or convene the students in the playgrounds and then would proceed to read out lectures about Kim Jong Un. They were supposed to cheer “long life” throughout, the phrase chanted about the earlier Kims at every opportunity.
A rumor went around Hyesan that once Kim Il Sung had asked Kim Jong Un to get him an apple. Kim Jong Un didn’t just get him a single apple; he asked for a shovel because he wanted to bring the whole tree to his grandfather. This was a not-very-subtle parable about the need to go the extra mile for the Great Leader.
The teenage Hyon wondered at the time if the powerful secret police had planted the rumor, hoping that it would then be spread around through word of mouth. This kind of message could be much more effective than putting it on the front page of the papers—again. It was the North Korean version of going viral.
By the time Kim Jong Un took over leadership, his succession seemed natural and inevitable.
PART TWO
THE CONSOLIDATION
CHAPTER 5
A THIRD KIM AT THE HELM
“The entire army should place absolute trust in and follow Kim Jong Un and become human rifles and bombs to defend him unto death.”
—Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2012
THE YOUNG MAN HAD GOOD REASON TO BE SOLEMN. HIS FATHER had died. Kim Jong Un found himself the leader of the totalitarian state that his family had more or less invented. He was now entering the most important year of his life, the year that would show whether he was capable of keeping his family’s grip on the country or whether the brutal, anachronistic system would finally tear itself apart.
He had to assert his authority over men who’d been working for the state for longer than he’d been alive and keep a lid on a population that had been cut off from the outside world for decades. And he had to repel an international community that was expecting—and, in many cases, hoping—that he would fail.
The first order of business was to turn the personality cult up to full blast.
On December 17, 2011, Kim Jong Il had suffered a massive heart attack, the result of “great mental and physical strain,” while traveling by train to give on-the-spot guidance in the north of the country, the veteran newsreader Ri Chun Hee announced in a quivering voice during a special midday bulletin on state television two days later.
She had tearfully announced Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. Then, as now, she assured her audience that North Koreans had no need for concern. They had Kim Jong Un, the “Great Successor to the revolutionary cause,” to lead them.
The twenty-seven-year-old was now “leader of the party, military, and the people,” and the young scion would “brilliantly succeed and complete” the revolutionary creed established by his grandfather almost seven decades before, the broadcast continued.
The announcement ricocheted around the world. North Korea was now entering a highly unpredictable new phase. The regime was a
ttempting the unprecedented: a transition to a third generation of supposedly socialist, highly totalitarian, and definitely untested power.
South Korea put its military on high alert. Japan activated an emergency response team. The White House was on tenterhooks and was “in close touch” with both of its allies on North Korea’s doorstep.
In North Korea, the propaganda had been written. The senior officials had been put in their places. All the steps necessary to ensure Kim Jong Un could succeed his father had been taken, even if they’d been taken hurriedly.
Now Kim Jong Un had to step up and play his role.
The first, and most important, part was that of Bereft Inheritor. Kim Jong Un made sure the North Korean people saw him as the natural continuation of a line that had ruled the nation for the previous six decades. Like his father seventeen years earlier, he was now modeling the kind of ashen-faced sorrow he expected to see throughout the population.
Kim Jong Un went to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, a thirty-five-thousand-square-meter, five-story mausoleum in the northeast of Pyongyang, where his grandfather had lain in state for the past seventeen years.
It was originally built as Kim Il Sung’s official residence but was converted into a permanent memorial at a cost rumored to have hit $900 million, money spent when the famine was at its peak. Still, the regime’s priority was not feeding its starving people but creating a behemothic tribute to the man who’d presided over the mismanagement that contributed to the deaths.
Kim Il Sung’s embalmed body had lain in a glass case there, a menacing presence even in death. Every day, untold numbers of North Koreans in their Sunday best rolled into the massive building on long travellators more usually associated with airports. A steady stream of foreign visitors went in too, for taking outsiders to pay homage to the dead despot was important to maintain the lie that the Great Leader was internationally revered.
The Great Successor Page 9