On my trips along the travellators into the mausoleum, I always found it fascinating to look at the North Koreans moving in the opposite direction. As they rolled along past me, I wondered what they made of this whole place. Maybe they were disgusted at the resources devoted to a corpse, or maybe they were genuinely moved by the sight of a man they’d been told was a demigod. Many were crying. For others, it was at least an opportunity to put on their best clothes and have a day away from the drudgery of ordinary life.
Now, Kim Jong Il was lying in state there too.
When they went into the mausoleum, Kim Jong Un and his sister, Kim Yo Jong, led the black-clad senior officials who went to pay their respects before their father’s body. Both were wiping away tears.
Their father was lying on a platform, dressed in his zip-up jacket, his head resting on a round pillow and his body covered with a red sheet. Around the bier were the red begonias grown to bloom on his birthday, a flower named Kimjongilia. In North Korea, even Mother Nature was forced to bend to serve the myth of the glory of the Kims.
Then, eleven days after Kim Jong Il’s death, came the public farewell.
Kim Jong Un sent his father on his last journey, the long black funeral cortege rolling through the white streets to complete a twenty-five-mile circuit through Pyongyang. The snow was falling thick and fast in a show of “heaven’s grief,” as a North Korean newsreader later described it.
The procession contained two American-made Lincoln Continentals: one carrying Kim Jong Il’s portrait, wider and longer than the car itself, and another bearing his casket, wrapped in the flag of the Workers’ Party, the traditional Communist hammer and sickle joined by a calligraphy brush to represent scholarship.
As the hearse rolled slowly through Kim Il Sung Square, eight men walked alongside. At the front right of the car was Kim Jong Un, clutching the side mirror as if to steady himself in his grief or perhaps as if to hold on to his beloved father as long as he could. His expression was as dark as his coat. But none of Kim Jong Il’s other sons were visible. There was no sign of Kim Jong Un’s older half brother, Kim Jong Nam, or his full brother, Kim Jong Chol.
Instead, the group of eight included Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Un’s uncle, a gregarious character who had an important role managing the North’s economic relationship with China. Jang was part of the inner circle thanks to his marriage to Kim Jong Il’s sister, Kim Kyong Hui. Both of them had been promoted to the politburo the previous year, at the same conference where Kim Jong Un was named heir apparent.
The streets were lined with mourners who were wailing and beating their chests, convulsing in tears and falling to the ground in a way that could look extremely melodramatic to outsiders. The theatrics were Korean soap opera crossed with Latin American telenovela with a heavy dollop of bizarre.
North Koreans don’t need to be told to mourn their leaders in this way. They know what is expected. Certainly, you would not want to be the North Korean caught on camera crying less passionately than the people around you. But some of it was no doubt genuine. Almost all North Koreans have grown up knowing nothing else, worshipping the Kims like gods. Some are true believers.
In the days after Kim Jong Il’s death, the state media held up the intense public mourning as a sign of how deeply the people loved their leader. “The wailing of people greeting and sending off the hearse in tears seemed to shake the land,” the official news agency reported.
This outpouring of grief was repeated across the country. Soldiers, schoolchildren, government officials, everyone gathered at monuments around the country to pay their respects—complete with unrestrained sobs, rending of black clothes, and full prostrations on the snow-covered ground—to Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Un ordered warm drinks and extra medical care for the mourners out on the snowy streets, the state media said.
After the funeral, Kim Jong Un watched over a military parade in front of the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where the Korean People’s Army pledged its allegiance to the young new leader. They vowed to act as rifles and bombs to protect him and to wipe out North Korea’s enemies if they dared “intrude into the inviolable sky, land and seas of the country even by 0.001 mm.”
Kim Jong Il had declared a three-year mourning period after the death of his father, during which time he consolidated his grip on the regime and tried to hang on through the famine.
But the Great Successor didn’t have any downtime. The man now known as the “Beloved and Respected” Comrade Kim Jong Un got busy “turning sorrow into strength,” as newsreader Ri put it. From that moment on, he devoted all his time and energy to staying in power. For that, he needed to establish his own power base, one that owed its loyalty directly to him, not to his father.1
It was easy to make fun of the new young leader, and he would soon become the butt of many a joke.
For starters, there was his cartoonish appearance, with his idiosyncratic fade haircut, his rapidly expanding girth, and his penchant for attire that is fashionable only in Communist holdover states.
The photos of the Busy Dictator published in the state media looked like something out of the Onion. He popped up from a tank, his round, smiling face encased in a soft black helmet. The jolly dictator was shown supervising the production of a giant vat of lubricant. It was the kind of lubricant used for greasing engines, but North Korea could hardly have chosen a more joke-inducing factory for that photo shoot.
Kim Jong Un gave himself a vast array of elongated titles—he had soon collected hundreds of appellations of varying degrees of obsequiousness. Some were standard Communist fare like First Secretary of the Workers’ Party. (He posthumously made his father General Secretary for eternity.) Others were standard but even more obviously undeserved, like chairman of the party’s central military commission and first chairman of the National Defense Commission.
But some were pure hyperbole, like Invincible and Triumphant General. He was the Guardian of Justice, the Best Incarnation of Love, the Decisive and Magnanimous Leader. And there were many with the suns: the Guiding Ray of Sun, the Sun of the Revolution, the Sun of Socialism, the Bright Sun of the Twenty-First Century, and the Sun of Mankind. There was no honorific too superlative for the new leader.
Even the stories in the North Korean media became ever more fabulous, like the one by the Korean Central News Agency that announced that some of its scientists had discovered a “unicorn lair.” Naturally, the story went viral immediately as people around the world tittered at this tale that was fanciful even by North Korean standards.
It turned out to be a translation issue. The report was in fact about a mythical creature linked to an ancient Korean kingdom—not so different from the Loch Ness monster. But that didn’t stop the most laughable version gaining traction.
On two occasions, the state media reported that the Great Successor had climbed “through thick snow” to the top of Mount Paektu, the mythical peak from which he claims his divine right to lead. As proof, the papers showed the overweight man on top of the nine-thousand-foot mountain—wearing a long woolen coat better suited for Pyongyang parades and black leather dress shoes. So great was the leader that he didn’t even require hiking gear to climb mountains.
Kim Jong Un was naturally moved by the power of the snowcapped volcano. With its unique prose style, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported that the “majestic spirit of Mount Paektu” was reflected in the eyes of the “gifted great person” and that, in that mountain, he saw “a powerful socialist nation which dynamically advances full of vigor without vacillation at any raving dirty wind on the planet.”
Stories about him soon took hold in the popular imagination outside North Korea.
In China, he was quickly nicknamed “Kim Fatty the Third,” despite the belated efforts of the Chinese censors to scrub the moniker from the internet.
There were the completely unfounded reports that he’d had a girlfriend, the leader of North Korea’s most prominent girl band, executed because she and her bandmates had bee
n making and selling lesbian porn films. She turned out to be not just alive; she became Kim Jong Un’s key envoy during a period of cultural engagement. There were rumors that he’d spent $3.5 million on sexy lingerie for his Pleasure Squad, although there was never any evidence that he’d created a harem like his father had.
And when Kim Jong Un disappeared from sight for six weeks in 2014, and then reappeared with a walking stick, it was said that he had so great a predilection for Emmental cheese, a legacy from his days in Switzerland, that his ankles had given way. It seemed more likely that he was suffering from gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis that has been known as “the disease of kings” because it is caused by an overindulgent lifestyle. The true reason for Kim’s disappearance remains unknown.
Even usually sober publications such as the New Yorker and the Economist couldn’t resist the urge to mock: the former depicted Kim Jong Un on the cover as a baby playing with toy missiles, while the latter had his idiosyncratic hair blowing up into a nuclear cloud.
Kim Jong Un did indeed have a wobbly start. His first attempt at showing his military muscle ended in humiliating failure—apparently giving sustenance to all those snide suggestions that his leadership would not succeed.
He’d been running North Korea for only four months. The regime was gearing up to celebrate the centenary of “Eternal President” Kim Il Sung’s birth on April 15, 2012. Even eighteen years after his death, Kim Il Sung’s birthday was still being celebrated as the Day of the Sun, the holiest day of the year in North Korea. It is a day of military parades and fireworks and bowing before statutes and other reminders of the Great Leader’s general ongoing magnificence.
More than a simple anniversary, the centenary was an opportunity for the young dictator to reinforce the myth of the Paektu bloodline and affirm his divine right to lead North Korea. He planned two weeks of extravagant celebrations to mark the occasion.
He intended to start with a bang.
On April 13, the Korean Committee of Space Technology launched what it said was a new earth observation satellite. It was called Lode Star-3, an auspicious name as every North Korean knew that a lode star had appeared in the sky over Mount Paektu on the day that Kim Jong Il was born.
The North Korean space committee had announced plans for the launch the month before. The ink was barely dry on the Leap Day agreement that Washington and Pyongyang had signed on February 29. In it, North Korea agreed to stop launching missiles and conducting nuclear tests in return for food aid.
The United States and other countries warned the Kim regime not to go ahead with the launch, viewing the rocket as a weak disguise for a long-range missile.
But the state media insisted that Pyongyang was simply exercising its sovereign right to the peaceful use of space. It took journalists from around the world to the launch site. Soon after dawn, the rocket lifted off. It flew for only ninety seconds before crashing into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
The regime could hardly ignore it, given all the fanfare it had created and the fact that international media had recorded it. Kim’s scribes simply said that the satellite “failed to enter its preset orbit” and that scientists were investigating the problem.
Even that modest and undeniable announcement was a break with the past. Kim Jong Il never conceded any kind of shortcoming. But Kim Jong Un publicly admitted a failure. It was an early sign that, while he was following in his father’s footsteps in some ways, he would also do some things differently. He would prove to be much more forthcoming about North Korea’s weaknesses and what needed to be done to fix them.
Anyway, Kim soon had reason to cheer. It wasn’t long before the North Korean scientists fixed the problem. By the end of the year, they had put a satellite into orbit—a rickety one but in orbit all the same.
Kim Jong Un wasn’t going to allow an early stumble to define him. Two days after the humiliation of the failed launch, the Great Successor returned to the balcony in Pyongyang, looking out over the square named for his grandfather. It was the same balcony where he had walked with his father barely eighteen months before, watching over a huge military parade and making his official debut to the world.
There, he delivered a speech. Much of what he said was standard North Korean bluster about how its “mighty military” would achieve “final victory” against the imperialists. But the speech was an event in itself. Kim Jong Il spoke in public only once, and then only a single phrase, during his entire seventeen years in power. “Glory to the heroic soldiers of the Korean People’s Army!” he said during a military parade in 1992.
Yet here was a young man holding forth for twenty minutes in front of a bank of seven microphones, speaking to the people just a few months into his tenure. Far from being nervous on his first public appearance as leader, he looked relaxed as he joked and smiled with his top aides on the balcony.
This young leader was already so different from his father. Yet so much was familiar. North Koreans watching couldn’t help but be reminded of Kim Il Sung, their Eternal President. Kim Jong Un had adopted a gravelly voice just like his grandfather, and he was again wearing his grandfather’s trademark Mao suit, a red Kim Il Sung pin over his heart.
Flanked by generals in military uniform and other top officials, Kim Jong Un watched as tens of thousands of soldiers marched through the square below, holding aloft giant portraits of his grandfather and father. He saluted his predecessors as the soldiers chanted his name in sharp unison. All this was now his.
He may have been a gift for comedians and cartoonists, but it was not through luck, chance, or accident that Kim Jong Un has defied the odds to remain in control of his regime.
Everything that he has done since his first days in power has been carefully calculated to help him achieve his only goal: to remain, as his image makers put it, the Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander of North Korea.
In the outside world, there was a tendency to diminish Kim Jong Un’s power, to say that he was just a figurehead and that the old guard was really running the show.
It did seem to be true that the Great Successor got some guidance in his early months and years. His aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, was his most important advisor. She had been very close to her brother, Kim Jong Il, and was a crucial pillar in his regime. She took the lead in ensuring her nephew got the education and support he needed as he took over the leadership. She also made sure the Kim family coffers were safe.
Her husband, pallbearer Jang Song Thaek, became the “Control Tower,” looking after day-to-day operations of the regime. It was Jang who decided what messages got to Kim Jong Un and with what priority, putting his own spin on them as he delivered them.2
A third official made up the triumvirate of close advisors: Choe Ryong Hae, who at that time was the director of the General Political Bureau, the agency within the Korean People’s Army that administers political education within the military. This was a crucial role that gave him authority in both the military and the Workers’ Party.
These three supported and guided the young leader as he started his new role, but North Korea’s regime operates on a system based on a Supreme Leader. Kim Jong Un wielded absolute power. This would be illustrated very soon through the fates of these three closest advisors.3
As he cemented his hold on the leadership and the regime, Kim Jong Un very deliberately retreated inward, forgoing the kinds of pilgrimages to Moscow and Beijing that his father and grandfather had made. He tried to make sure that no one else left the country either. He immediately set about sealing the borders to make sure that there was no exodus of people or sense that his grip on the state was anything less than iron clad. He clamped down on the flow of information, employing advanced technology to catch those who dared watch a South Korean drama or listen to a Chinese pop song.
He injected a new dose of terror into society, ensuring everyone lived in constant fear. The general populace came under new levels of repression, and elites in the regime who accumulated too
much power risked being exiled to the far corners of the state—or worse.
Kim needed a cohort of supporters around him who also had a vested interest in his success, so he went about figuring out who to keep and who to eliminate. He got rid of potential rivals to the leadership, dispatching his uncle and eventually his half brother in brutal fashion to make it clear that his ambition knew no boundaries.
He allowed more economic freedom—distinctly capitalist markets became central to most people’s lives—as a way to give the population a sense that their standard of living was improving.
That freed him up to pour all the regime’s resources into developing the missile and nuclear weapons programs, pressing ahead with breathtaking speed and accomplishment to demonstrate a credible threat to the Kim regime’s mortal enemy, the United States of America.
Even the ridiculous appearance was by design.
While other dictators have tried to hide the fact that they’re aging and might therefore be mortal—just look at the way Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi dyed their hair—Kim Jong Un did the opposite. The young autocrat made himself the reincarnation of his grandfather. His hairstyle was straight out of the 1940s Soviet Union, and he walked with a limp. He had turned his voice into a low rumble reminiscent of his grandfather’s, overlaid with a two-packs-a-day rasp. And most noticeable of all, he gained more and more weight between every public appearance.
In the summer, he wore the white, short-sleeved, comrade-style shirts that his grandfather sported. In the winter, he had the same huge fur hats. He even wore old-fashioned, square glasses. The whole look was vintage Kim Il Sung to remind North Koreans of the good old days.
The mimicry worked.
The first time he saw Kim Jong Un, with his substantial girth enveloped in a Mao suit and his unusual short-back-and-sides hairstyle, the high schooler from Hyesan immediately thought of his history lessons and the family reminiscences about the good times the country enjoyed under Kim Il Sung. “I thought about Kim Il Sung’s time and time when North Koreans’ lives were better, and I think a lot of other North Koreans thought that way too,” Hyon told me.
The Great Successor Page 10