During the game, Kim Jong Un had invited Rodman and the core part of his delegation to spend the weekend with him at the Masik Pass ski resort he’d had developed. When they arrived, members of Kim’s family and other senior regime figures were already there. Spavor, who grew up near the Rockies, hit the slopes with Kim’s brother and sister. Terwilliger spun out of control on an inflatable tube and wiped out several North Koreans. Luckily, he came to a halt before going over a cliff.
Inside at the resort, Hwang Pyong So, a top military official, spent long periods of time sitting in his undershirt and boxer shorts at the analogue phone in the corridor of the VIP floor. It was the phone that went straight to the leader.
Kim Jong Un did not show up that weekend. The friendship for life was on ice.
PART THREE
THE CONFIDENCE
CHAPTER 12
PARTY TIME
“I will fight on undauntedly, offering myself without regret in the sacred struggle to hasten the final victory of the cause of the Juche revolution pioneered in Mt. Paektu.”
—Kim Jong Un, May 10, 2016
KIM JONG UN MAY HAVE OFFICIALLY BECOME LEADER OF NORTH Korea in December 2011, when his father died, but he really, truly became the leader in early May 2016. That was when the Great Successor delivered a show of force and confidence that left no doubt he was in absolute control.
The occasion was the Seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the highest-level meeting of the Communist organization through which the Kim family has kept a grip on the state for three generations.
The last congress had been in 1980, while his grandfather was still leader, four years before Kim Jong Un was even born. His father never convened one. But the new leader wanted to bring together the cadres who kept the regime together. This time it was his party.
I arrived in Pyongyang three days before the congress opened. My regime-appointed guides for this trip were waiting for me. There were two midranking officials: Mr. Jang, who played the role of bad cop, thwarting my every attempt to break out of the prearranged schedule, and Mr. Pak, a jovial good cop. Throughout the trip, Mr. Jang complained that I asked too many questions and tried to move me along through hospital wards and snail farms—these were the stops on our itinerary—while Mr. Pak smiled and took pictures of the sights on his smartphone.
There was a lot to photograph. Pyongyang was in celebration mode. The newspapers were full of reports about the “70-day speed battle” that had been unleashed to prepare for the event. Waves of cadres in dark suits and military officials in olive dress uniform from around the country were flooding out of Pyongyang Station.
Along country roads and city streets, at farms and in factories, banners heralded the congress, and red flags bore the golden hammer, sickle, and brush of the Workers’ Party. The April 25 House of Culture, the colonnaded and distinctively socialist-looking building that would host the congress, had been wrapped up in red like a present.
The official slogans rolled out for the event sounded just as strange in Korean as they did in the English-language versions distributed by North Korea’s news agency. “Make the whole country seethe with a high-pitched campaign for producing greenhouse vegetables!” “Let’s give a decisive solution to the problem of consumer goods!” “Let’s dynamically wage this year’s general advance in the same spirit as shown in succeeding in the H-bomb test!”
There was no doubt who was at the center of all the celebrations. The slogans called on North Koreans to devote themselves to fighting for the “Beloved Supreme Commander Comrade Kim Jong Un” and to make themselves into his “unfailingly faithful young vanguard.”
On the second day of the congress, I was sitting at my computer in a press center the North Koreans had set up for us at the forty-seven-story Yanggakdo Hotel, a place they like to keep journalists in because it’s on an island in the middle of the river that runs through Pyongyang. Journalists call it “Alcatraz.”
The North Koreans want to make sure visitors have no reason to try to leave. There’s a casino in the basement and a restaurant at the top that, once upon a time, used to revolve. Now you must walk around it to get the 360-degree view because its motors are defunct. The convenience store array includes surprisingly good local beer, biscuits that may or may not be made of sawdust, and boxes of North Korea’s own Neo-Viagra.
On the big screens set up in the middle of the press center, I watched as Kim Jong Un walked out onto the stage of the congress hall, which was decked out in glorious socialist red: red seats on the stage for Kim Jong Un and his cronies, red seats for the audience, red flags with the Workers’ Party insignia, and red banners declaring “single-hearted unity.”
Kim Jong Un wore a dark Western-style suit and gray tie, the same outfit that his grandfather was wearing in the portrait that formed—together with one of Kim Jong Il—the backdrop to the stage. They were lit up like a sunrise. An old day was dawning.
Every one of the 3,467 delegates in that hall, many of whom were twice his age, stood to cheer Kim Jong Un for what seemed like hours. The military top brass wore medals down to their waists. On the stage, Kim Yong Nam, the eighty-eight-year-old premier and a man who had been deputy prime minister of North Korea before the Great Successor was even born, turned to applaud him.
Kim Jong Un tried to shush them with hand gestures as if to tamp down their enthusiasm for him, but the delegates knew better than to stop cheering and clapping.
He was just thirty-two. And he was now confident enough and secure enough to stand up there in front of all of them and lap it up. He delivered a fourteen-thousand-word speech in which he boasted about a nuclear test done a few months before.
He laid out a five-year economic plan that would now be directly associated with him—and which he would be personally responsible for putting in place. He highlighted North Korea’s food and energy shortages—something already well known to people around the country, but notable because he acknowledged it—and pledged to lead the drive to address them.
He repeated his promise from that very first speech he made back in 2012 to improve people’s lives. And he took a swipe at China, decrying “the filthy wind of bourgeois liberty and ‘reform’ and ‘openness’ blowing in our neighborhood.”
To no great surprise, Kim Jong Un was reelected as leader of the party. But his title was upgraded from first secretary to chairman. He was restoring the party to pole position in North Korea, returning it to the vaunted status it held during his grandfather’s years, before it ceded some ground to the military during his father’s years.
It could have been a risky move, causing the kind of resentment that has sometimes led to military coups in other countries. But as with the “byungjin” policy of simultaneously pursuing economic development and nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un wasn’t demoting the military as much as elevating the party.
The Great Successor would find ways to keep the military happy and stave off a putsch—mainly by pouring scarce resources into the nuclear and missile programs and turning the generals in charge into North Korean celebrities. They also had the memories of the former defense minister, the one reduced to a pulp with an anti-aircraft gun after he fell asleep in a meeting, in the backs of their minds.
Throughout the pageantry of the congress, I was struck by how remarkably self-possessed Kim Jong Un was. He was not a man worried about his job. He had proven the skeptics on the outside—and on the inside, if there were any—wrong. He had demonstrated an aptitude for purging and executing rivals.
He had shrewdly promoted economic development and nuclear development at the same time. The detonation a few months earlier was North Korea’s biggest nuclear test to date. The economy wasn’t going gangbusters, but it was ticking along at 4 or 5 percent growth—the highest it’d been in years.
The following month, Kim Jong Un scrapped the National Defense Commission, which had been established in 1972 by his grandfather as the state’s highest institution for military and nation
al defense. He established the State Affairs Commission as North Korea’s supreme power and policymaking organization and appointed himself its chairman. This formally made him the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
Everything Kim Jong Un had done since taking power, ruthless as much of it had been, was done in a calculating way.
Contrary to the popular perception of the younger leader as a madman, all the evidence suggested that Kim Jong Un was a “reasonably psychologically stable individual,” said Ian Robertson, a clinical psychologist and professor of neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin and someone who had also been trying to penetrate Kim Jong Un’s psyche. The author of a book about the psychology of winning, Robertson has been closely following the young leader’s movements ever since he took power.
I asked Robertson what he could glean about Kim Jong Un’s state of mind, and the psychologist pronounced him a classic narcissist.
“Most people who don’t get scared off by their conscience or the stress of being a leader develop narcissism,” Robertson told me. Because it’s an acquired narcissism, it’s a personality distortion rather than a personality disorder.
But there’s a chemical component too. Becoming leader of North Korea could have actually changed Kim Jong Un’s brain. “Power is possibly one of the most profound causes of major biological and psychological change in the human brain,” Robertson said.
It turns out there is some scientific basis to the thought encapsulated by the nineteenth-century British politician Lord Acton, who said “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was referring to absolute monarchies, such as those run by godlike Roman emperors and Napoleon Bonaparte, but it could equally apply to the Kims.
This kind of power releases dopamine, the neurotransmitter linked to the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. It’s the chemical that regulates how we perceive and experience pleasure—from eating ice cream to having sex—and makes us want to do it again. Dopamine is often linked to addiction.
In a leader like Kim Jong Un, the rush he gets from exerting his power makes him crave another fix, Robertson said. Very few human beings can resist this chemical effect and stay balanced if they hold enormous power for long periods of time.
But there’s a very unpleasant flipside: the more the ego swells, the more vulnerable it is. Many tyrants develop an eggshell-thin skin that can be pierced by the tiniest infraction. In Kim Jong Un, that vulnerable ego erupted in alarming ways.
Kim Jong Un, having asserted himself at home, was ready to up the ante abroad. He needed to prove to his detractors in the outside world that he was no joke.
His nuclear program would be a key part of that.
As he was celebrating his fourth anniversary in power, he went to a former munitions factory in central Pyongyang, the place where grandfather was said to have test fired a submachine gun soon after the division of the Korean Peninsula. He dropped a proverbial bombshell.
Standing outside, Kim said that North Korea had become “a powerful nuclear weapons state” and was ready to detonate a hydrogen bomb to “defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation.”
“If we struggle in the same spirit with which the workers produced submachine guns by their own efforts just after the liberation of the country, when everything was in need, we can further build up our country into a powerful one no enemy dares provoke,” he reportedly said. Aides in military uniform took down his every word in their notebooks.
I visited the site a few months later and wandered through the gallery of photos commemorating Kim Jong Un’s visit. Every site in North Korea that has been blessed with a royal visit has an exhibition like this. I asked my guide, a fiftysomething woman in traditional dress, if she’d been working on the day that the Marshal came by. It turned out she had. But when I tried to ask her about him, she stormed off, raising her hand over her face to try to block me out.
Kim Jong Un’s claim was treated with skepticism in the outside world. Since he took power, Kim Jong Un had presided over just one nuclear test, at the start of 2013, only the country’s third in its history. A relatively small, simple atomic bomb was detonated, which didn’t seem to indicate much improvement in North Korea’s technical abilities.
Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts wrote off the claim of a hydrogen bomb as typical North Korean exaggeration, dismissing the suggestion that Kim Jong Un’s regime could make a thermonuclear device, which would require both fission and fusion technology.
Their doubts seemed justified a month later, when Kim Jong Un ordered the second nuclear test of his reign. The regime claimed it as a hydrogen bomb. Looking at the seismic waves it caused, outside experts said that it appeared to be an ordinary, vanilla atomic bomb. It had a yield of about six kilotons, making it about the same size as North Korea’s 2013 atomic test.
The Little Boy atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of fifteen kilotons, while the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki a few days later had a yield of twenty kilotons.
But such mockery of the bomb’s small size missed the point. The statement was an aspiration. Kim Jong Un was working on a hydrogen bomb.
At the same time, the Great Successor was nurturing an entirely different kind of army: one of cyber warriors. Just as North Korea was considered inept at making nuclear weapons, it was thought of as second rate when it came to hacking.
North Korean hackers had been tinkering around the internet for years but without causing much alarm. In 2009, a group called the DarkSeoul Gang attacked South Korean banks and television stations, sometimes with the aim of collecting information but usually just to cause chaos.
But the state’s hacking activities have grown exponentially under Kim Jong Un. South Korea is hit by about 1.5 million North Korean hacking attempts every day—that’s seventeen every second—according to southern officials.1
Pyongyang used cyberattacks to mount asymmetric warfare, the American military commander in South Korea said.2
At the end of 2014, North Korea provided a stunning illustration of this theory. The first target was Sony Entertainment, revenge for the film The Interview, which ended with a Kim Jong Un character exploding in a fireball to a Katy Perry soundtrack.
When news of the film emerged in June 2014, Pyongyang was incensed that the studio would dare imagine an assassination attempt on the North Korean leader. It vowed “merciless countermeasures” if the movie was released.
A month before the planned release date, Christmas Day, a group that called itself the Guardians of Peace sent malware to Sony employees, some of whom clicked. The resulting hack was embarrassing for Sony, wiping computers, releasing salary details, and disclosing nasty emails between executives. The group then threatened “9/11-style” terrorist attacks on movie theaters that screened The Interview. All the major chains dropped the film.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that there was clear evidence pointing to North Korea as the perpetrator of the attack. The Justice Department brought charges against a North Korean man it said had orchestrated the hack for the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The RGB, an elite spy agency run by the military, has a unit of computer hackers called Bureau 121.
Kim Jong Un’s regime denied any involvement but called the hack a “righteous deed.”
North Koreans were also accused of being members of the Lazarus Group, which was behind two audacious hacks.
The first involved a plan to steal $1 billion from Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016 by posing as bank employees to order money transfers through the global electronic system called SWIFT. A spelling error disrupted the attack but not before the hackers had stolen $81 million. The FBI called it the largest cyberheist in history.3
Then in 2017, the hackers launched WannaCry 2.0, a computer virus containing ransomware that infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries. It encrypted data on victims’ computers and demanded money to restore access. Among the victims was Britain’s healthcar
e system, which was crippled by the attack. The United States and the United Kingdom both accused North Korea of being behind it, but North Korea again denied any involvement. Yet technical experts say the hackers left plenty of evidence behind, in the form of source codes, IP addresses, and email accounts, to prove that North Koreans were the culprits.
North Korean hackers went on to steal a huge amount of data—some 235 gigabytes’ worth—from a South Korean military network. These included classified wartime contingency plans and a “decapitation” plan for removing Kim Jong Un. Then, at the beginning of 2018, they were suspected of stealing $530 million worth of digital tokens from the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.
At every turn, the hackers showed themselves to be increasingly sophisticated and wily.
By one estimate, RGB hackers have attacked more than one hundred banks and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world since 2016 and pilfered more than $650 million in the process.4
The North Korean regime is actively cultivating elite hackers to join the RGB’s Bureau 121. Students who show potential—some as young as eleven years old—are sent to special schools and then on to the University of Automation in Pyongyang, North Korea’s military college for computer science. For five years, they are taught how to hack and how to create computer viruses. They compete in “hackathons,” solving puzzles and cyberattack problems under extreme time pressure. “For six months, day and night, we prepared only for this contest,” said one former student.5
Throughout 2018, North Korean students based in Pyongyang were regularly scoring in the top ranks, and sometimes winning, in competitions run by CodeChef, an Indian software company.
Hacking is the country’s strongest weapon, said another former student. In North Korea, it’s called “the Secret War,” he added.6
American intelligence agencies say North Korea has a total of more than one thousand cyberoperatives living and working abroad, where there is better access to the internet. Most are in China, but some are in Russia and Malaysia.
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