CHAPTER 16
TALKING WITH THE “JACKALS”
“The meeting of the century, pioneering a new history in US-North Korea relations.”
—Rodong Sinmun, June 13, 2018
THE MUCH-LAMPOONED AND UNDERESTIMATED MAN WAS ABOUT to rack up his biggest triumph yet: the leader of a tiny country that was technically still at war with the United States was going to sit down with its president. Such a meeting would give Kim a worldwide veneer of legitimacy and respectability. And, if it went well, it could pave the way for the removal of crippling sanctions and even, in the future, American investment.
On June 12, 2018—less than nine months after the North Korean threatened to “tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”—Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump walked onto a platform at the secluded Capella Hotel in Singapore. In front of carefully arranged North Korean and American flags, they smiled at each other and shook hands for what felt like minutes.
It was astounding. Even for the Great Successor himself.
“Many people in the world will think this is from a science-fiction movie,” the North Korean leader told Trump through his interpreter as they walked into the room where their delegations were waiting.
Gone was “Little Rocket Man.” Gone was the “total nutjob.” Kim Jong Un was demonstrating that he was indeed the “smart cookie” that Trump had once called him.
Kim Jong Un achieved something that his grandfather and father had tried but failed to accomplish.
In the last years of his life, Kim Il Sung was exploring the possibility of a “grand bargain” with the United States. He twice met with the American evangelist Billy Graham. For their first meeting in 1992, Graham carried a personal message from President George H. W. Bush.
Kim Jong Il invited Bill Clinton to Pyongyang as the American president was approaching the end of his second term. Clinton sent his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, on an exploratory mission, and there were hopes that this was the start of improved relations. Instead, Clinton chose to spend his final months in office dealing with another intractable problem: Israel and Palestine.
But Kim Jong Un was the one to make it happen.
In Washington, DC, talking heads had been tearing their hair out. This isn’t the way diplomacy is done, they said. Summits come at the end of a process, not the beginning, they wailed. He’s taking a page from his father’s playbook, they raged. The United States won’t get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons this way.
But from my perch in Singapore, I felt optimistic about the process. I didn’t for a second think that the Great Successor was going to give up his nuclear weapons. They were his security blanket, and he needed them. The fate of Muammar Gaddafi was still in his mind.
But he might be willing to give up some of his missiles and nuclear warheads to get sanctions relief and to normalize his leadership in the eyes of the world. Kim Jong Un wouldn’t make it easy, but he appeared willing to play ball.
And maybe it was time to try something different. For a quarter century, the conventional way of doing things hadn’t worked. Maybe these two unconventional leaders were just the right people to try something unorthodox.
Kim Jong Un had shown he was not his father. He was much bolder and more audacious. And Trump was unlike any president the United States had ever seen.
Since taking office, Trump had adopted an unusual practice in his meetings with other world leaders. He liked to meet with them alone, sometimes with only one translator between them. That was a sign of his conviction that he could build a personal rapport with his counterpart and hammer out a good deal.
This approach suited Kim Jong Un. And personal relationships are extremely important when doing any kind of business in Asia, particularly when that business is difficult. This is even more the case in autocracies run by strongmen.
When the United States and China were normalizing their relationship in the early 1970s, then secretary of state Henry Kissinger spent hundreds of hours in meetings with the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. In a similar way, Secretary of State Pompeo spent hours with Kim Jong Un and his top aides both before and after the summit, in Washington, New York, and Pyongyang.
By holding this summit, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump were taking a personal stake in this process. Both would have an incentive to make it work.
Plus, for all their differences, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump have a lot in common. Both were born into a family empire. Neither was the oldest son, the automatic heir. But both proved to their fathers that he was the right man to inherit the dynasty. And both love a grandiose construction project.
My optimism about the summit stemmed most of all from the fact that Kim Jong Un had delivered a very clear but widely overlooked signal that he was now pivoting 100 percent to the economy.
Just a week before his summit meeting with South Korea’s President Moon, Kim Jong Un delivered a speech to a Workers’ Party meeting in Pyongyang in which he declared the “byungjin” or “simultaneous advance” policy to be over. He no longer needed to pursue nuclear weapons—he had achieved them. He declared an immediate end to nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missiles launches.
Having proven his military credentials and gotten rid of detractors and potential rivals, he was ready to move ahead with the deliberate changes that would enable economic growth.
From now on, Kim Jong Un said, he would be focusing on a “new strategic line.” He would be concentrating on the economy. And for that, he would need an “international environment favorable for the socialist economic construction.”
It was a tectonic shift. In 2013, he had boldly elevated the economy to level pegging with the nuclear program after decades of “military first” policy. Five years later, almost to the day, he was unequivocally making economic development his top priority.
But he couldn’t achieve his strategic vision for economic development while the American-led sanctions, which were so sweeping they threatened to strangle the economy, remained in place. Nor could he achieve his diplomatic goal to be seen as the respectable and responsible leader of a normal state without the American president’s seal of approval.
Kim Jong Un’s contrived metamorphosis into cosmopolitan global statesman was apparent the moment he departed North Korea.
His father, who had been was terrified of flying, always took his armored train when he went to Beijing or Moscow. The Great Successor didn’t have this fear, but he didn’t have a particularly trustworthy plane, either. So he sponged one from his benefactors next door—an Air China Boeing 747 that was usually occupied by Beijing’s premier. It was an American plane with a big Star Alliance logo by the door.
Kim Jong Un didn’t even try to disguise the fact that he had a borrowed ride. The photos of him boarding the Air China jet appeared in full color on the front page of North Korea’s main newspaper, almost as if it was a point of pride that powerful China had loaned him the jet.
The First Sister traveled on a separate North Korean plane. The Kims apparently didn’t want to risk spilling too much Paektu blood at once if something untoward happened.
The logistical preparations were exhaustive. Kim had never been that far from home since becoming leader. The Supreme Guard Command, the leader’s personal security entourage that is estimated to comprise as many as 120,000 soldiers, left nothing to chance.
North Korean guards monitored the security check at the entrance to St. Regis Hotel, where Kim Jong Un and his sister would be staying. Incidentally, their now-deceased half brother Kim Jong Nam had liked to stay at the very same hotel.
The top three floors had been reserved for the North Koreans, including the $7,000-a-night presidential suite on the twentieth floor. (Singapore picked up the bill for the hotel accommodation and meals.) The guards were stationed in the elevators around the clock to make sure that no one tried to go above the sixteenth floor.
The guards had wanted to check all the rooms in the hotel, but the management refused
to allow access beyond the top three floors. They swept those hotel rooms, along with the meeting rooms at the summit venue, for explosives, eavesdropping devices, and anything else that might harm or offend their leader.
None of the rooms would be released until two days after Kim Jong Un had left Singapore. The North Korean staff had a lot of cleaning to do before they could hand the rooms back to the hotel management, free of Kim family DNA.
Kim and his sister had stuck to their rooms while in the St. Regis. They ate specially prepared meals cooked with ingredients brought in from Pyongyang, transported on a separate cargo plane, and delivered in refrigerated trucks that were waiting at Singapore’s airport. The same plane carried Kim Jong Un’s limousine as well as authorized weapons and other supplies.
Once he arrived safely in Singapore, Kim Jong Un was at his most winning.
On the first day, he met with Singapore’s prime minister, the son of the island-state’s founding leader, Lee Kuan Yew, a strongman who’d ruled for some five decades. The prime minister later declared that the thirty-four-year-old was a “confident young leader.”
There was another official handshake photo to add to Kim Jong Un’s legitimacy album.
That night, after dark, he went on an unannounced tour of Singapore’s most spectacular sights. Guided by Singapore’s foreign and education ministers, Kim Jong Un, his sister, and a huge posse of bodyguards and North Korean cameramen walked along the glittering waterfront. They admired the flowers at Gardens by the Bay, a spectacular futuristic park. And they did what millions of tourists before them had done in that spot: posed for selfies. Kim smiled into the foreign minister’s camera, his cheeks ruddy in the sweltering humidity.
They walked over a bridge and around to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, an architectural wonder comprising a giant concrete boat resting atop three skyscrapers. Incidentally, it is owned by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who backed Trump in the 2016 election and whose properties in Macau were a regular haunt for Kim Jong Nam.
They ascended to the Sky Park, an open-air bar area with an infinity pool on the fifty-seventh floor. Kim Jong Un stood on the deck for about ten minutes, looking out over the skyline with its skyscrapers topped by illuminated Citibank and HSBC signs.
Everywhere he went, the North Korean leader drew huge crowds. Hordes of tourists and locals wanted to get a glimpse. They lined the streets, straining at the police barriers, as he arrived at his hotel. They flocked to the waterfront area to snap photos for their social media pages as he walked along the esplanade. They stood on tiptoes in the lobby of the Marina Bay Sands complex to try to see him over the mob. Swimmers, some in skimpy bikinis, got out of the infinity pool to snap him as he walked past.
It was all perfect fodder for Kim Jong Un’s personality cult. Just as crowds assembled in North Korea to demonstrate their devotion to him, here were throngs of foreigners flocking to see the Beloved and Respected Supreme Leader. Photos of all this would be splashed across North Korean newspaper and television screens. “See?” his propagandists could say to the North Korean people. “Kim Jong Un is revered abroad too.”
Singapore was the ideal destination for the summit for many reasons. A steady stream of North Koreans and North Korean businesses had passed through the city over the years. They hadn’t even needed a visa to enter the country, making it one of the few places North Koreans could travel to easily. Singapore was the standard bearer for the wider sentiment in Southeast Asia that engagement was the way to lead rogue states down a better path. It was a very different approach from the sanctions and isolation favored by the United States.
This was not the first time an Asian leader had come to Singapore for inspiration.
China’s economic visionary Deng Xiaoping had visited in 1978. He toured the city with Lee, who explained how he’d done it. Deng was hugely impressed. Five years later, he introduced socialism with Chinese characteristics. So Singapore hoped to inspire another Asian country desperately in need of economic transformation but mortally afraid of political change.
Kim Jong Un was receptive. Extraordinary proof of this came through the North Korean state media the very next day, when the main newspaper ran photos on its front page showing Kim’s walk through Singapore, complete with the boat on skyscrapers.
It was complemented with an eye-popping forty-two-minute television documentary entitled The Epochal Meeting That Pioneered a New History between North Korea and the United States, which showed every part of Kim’s trip. The most surprising aspect was that the official film showcased how dazzling, clean, and beautiful Singapore was, from the plush presidential suite rented for Kim at the St. Regis to the many magnificent and unique buildings the city boasted.
It showed his motorcade driving down Singapore’s most famous shopping street, past the Rolex and Prada stores, and strolling along the magnificent waterfront.
“The Great Comrade Leader said,” the narrator relayed in the documentary, “that we will study Singapore’s excellent knowledge and experiences in various fields from now on.”
After the summit, a Pyongyang economist said that if the sanctions were lifted and the political climate improved, North Korea could emulate countries like Singapore and Switzerland, “which have few resources and little territory but have used their geographical location to their greatest advantage.”1 The economist had clearly never been to Singapore or Switzerland and seemed to have little grasp of the unlikeliness of this happening any time soon. There were a few other hurdles in the way, to put it mildly. Like a democracy and a rule of law.
Kim Jong Un was signaling to the outside world—but, most importantly, to his own people—that this was his vision. It was the clearest indication yet that the North Korean leader didn’t want to be a dull Stalinist dictator. He wanted to be a developmental dictator of the kind that has flourished in other parts of Asia.
The big day had arrived. The day he would come face to face with his archnemesis. The stakes were incredibly high for Kim Jong Un—both in terms of politics and his security. A paranoid dictator lives in constant fear for his life.
When Kim Jong Un left his hotel to go to the summit venue that morning, he was surrounded by more than forty agents from the Supreme Guard Command.
Entrance into the elite squad is extremely selective, with the best conscripts from the military put through a series of tests regarding their health, personality, height, appearance, and—most crucially—family background. Those charged with guarding the Brilliant Comrade must have excellent political credentials and come only from the most loyal classes. One former bodyguard wrote that getting into the leader’s security detail was “harder than passing through the eye of a needle.”2
But once they’re in, they live a good life in North Korea. Kim Jong Un certainly doesn’t want unhappy men with guns around him.
Twelve of the bodyguards briefly became internet celebrities when they were filmed running alongside Kim Jong Un’s limousine in black suits, even in the Singapore humidity. It seemed to encapsulate the absurdity of the North Korean leadership.
Kim got the idea for this human shield from Clint Eastwood. As a boy, he’d seen the movie In the Line of Fire, in which Eastwood plays a US Secret Service agent who had been guarding John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1963. Eastwood’s character and other agents run alongside the president’s car.3
The car itself was also notable. Kim Jong Un arrived in a Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Pullman Guard, a twenty-one-foot-long saloon that had gone on sale less than a year earlier. It retails at a cool $1.6 million.
Mercedes markets the “highly exclusive vehicle” to “heads of state and other individuals at particular risk.” It features a “generously sized and tastefully appointed club lounge in the rear,” according to the company, but it’s the array of security features that no doubt made it appeal to Kim.
It is fully armored and can withstand machine-gun fire; it has blast protection underneath to stop explosive devices and a steel bulkh
ead behind the rear seats to shield the passengers’ heads from anything that might come through the back window. This also helps make the car weigh in at five tons. Its doors are so heavy that they have their own motors to help them open and close.
After their initial hand-gripping encounter in front of the cameras, the two leaders went into a one-on-one meeting, or rather two-on-two, since they both had interpreters. At the outset, Kim Jong Un said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. President” in English. I’ve asked a dozen or so English and German speakers who’ve met him if Kim Jong Un ever gave them so much as a hello in those languages. He did not, but he made an extra effort for Trump.
Throughout the five-hour-long encounter, Kim proved that he knew exactly how to handle the American president.
He entered the hotel first, in line with traditional Korean rules about respecting one’s elders. Trump was more than twice Kim’s age, meaning he had the higher status and should enter last. The Korean language has complex levels of politeness, and Kim Jong Un made sure to use the most honorific terms when speaking to Trump, something he knew would be appreciated by the American president. Trump’s interpreter told him that the North Korean leader was using very deferential language.
It wasn’t the first time Kim Jong Un had played to the American president’s famous ego. In the weeks leading up to the summit, he sent a top aide, Kim Yong Chol, to the White House with a letter for Trump—not just any letter but one in an envelope so enormous it bordered on comic. The White House released photos of a grinning Trump holding the missive, immediately inviting comparisons on the internet to the giant checks that game-show contestants win.
At the summit, Kim didn’t appear to be nervous. He was engaging. He told jokes. He showed that he knew how to impress but also that he cared about how he was seen by others. He wanted to be viewed as gracious.
As the American president introduced the North Korean leader to his team, the tone was light. Referring to Trump’s previous assertion that he’d be able to get a read on him within a minute, Kim asked the president how he was doing. Trump responded that he’d found his counterpart to be strong, smart, and trustworthy.
The Great Successor Page 29